I was having a quick conversation with Donnacha about a few things today and I mentioned something about Amazon S3. Which of course led to the inevitable discussion about the recent outage there. So we chatted and he sent me a few mails and a link to Barry’s blog on WordPress.

What I was interested in was the AWS post, but as I read the comments/trackbacks I noticed a link to http://blog.animoto.com/. The name was cool so I said I would check it out, as I sometimes do still “surf round” from time to time.Alas I got a 404 for the post, but me being curious persisted and I substituted the blog for www and have never been so happy that I did. Animoto is a cooler than cool web service that allows the user to upload photos or point them at their flickr/facebook photos then they select or upload their own mp3 and hey presto a few min later you have a video montage of your photos.Like Patrick de Laive, it took me less than five min. to be subscribed to the service for a year, all for $30 bucks, which is nothing these days if your live in Euroland.

I have thousands of photos, all over the place. Lots of my friends have photos of me and I of them, they are not photographic works, they are just photos, collections of memories and events. I don’t get much free time these days (Druid + Symfony Projects are taking all my time) and with the exception of the aforementioned Donnacha, I don’t really browse photo albums online, primarily because they are still somewhat slow (This may be Irish broadband tho), and the user interfaces are pretty much the same, click photo, wait, view, click next.

Animoto, have changed this for me completely, I am entertained, excited about watching their photo montages. I get to cover an entire album in the amount of time of your average song plays. Plus if I am impressed enough, I’m off to the site hunting down those little gems that are amidst the noise of photos taken these days.

Don’t get me, have a look at this, my sisters wedding snaps;

You see what I mean? My mother will love this, my sister will love this, my friends will love this, I am a hero! It took no real effort or hours of endless playing with timelines and such in various video editors. It even makes crappy snappy pictures look good!It gets better tho, as I write this, Animoto’s elves are busying themselves upgrading the service tonight. OMG I can’t wait to see what new shiny things I will have to play with in the morning.There is however only one thing that may be a drawback, the more popular this becomes the more people will get tired of it, so lets hope they keep this service fresh and independent, its a good niche they have found, it’s the price of a few pints and hours of endless fun (Making the killing in the name of version of above as I type).