Those brainboxes at Nokia Beta Labs are up to their old tricks again, dropping yet another intriguing pre-release application into our laps. This time it's Nokia Image Exchange, a photo-sharing/social networking app that automatically stores your phone snaps on a shareable online database.

Okay, so on the face of it, it's nothing we haven't seen before in, say, Flickr or Picasa Web Albums - but Image Exchange is designed with mobile phones in mind from the get go. The app assumes that you want to avoid excessive fiddling around to get your shots uploaded, so takes the legwork (fingerwork?) out of proceedings by automatically creating your account and automatically uploading images.

Of course, this will use a truckload of data, so a Wi-Fi connection or an unlimited 3G data plan is pretty much a necessity.

One of the coolest features is that you'll be notified whenever anybody from your mobile's contacts list updates their Image Exchange account. You can also comment on other people's photos, and have them leave comments on yours. Everything can be viewed on your PC when you're at home, too - account browsing isn't limited to your mobile.

If you want to give the beta a try, you can download it from its Beta Labs page. According to the blurb it won't work with the N96, E90 and 5800 XpressMusic, but has been successfully tested on the N95 (all versions), N85, N82, N81 (all versions), E71, N76, N78 and 5320 XpressMusic. It should also run on other S60 devices, but as with all betas some bugs should be expected.

Here's a video explaining the app in a bit more detail: