Filled Under: Image Sharing
Picasa
Picasa is a free software associated with Google that is used to help users, share, organize, and edit their pictures. There are many options available in the software that allow the user to customize the organization of the photographs and it is ideal for professional photographers or people that have a large volume of photographs that all need to be appropriately categorized.
Uses of Picasa
It should be stressed that Picasa is not an image editor, just an image organizer. However, the options for organization that picasa offers are unparalleled by any other image categorizing software available. Users can save their photos in any variety of file formats with tags created so that each file format has specific information associated with it. Google technologies also allow picasa users to take advantage of geotagging, adding coordinates to whatever image is being edited. There is a back-up system that allows users to make changes to a hidden file expressly made for editing before the final changes are made with the save function.
Another helpful feature that picasa offers, is facial recognition software supplied by Neven Vison. Neven Vision is a company that specializes in facial recognition software, and though it is now public, it has won competitions against formal government crime scene investigation software and is equal to the best version out there. This means that official CSI quality software capabilities are now available to consumers through the wonder of picasa. There are many other advantages to picasa such as advanced categorization systems as well as several different modes of organizing, but best of all is how user friendly it is. Picasa is software for everyone.
Photobucket
Photobucket, created in 2003, is currently one of the most popular methods for storing photos on the internet. Its popularity is due to a variety of reasons, but the most prevalent one being because it is more catered towards casual users.
How Photobucket works
Photobucket hosts both videos and pictures, but because of the popularity of youtube, photobucket users rarely upload videos. Photos up to 1MB or of a certain wallpaper size resolution can be uploaded for free to photobucket, and one of the main advantages of photobucket is that it offers a free 500 MB of hosting space, more than twice that of their competitor Flickr. In addition, unlike Flickr there is no limit to how many photos can be uploaded as long as the cumulative file size does not exceed 500 MB. The layout of photobucket is unfortunately still unpopular, but the services offered by photobucket are much more than most competing file hosting sites can claim.
Their relative popularity allowed them to develop the tools necessary to connect directly with sites like ebay (this is a popular option for people that sell things on ebay), neopets (a popular option for children and for parents that want to monitor what photos their child can and cannot send) as well as facebook (a popular option for everyone that has a facebook account and wants to upload photos to that. Photobucket also offers users options to share photos by email, and online game. They operate a few subsidiary companies and services, one of which is the website tinypic.com. This website allows users to upload photos without the need of an account. All that is needed is to type in a captcha.
Flickr
Flickr is a popular image and video hosting website that was founded in 2004 by a company called Ludicorp, which was later purchased along with their Flickr service by Yahoo. The idea for it came out of a game that was being developed by Ludicorp which was later canceled, but from this idea emerged Flickr.
Usage of Flickr
Flickr is popular amongst very casual members and for very serious members as well, though there is trouble finding an intermediate market because of the limitation for free accounts. There are only 2 types of accounts offered by Flickr, which are Pro, and Free. People that possess free account can upload only 200 MB of photos per month and only the most recent 200 photos will appear in the user’s photo stream. Though links posted will still remain active, after 200 photos are uploaded, nobody will be able to access the originals. Pro account holders have no limits on how many photos they can upload nor any limitations on access, but this account costs money.
Flickr is one of the most popular image hosting website, with estimations that the site is hosting over five billion photos, however for users that don’t pay there are probably better alternatives out there. Flickr has a layout that is very popular amongst blogger’s and its affiliation with yahoo allows anyone on the yahoo network to easily open an account. Because of this, there are many yahoo bloggers paying to use the Fickr services for hosting purposes. The standard viewing window is usually larger than that of photobucket or picasa or any of the other hosting services out there, which is another factor that makes it more popular.
Dailybooth
Dailybooth is not a typical photo hosting site by any means. What sets it apart from its competitors is that it is strictly geared towards teens, is extremely user friendly, has a strong knowledge of its user base and the services they desire, as well as opening up for the ability for users to participate in photo blogging.
Better than the competitors
Dailybooth is not necessarily objectively better than any of the competitors it has such as flickr and photobucket. In fact it could even be argued that if Dailybooth were just any ordinary picture hosting site, it would suffer from a crippling lack of features that are all available in the competitors. What dailybooth does right is that it combines the attractive idea of a blog, something that most people with account at image hosting sites link their images in regularly, with that of a standard image hosting site.
It is a fairly genius marketing plan, as a great deal of the people that use photobucket or flickr generally use those services so that they can store photos that link to their blog, the blog being the most important part. This site weeds out the middle man, fusing the two together into one hybrid. Users unconvinced with the lack of control over photos will fall in love with the blogging aspect, and users that like to maintain a blog will cave to the ease of which photos can be uploaded. Because it is marketed toward teens, Dailybooth makes sure not to make any of its features too hard to use or understand, and thus, the company is successful in finding an audience worldwide.