Would you like to create an album from pictures in your email?

2Pad.com, a recently announced photo website, automatically retrieves photos and videos from your web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo and stores them in a private online gallery.

It’s a good idea.

Friends and family email you pictures that are special to them. You email pictures of your new baby or car. If you consistently use a web-based email system, it contains plenty of your history.

Sign up for a free account with 2Pad and give it your email address and password, they make sure your password is protected, and 2Pad will scan all of your email and copy the photos and videos to a private personal gallery for which you can share photos, if you like, or order prints. 2Pad stores contextual information about your photos like what was in the email message that contained the media.

What I like

It really is great to be able to look at all of your pictures and get a look at some of the older ones of friends and family.

What I don’t like

There are some annoyances on the business side of 2Pad that interferes with the way it operates.

A free account (see chart below) accepts a maximum file size of 100 megabytes. Now the nice way to act, if you know how, is to reduce the size of your pictures before you email them. Unfortunately, today’s high megapixel digital cameras create large images and many people don’t reduce the size of their image before emailing so you probably have a goodly number of large photos stored in your email. If you first scan your email with a free account (who wouldn’t?) 2Pad simple ignores the larger photos leaving large time gaps in your generated gallery.

No question the answer 2Pad wished you to choose is to upgrade to a paid account. It might create a better first-impression of the service if all your pictures were there and you just used up your free gigabyte and stopped scanning.

My other annoyance is not limited to 2Pad, but 2Pad is also guilty of making you pay what they call a “price per month” on an annual basis (lump sum) when you first sign up rather than a monthly payment. I understand why they want you to do this, but I have signed for too many “cute” services that I ended up not using after the first month.