With the explosion of digital photography and it's impact on Web applications (for storage and display a well as social networking) there are a lot of opportunities for new tools and services to make managing and tracking images faster and more effective.

An interesting example of this is Xoopit (currently in beta). Xoopit is a service that works with your Gmail account along with your accounts on Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube, Shutterfly, and Kodak to index all of your received photos and attachments making it much easier to find the stuff you know you have but can’t quite remember what it is called or who sent it to you.

All of the magic of Xoopit is really done on its server. Your free account is defined by providing your login credentials for Gmail; a clever technique that adequately validates your account for Xoopit’s purposes.

If you have signed up with Xoopit when you go to the site it will have mined Gmail for photos, videos, and attached files, listed all of the people you communicate with, and listed your received message that have attachments and images in reverse date order.

Xoopit also provides a Firefox plug-in that creates a photo browsing bar above the main panel in Gmail. Click on a photo and you’re shown who the image was sent by. When you click on an image you’re taken to the message it is in.

You can also select Photos, Videos, or Files from the menu in the Xoopit bar and the main Gmail panel will be replaced by a sortable and searchable matrix of thumbnails for that type.

If you select Photos or Videos clicking on an image brings it up at a larger size and you can then jump to the original message, enlarge the image to full size, download it, or delete it. You can also forward the photo to other people, send the originator a comment, add it to your Facebook account or post it to a blog.

Selecting Files provides a table of attachments that can be downloaded or deleted and sorted by size, date, and other criteria (only one criteria at a time unfortunately – this means you can select all of the videos and then sort them by file size).

Xoopit also provides a widget that lets you browse your Gmail photos on iGoogle.

For anyone who uses Gmail and deals with a lot of multimedia or simply just a lot of attachments, using Xoopit could make your life a lot easier.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.