Product Reviews

Mugshot offers an alternative way of browsing and managing photos at popular photo sharing website Flickr.com.

Instead of clicking links on a web page, Mugshot logs into your Flickr account and lets you do things with good old drag and drop. The Mugshot window is unique, spurning most trends in Mac software design to offer an interesting combination of simple graphic elements, strong colours and some influence from iPhoto.

It does what it says it will. You can drag an image from your photostream into your favourites, or into any of the photo groups to which you belong. Any photo you view at full size can be downloaded easily, but the Send to iPhoto button didn't appear to work.

There

ADVERTISEMENT

are other bugs, too. Sometimes Mugshot fails to display any image thumbnails, although they'll appear if you attempt to resize the window.

Mugshot is a nice idea, but one that needs more work. Aside from the mouse-oriented controls for dragging images around, it offers nothing that you can't find already on Flickr itself. And Flickr is so well constructed and designed that the lack of drag-control is rarely noticeable, let alone a problem.

Indeed, when you're using Flickr in a browser, you're getting more than just extra functionality: you're also getting the interlinked nature of browsing tags, user streams, groups, comments and discussions. Mugshot effectively removes you from all these fun extras, forcing you back to your browser to find them again. You can't even upload a photo from your computer to your Flickr account using Mugshot, so you'll be switching to iPhoto, Flickr Uploadr or any one of a dozen other helper apps to do this.

As it stands, Mugshot offers little that's compelling, but don't give up on it completely. With continued development, it might yet turn into something innovative and useful. Let's hope so, because the approach to interface design is refreshing, and the idea of an 'offline' Flickr, if such a thing is possible, is enticing.