PicSquare - Upload, Share, Print.

Now that digital photography is attracting many more yuppies than the old film photography, storing & sharing of digital images has turned into an important aspect of it. Not that there is any dearth of online webspaces to store the pictures - Sony's ImageStation, Yahoo's Flickr and many more. Most of them provide the facility to get the printed copies on your doorstep by mail. But, sadly, that's limited to just US & Europe. While the demand of such a service in India has raisen considerably in recent times, we are yet to see any such service take off.

PicSquare is one such service introduced very recently in India. The brainchild of two young entreprenuers, it is still taking baby steps, but promises a lot more. The two masterminds behind this venture - Manish & Kartik - are undergraduates from IIT Bombay. Manish graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2002 and went on to pursue his MS from Purdue University. After completion, he worked for a while and later on gave it up to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. Kartik completed his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering in the year 2004. He was working for about 1.5 years before joining Manish in this venture.

I have used PicSquare to get some of my photos printed. I guess it doesn't make much sense for me as a person living in India, ordering prints to be delivered locally, but if you think about Indians living abroad & wishing to share their memories with people back home, this service does make a lot of sense. E-Mail the pictures, you'd say, but then the internet penetration in India is still as low as a meagre 5%. Even for someone like me, living in a different city from my parents, it makes sense to get the printed photos delivered directly to my parents in Jaipur (They don't access the net, of course). Its also quite hassle-free for both the parties. One point I'd like to make it here is, the service as such is expansive if we compare to the local GK Vale printing (It costed me ~ Rs.90 for 11 4x6 prints, including delivery).

The print quality is very satisfactory. I guess they process the images a bit before printing them. Hence the richer colors & sharp images. No complaints here.

Their website is rather simplistic. I personally like to-the-point websites, without all flashy mumbo-jumbo & the cluster of buttons & links. The navigation is also quite intutive. They have implemented the functionality to upload multiple images in one go, which is utmost important for such a site. You can edit attributes for multiple images together, which is again an important desirable. They have borrowed the idea of tags from Flickr, which is another nice-to-have feature. They claim to provide unlimited image storing space, but my experience with them doesn't give me any chance to support or deny that. I can't say how gracefully their system will handle it once the bulk uploads start to happen.

You can select photos from the uploaded ones and put them in the shopping cart and order prints; quite standard process as far as online shopping websites go. Presently, they are charging Rs 4.50 ($0.10) per 4x6 photo, Rs 13.50 ($0.30) per 5x7 & Rs 67.50 ($1.50) per 8x10 photos (On a local printing shop, they charge about Rs 3.50-Rs 4.00 for one 4x6 print). One problem I found in their payment module is that it refused to work with my Visa card. Manish & Kartik later acknowledged the problem and hopefully they'll iron out such issues soon.

For the future, they have quite a lot planned. Personalized greeting cards, photo-printed T-shirts, customized coffee mugs, photo frames, calendars, etc. If we go by the testimonials on their site, they have already made many patrons. Hopefully, they'd make many more in coming times.

Keep up the good work, fellas!