News: .Mac Web Gallery fully integrated with iPhone, post photos from your iPhone now

Apple's media event today, August 7th, was supposed to be exclusively for the announcement of the new iMacs. So it was, as Steve Jobs demonstrated a sleeker, more feature packed, sexier version of the iMac ever seen.

He also announced a slew of software updates such as iLife, iWork and .Mac online service. However, one of the updates that would interest iPhone users is that Apple has fully integrated .Mac Web Gallery with iPhone, so you can view all your photos and movies from wherever you are, and even post photos right from your iPhone.

.Mac has been Apple's online subscription service featuring email, web hosting, online storage, and other features. Today, Apple has added to it the .Mac Web Gallery featuring online photo and video sharing along with iPhone integration.

We have started seeing reports of some iPhone users who until yesterday were seeing only 3 options when working with photos on their iPhone i.e. "Use as Wallpaper," "Email Photo" and "Assign to Contact." are now seeing a fourth option "Send to Web Gallery".

However, not everyone is seeing this fourth option and it seems like you must have a .Mac email account set up on your phone for this to work (still waiting for a confirmation). Also, attempts to send a photo to a gallery result in a prompt to configure .Mac. So probably iLife '08 must be installed as well as that option is not available on the .Mac homepage.

So looks like with the first firmware update along with the security fixes, Apple also sneaked in this time based feature so that this features is enabled around the same time as the Keynote address so that one can share online photos if you had a .Mac account.

If you are an iPhone user and do not have an .Mac account then get a free 60-day trial account now and test this feature and let me know your experience in the comments below.

I guess this makes it the very first feature unlocked after the iPhone's launch, it is good to finally see Apple unlocking features on the iPhone.

Update:

You need to do the following to make the “Send to Web Gallery” functional on your iPhone (courtesy iPhoneAtlas):
1. Upgrade to iLife ‘08, which includes iPhoto ‘08 (version 7.0.x) as it is the only release of iPhoto that supports Web galleries.
2. Create an album in your photo galleries, and upload them to .Mac by sending the album to your Web gallery.
3. In the control settings for whether visitors are allowed to submit photos to your album via web browser uploads and/or via email, you must enable the “email” updates feature for the iPhone “Send to Web Gallery” function to work correctly. Also note “Each album can have it’s own security settings. The iPhone checks each album in your gallery page for permissions and then displays a list of all albums which allow updates via email.”

[via Tuaw]

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