Picture Publishing

OK, I'll admit right here on the start that I was lazy on this one, but I don't feel bad about it: just think of me of a "web joe user", and you'll understand.

Everyone (sort of) knows about Flickr. Flickr is sweet, cool, free, the pro accounts are cheap... Of course it has some problems (the authentication is one of them), but overall is a good webapp. So why look for alternatives? Well, because I'm not that into taking pictures nor into social networks that I would pay to have the stuff Flickr gives. But that gives me one problem: being no 'lover' makes me 'lazy', so I accumulated months of pictures I wanted to publish, and now I wanted to publish them all at once. Since that you can only upload 20Mb of pictures per month, and those Megs aren't accumulated, yesterday I got myself with those 20Mb used, and just needed more to finish uploading my XTech pictures.

So, since I won't pay for more space, and since I could get this as an excuse to write this post :-P I decided not to do this the 1.0 way (uploading the pictures to a webserver and doing a nice website showing them) and instead I decided to take a look on Flickr alternatives. Being generally interested in themes like Web 2.0 I knew in advance three things: Yahoo! has another photos service besides Flickr, there's one Flickr alternative everybody talks about as being preety good, and there's lot's of other alternatives to Flickr: a really big load of them.

Starting with the first, I went to Yahoo!'s page and clicked on "photos", that led me to http://photos.yahoo.com/. Unfortunately the result page was just a blank page with this text:

RESULT=49 - TCookie invalid
VERSION=2.5

Acting like a "joe user", I just thought "what the hell?" and moved on. I knew that there's a really well-talked alternative, but I wasn't just recalling it's name (a couple of seconds later I did, it was photobucket, but it was too late by then) so I went google and searched for "Flickr alternatives". The first result was a blog post talking good about 23, and since I recall the name of it but not if I tried it, just decided to give a try.

I still can't understand why some webapps don't let me use more-than-one-word "screen names"... It totaly beats the shit out of me! Plus, I identified some problems with the Ajax magic while using the site (browser is SeaMonkey on Linux). The monthly quota here is 300 pictures, which I prefer, since it's more pictures than 20 Megs and because it makes more sense and it is easilly trackable for the user if his quota is in number of pictures (something accountable for him) then in number of bytes (something accountable for his computer). You can only upload 4 pictures at the time, against the 6 you can in Flickr. The 6 limit exasperates me on Flickr, so seeing here "4" got me frustrated, but then I read that you could do something awsome: you can upload a .zip with the pictures inside! Another sweet thing is that you can create a "photo set" in the same view you're uploading your pictures, or you can choose to upload them to an already created set. User-friendly.

Et voilá! Here are the latest pictures I had to upload, and I did it in an easier way than I would if I were posting them on Flickr. The conclusion? Flickr is good, but they need to get even better. They might end loosing users to the alternatives!