If you remember how cool it is to use the Beamer app to share your pictures on almost anywhere, Microsoft Research is developing another sharing app that works cross-platform and allows you to Zoom and Pinch and so on. What is awesome about the app is that it is also cross-service compatible, which means it’s not just your photos on Windows Phone, but it could be on your Dropbox or OneDrive or Facebook or even Instagram.

The app has been recently updated to support browser, Xbox One, Amazon Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick. Once you select photos and share it, whatever action you do on your phone, shows up on any of the supported devices. TV is probably the best device to show off photos as its available everywhere. Now here is the catch, the reason why it’s freaking fast because it shares over the local network, which means you should have Xbox One or anything else on the same network. I am pretty sure you aren’t going to share photos from miles apart.

The viewers at the other end will be able to save images using the controller or making a long press or by any other means—this call-in that you be extra careful on what you would want to share and whatnot. If your friends have XIM, they can join in and add photos from their devices as well, making it a fun party.

That said, the next obvious step should be letting video streamed over or even replace Miracast with this. Pretty sure this might just be that easy, but then nothing is easy.

List of Features in XIM

Swipe and Zoom together.
Invite people from your phone’s contact list, via email or via the phone number
Choose photos from your camera roll, Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox, or OneDrive; mix and match easily from any of these sources.

Xims only stick around for a little while so you can enjoy the moment with no storage or organization overhead.
Image Expiration can be set for an hour now.

Microsoft