musings from the photographic memepool [the shallow end]

I've been roaming the interwebs over the last few weeks, searching out another cyber-gallery/home for my photography.

In my travels I've found the following sites, which is by no means an exhaustive one, but a good starting point for those thinking of using the web this way.

• ipernity.com#
• zooomr.com
• multiply.com##
• deviantArt.com*

Today I spent some time uploading and tweaking, my mulitply.com site. Which lead to me noticing the pluses of flickr and perhaps why it's become so successful.

Two areas I notice where flickr really is head and shoulders above the others, uploading and groups. One minor negative, is skinning or the appearance of your stream.

Something that flickr doesn't offer is 'skinning' the ability to change, the appearance of your page, multiply does and so does as does ipernity, each to a different degree, but the look of your site/page can be made different to the rest of the site, a feature also by the way of myspace, which in itself has become a cottage industry, but not facebook. Anyway I digress. This skinning feature is obviously a feature not clamored for by many people. [Some basic layout changing can be done on flickr, but I don't get the feeling people don't want to change the appearance of the streams on flickr. Possibly a clever move on flickr's part, certainly from a 'branding' point of view. But flickr has done some other things that make it stand and and more memorable.

Uploading to flickr, is a breeze. People can use the flickr interface itself, and several 3rd party apps that will do it very seamlessly for me as well. Multiply has no 3rd party apps that I can see, just a java, e-mail or html interface for uploading, which isn't bad but those little 3rd party apps I use really tap into the aspects I want fast easy simple and feature packed. Ipernity has one 3rd party app, which is very good, it has been so long since I've used zooomr I can't remember now how to upload, and I think there are account problems as well? DevaintArt's uploading system [html] has always been to prescriptive for my liking, [I'll be the one who decides what sort of categories my photos fit in thanks].

Creating groups and more importantly adding photos to groups. On ipenrity, as I write, no group facility exists, nor on zooomr, on multiply their are groups, albeit a huge variety of them, but adding photos to them is a separate process to adding photos to your own stream/account. When adding photos to groups on multiply, you add separate albums to the group, a bit of a nuisance really.

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