And then there are the photo managers; the best of breed pretty much has always been Google's Picasa, and now the advent of Google+ means some tidy Picasa integration. But as well as Picasa there's Flickr, probably the biggest photo sharing site around; but of course Flickr is pretty much just about photo sharing whereas social networks are about sharing much more - so photo sharing on Facebook is pretty big too.
So what's this post all about? The point is, we end up with different albums shared with different people on different platforms, and we want something tidier. As users we want a service that lets us see all our photos in one place, and to share them with the people we want to. A bonus would be to retain the information we've added to the photos - where and when the photos were taken, people we've tagged in them, captions and comments etc. Not surprisingly there's no service (yet) that can do all that for us - partly due to the limitations of the various APIs and partly because nobody's made them yet - but there are a few that are trying to come close. Below I'm going to explain what I've found, but first here's a list of what the ideal online photo manager should be able to do:
- MUST: list photos and albums across various services in one place
- MUST: allow copying of photos/albums from one service to another "web-side" (ie. without using any of the users' bandwidth to download photos from one service and re-upload them to another)
- MUST: be completely free of charge
- SHOULD: copy time and location information
- IDEALLY WOULD: copy captions and lists of people tagged
- IDEALLY WOULD: manage which circles/lists/users/friends/followers can see which photos/albums
- SHOULD: allow easy merging of albums
- IDEALLY WOULD: allow automatic synchronisation of albums across platforms
Showzey
Showzey is a relatively new kid on the block and promises much. It searches all of your Google, Facebook and Flickr photos and lists them nicely. It lists albums and, yes, lets you copy an entire album from Picasa to Facebook or vice versa. Another key plus point is you don't need any new username or password - simply authenticate via your existing Google, Facebook or Yahoo account.
On the downside, it's excruciatingly slow. I have over 15 pages of albums and navigating between pages on Showzey is an ordeal. Shifting photos around between services requires oodles of bandwidth, memory and processing power and it's apparent that Showzey's infrastructure isn't quite up to the task.
Pictarine
This site has a slightly nicer look and feel than Showzey but does require a separate user account to be created, along with yet another user name and password to remember. Considering the whole point is to link other services together, and the first thing you do when you've created an account is to authenticate with those other services, it's a tad surprising that Pictarine hasn't gone the way of Showzey and used that authentication instead of requiring users to input separate credentials just for Pictarine.
Pictarine covers a much wider range of services than Showzey - but seems to suffer from the same performance issues: loading a list of albums takes ages. In fact, performance is so bad that I haven't yet managed to load my Pictarine homepage after signing up and authenticating with Facebook and Picasa. Sbo I can't really report on how good or bad its features are beyond that point; suffice to say if it takes over an hour to load a list of albums it's not really a usable service. Which is a shame, because there are some favourable reviews of Pictarine out there.
Mobypicture
This site sounds promising - "share your photos, videos and audio with your friends on your favourite social sites" - but since the very well established Picasa is not supported - and, therefore, neither is the fastest growing social network in the world, Google+ - this isn't really worth a look. I only discovered Mobypicture though through Pictarine. If Pictarine can't share directly with Facebook, but Mobypicture can and Pictarine can share directly with Mobypicture - then perhaps there's some mileage. But as I write I'm still waiting for Pictarine to load my list of albums, and I won't be going anywhere near Mobypicture until I'm satisfied that it has a robust link with Picasa - either directly or through a reliable third party.
Facebook & Google+
Of course there's no real reason why we should have to rely on third party applications, as it's within the means of both companies to make their own photo handling better. But since these are rivals it's very unlikely that either would see fit to put the wishes of their users first; Facebook are unlikely to put a "share album to Picasa/Flickr/whatever" button on their photo pages of their own accord, and neither are Google+ likely to add a native "Share to Facebook" button in their Google+ or Picasa album views. Which is shooting themselves in the foot slightly, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, whichever service were to offer that function first would most likely become my primary online photo management service. If Facebook want me to spend more time on their site, they need to allow me to manage my content on other sites through their site. The same goes for Google and, indeed, anyone else.
Secondly, both companies claim that they value the notion of putting users in control of their own data, and make it easier to share whatever we want with whomever we want. If they're serious about that, they should acknowledge that some of those "whomevers" don't use their services, and that their users will still want to share with them - which means being able to throw stuff at other services from within their own.
But it's not just sharing that's problematic. There are some pretty basic requirements that neither site meets; the ability to merge two or more albums together at album level, not at photo level, is something that's frustrated me on both sites in recent days. The ability to automatically identify and remove duplicate photos in an album (preferably merging comments/tags if appropriate) is technically more difficult but far from impossible, and would be a very useful feature for users.
Firstly, whichever service were to offer that function first would most likely become my primary online photo management service. If Facebook want me to spend more time on their site, they need to allow me to manage my content on other sites through their site. The same goes for Google and, indeed, anyone else.
Secondly, both companies claim that they value the notion of putting users in control of their own data, and make it easier to share whatever we want with whomever we want. If they're serious about that, they should acknowledge that some of those "whomevers" don't use their services, and that their users will still want to share with them - which means being able to throw stuff at other services from within their own.
But it's not just sharing that's problematic. There are some pretty basic requirements that neither site meets; the ability to merge two or more albums together at album level, not at photo level, is something that's frustrated me on both sites in recent days. The ability to automatically identify and remove duplicate photos in an album (preferably merging comments/tags if appropriate) is technically more difficult but far from impossible, and would be a very useful feature for users.
Conclusion
Well, I signed up for Pictarine just before starting writing this blog entry and it's been trying to load my list of albums since then and still hasn't succeeded. So the best of the services that are available at the moment definitely seems to be Showzey. But the reality is that there's a substantial gap in the market for a decent online photo manager. It's a gap that could be filled by one of the big players themselves (Google, Facebook or Yahoo [Flickr]) quite easily, or a nice niche for a startup to come along and fill. It's clearly not the easiest nut to crack - lots of issues with APIs and and setting up servers that are able to cope with large volumes of images being punted backwards and forwards - but nobody said these things were easy. They are, though, sorely needed.
Update
Not surprisingly, as soon as I published this blog post I came across another one which lists the services mentioned above plus several others:
http://www.mysensetechnology.com/2011/11/group-albums-and-photos-from-facebook.html
I've started using Fotolink (the last one mentioned in that post) and am very impressed so far!
Update
Not surprisingly, as soon as I published this blog post I came across another one which lists the services mentioned above plus several others:
http://www.mysensetechnology.com/2011/11/group-albums-and-photos-from-facebook.html
I've started using Fotolink (the last one mentioned in that post) and am very impressed so far!
