Photo sharing - Pikeo news

Visiting the world

Since we began working on pikeo we have been looking around at the different sites that provide interesting features mixing pictures and maps. Woophy is one of them as it seems that we share part of our vision.
It basically allows its users to upload their pictures of places of the world. The community effect creates a nice world map with pictures that the nearly 10k users put in common to document our globe. Consequently Woophy is a nice place to go to do discover the world with a nice community.
In my point of view it is very succesful at doing this. However it lacks a full picture hosting interface. As a result people use Woophy as an extra tool to show their pictures of travel to the community, not as a space they can use to share all their pictures with their friends and family too. It just requires twice the effort.
We currently lack the golbal world view that allows users to see any pictures from anybody straight from the map (we only display the recent places for now). It is in the works of course and a natural extension to pikeo given our extensively map-centered interface but i wanted to point out that other players were covering another edge of this field.
If i could make the analogy i would say that pikeo is at the center of a triangle with Shutterfly, Flickr and Woophy at its corners.

Tags: woophy geotagging pikeo map photosharing community

Picture2life: import and edit

A new online picture editing tool just came out: Picture2Life. Pete Cashmore talks about it in Mashable.Like Pixoh and PXN8, Picture2life allows you to import pictures from other sites like Flickr, MySpace and Photobucket to be able to then edit tem the way you want.

Back to a hot topic ealier this week, about the import of pictures, it is interesting, as Mashable states to see that sites like that "found an easy way to piggyback on the growing popularity of photo-sharing sites".
So is their purpose to be acquired by major photo sharing sites as The editing tool? Or is the point just to generate some enough trafic to generate some ads revenue?

As far as Picture2life is concerned, I found the design quite poor even if the features are there.

Tags:

picture2life mashable photoediting

Photobucket number one in market shares

While everybody talks about Flickr, a recent post from Hitwise shows that Photobucket is actually the number one site in photo sharing with a huge 44% market shares."It surpassed Yahoo! Photos in January, and its share of visits increased by 34% in the four months from February 2006 to May 2006."

But what is interesting here is the fact that the traffic to Photobucket is mostly coming from MySpace. Photobucket is a quite "plain" photo sharing service with no tagging,  or Ajax stuff for instance. So does that mean that people just want plain photo sharing without fancy features? Or does that mean that picture sharing is only valuable when you have a great community behind like on MySpace?
It will be interesting to follow those stats and the following graphs evolutions.

Techcrunch, and gigaHOM also talk about it.

Tags:

photobucket yahoophotos flickr techcrunch gigaom

Import/Export of pictures

Because so many people are already on Flickr, we've always thought that we would have an import feature from Flickr to pikeo. We got this feature request from people internally and even from people outside like Tara Hunt.
From this Friday post on Techcrunch, it looks like commercial APIs to retrieve pictures from Flickr are not available yet. The quite intense and passionate debate currently happening on the Techcrunch blog shows however that it is not that easy of a debate.
Web 2.0 means being open but how open?

For us at pikeo, the point is not to "steal" Flickr users because obviously, we cannot compete with the ton of features + community they have. Our motivation would be to allow people to discover pikeo without the inconvenience of re-uploading all their pictures.

Let's see how all this goes... tags: pikeo flickr zooomr techcrunch APIs

IPTC and its limitations

This is a follow up to my previous post about mainstream tagging on desktops. Indeed, the main applications available for tagging (Photoshop Elements, Picasa...) rely on the IPTC standard to store the information in the pictures. This allows interoperability between the applications and some web picture sharing sites as well.
Originally IPTC is a standard that has been created for journalistic pictures and thus contains a lot of fields that offer information about the photo. Since no other standard was available and agreed upon when tagging for consumers pictures arose, it quickly became the de facto standard for anything related to picture tagging.
Among all the available fields, few are actually used for mass market tagging. A couple of them are debated about for the picture title or caption as the interpretation from the specs differs depending on who reads them (see this original thread from Flickr forums for more details) but it is a given that the Keywords field is used for tags.
This is where the limitations kick in.

• First the keywords separator used in IPTC is the blank space. This means that if you tag a picture San Francisco in Photoshop for example, it will show as 2 different tags San and Francisco in any other application or website. This is a major problem as picture tagging expands and gets more mass market.
• IPTC doesn't allow categories to be created for the tags: You could imagine being able to group your tags in categories such as people, places, colors... anything really. But this is made impossible with the current IPTC limitations.
• Since it was built for journalism several fields are dedicated to the location where the picture has been taken. There are 4 of them and they tend to be hierarchical (Location > City > State > Country). Since most people just tag the locations without any specific structure (some will use Home, others the address; some will say Paris, others will specify Paris, France as opposed to Paris, Texas) it would be hard to map those tags on the IPTC field. However we can imagine just using the Location field for most people, as a trade off. Here, the problem is that every application uses only the Keyword field... Beginning to put the location information in the Location field will mean that no other application will actually consider this as a tag for a place. However, writing the information in both fields would already be a good start...

