Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here

Yesterday we introduced and reviewed various social bookmarking services and today we’ll be doing the same but for photo sharing ones. Photo sharing sites allow you to share your photography with friends, family and/or complete strangers providing a good way for photographers to gain contacts and for family/friends to stay in touch.

Photo sharing services are nothing new, and indeed sites like Webshots are pretty Web 1.0. The latest photo sharing sites implement a number of features though which make it easier to find and share photos.

Like social bookmarking sites, most photo sharing sites implement a tagging system of some sort which allows you to come up with relevant ‘keywords’ for your photos which yourself or others can search through at a latter point. For example, one could tag a photo of Father Christmas as ‘santa’, ‘christmas’ or indeed a more specific tag such as ‘doe christmas dinner 2005′!

Flickr
Flickr is likely to be the largest photo-sharing site and is owned, like del.icio.us, by Yahoo! To sign into Flickr you must now use your Yahoo! log-in which is good for new members but is a pain for people like myself as I could get my desired original Flickr log-in (computerjoe) but my Yahoo! ID which I now have to use to sign-in is computerjoe_uk.

Flickr has a lot of features, such as tagging as well as the ability to place photos on maps, but if I’m not mistaken limits you to 200 photos on a free account (you may still continue to upload and your previous ones won’t be deleted just you – nor anyone else – won’t be able to view them until you pay the US$24.95 a year).

The site also has good social abilities like being able to comment on photos, adding fellow users as contacts (and further categorising them into friends and family allowing you to restrict who has access to certain photos) as well as groups who you can ‘send’ images and messages to; the messages form a forum.

As well as tagging (folksonomy) the site allows users to sort photos into sets and collections (which pretty much act as a taxonomy). For example, I have two collections: UK & Abroad and in those collections I have multiple sets which are the locations and dates I shot them (e.g. Tenerife 2006, Tenerife 2007 and Lake District 2007). Sets and collections can be used to sort photos in any manner you wish, though.

Zooomr
Zooomr is a site which got a lot of popularity from veteran Flickr users when Yahoo! instigated the use of Yahoo! logins opposed to Flickr ones.

Zooomr does provide you a choice of log-in options though; it supports the OpenID single-sign on much like Mag.nolia (a bookmarking site we reviewed yesterday) as well as the ability to set-up and login with a normal account.

They provide many of the same features as Flickr as well as a few more (such as the ability to license photos for commercial use at a certain price) however I feel that consequently the site’s interface is far too heavy and you get the feeling of ‘feature overload’ which you don’t over at Flickr.

Zooomr also offer pro accounts which aren’t served ads (whilst free ones are). Also, pro accounts will be given features in the future such as analytics for view of their photos which is pretty cool .

Sadly, there isn’t a way to import Flickr photos into Zooomr whilst keeping data such as tags (at least none I can see!). This is the fault of Flickr, though, for refusing Zooomr a commercial API (basically a commercial licence permitting Zooomr to grab data from Flickr).

Pikeo
Orange-owned Pikeo is another photo sharing site, sadly it seems to be based heavily on Flash. The Flash basis restricts the portability because although most internet devices have Flash some – such as my PDA – do not.

The site provides 1GB (1024MB) of storage with support for sending images from mobile phones (no doubt due to the fact it’s owned by Orange). In addition to this it provides geotagging, tagging, albums and comments.

Like Flickr they also provide groups however Pikeo’s have a much small niche (such as a group for a specific family as opposed to a group for ‘Web 2.0′ etc).

Pikeo seems to mainly target non-Anglophone countries (even though that the site is in English) because most of the uploaded photos seem to originate from France (where Orange has a big presence).

Tags: photo sharing, photosharing, web 2.0, web 2.0 for dummies