To conclude, IPTC is great since it allows us, users, to tag our pictures and have this information transfered from one application to the next. However as tagging becomes more and more mass market and gets to evolve, there will be a need for a true dedicated standard. Some work has already been done on the subject by different bodies but nothing definitive and adopted by the players...

Tags: IPTC tag tagging pikeo Picasa Photoshop Flickr

Mobile applications, more to come

Last week, Yahoo! and Nokia "announced a partnership to co-market new Nokia phones that facilitate a simpler exchange of information between members of Yahoo's photo-sharing community Flickr." (From MediaPostPublications) Embedding applications to upload pictures right into the cell phone without having to download any application is definitely the right move. Nokia is planning to rely on the popular Flickr but it could be too limited knowing that Flickr has only 2% market share. However, it will satisfy the Flickr community for sure.

Two (not counting our pikeo mobile application) noticeable photo sharing mobile application are already out there. Shozu has been developed by the UK based company Cognima and allows uploads to Flickr, Buzznet, Webshots and Kodak Easy Share Gallery. The beauty of the application is that once it's installed, there is no need to launch the Shozu application to take a picture. On the contrary, the user takes a picture with the regular photo application and the Shozu application launches automatically. They just released a new version (see Darlamak blog) that includes more supported phones, the ability to answer comments from the phone and the option to upload photos to different places (blogs, emails...).
ZoneTag is the other interesting application that not only does the "seamless upload" but also allows users to tag their pictures. ZoneTag supports only Nokia Series 60 phones and is coming from the Berkley research MMM2 project. The interesting part is that it is also a Yahoo! beta application! In terms of features, ZoneTag uploads to Flickr, captures cell ID tags and proposes tags used by your  Flickr contacts. It is pretty fast and usable, but (to me!) it displays way too many tags along with the picture in Flickr that should be hidden to the user.

Now is the perfect time to introduce our pikeo mobile application!Pikeo mobile starts automatically when a picture is taken. It allows the users to add tags on the picture: person (who) tags that are proposed directly from the phone contact list, and location (where) tags which are suggested based on the cell ID you're in. Location tags can also be proposed from your contacts on pikeo. For now, the pikeo mobile application is available on Windows mobile phones. Of course, it upload pictures to pikeo.com. If you want to test it, please, let us know at "support at pikeo.com".

tags: pikeo mobile shozu zonetag flickr nokia yahoo photosharing mobilephotosharing

Pure player moves: Kodak

Kodak just unveiled its new camera (here in English, there in French), the V610, a compact 6-megapixel camera with a 10x optical zoom. The revolution resides in the fact that, according to Kodak, it is the first Bluetooth enabled camera.

But Kodak is going even further proposing its future around three themes: easy quality, easy sharing, easing archiving.

Quality - By embeding a software that can correct red eyes, povides "anti-blur" and panorama stiching, right into the camera itself, Kodak is making sure that almost anybody can become a pro photographer!
Sharing - The V610 not only has Bluetooth, but also Wi-Fi, which makes it really easy, as long as the user is close to a hotspot, to upload pictures directly to Kodakgalley.com. (no other web site of course!) Kodak also just signed a 10-year partnership with Motorola. One of the result will be to allow the users to send pictures as easily as SMS.
Archiving - Kodak is now working on face and landscape recognition softwares for fast and easy retrieving.

It doesn't mean that Kodakgallery.com (former ofoto) is the new Flickr, or even close. But manufacturers can make the market move faster, with Kodak innovations, and potentially further with mass market GPS camera, Wi-Fi enabled cameras that are open, ...

tags: kodak kodakgallery photosharing v610

Tagging on a computer: not there yet?

I have been into tagging for a while now. No need to explain the motivation, it is just a great way to have your pictures organized and it makes retrieval very easy. Like a lot of people i got introduced to mass tagging with Flickr but i quickly moved earlier in the work flow and decided to tag my pictures on my computer.
Indeed you can then tag every single picture you have, including the old ones or those you just don't put online, and in the end the tags will stay with the pictures when you upload them on any decent picture tagging website.
One problem remains though: there are not many tools that allow you to tag properly and easily, and that will use the IPTC standard (not the best, but it has the merit of existing).
I am a PC user so i really have two choices: Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Elements. iPhoto will be covered as well as it improved in its latest version.

• I began by using Picasa because it is free and so much faster to use. However tagging on Picasa is a disaster if you want to do it seriously (I am not talking about the labels here but the actual tags that get written within the picture file). There are no convenient shortcuts and you need to do too many clicks to tag a single picture... The feature is just not well designed.

• Photoshop Elements offered a much better interface thanks to drag and drop and the possibility to create categories and sub categories. However with an increasing library of tags the drag and drop becomes a little bit combersome and time consuming. Making it “check box style” would be a better way of going: you basically click on a picture to select it and then click on all the tags you want to attach to it, and that’s it. It would be much more time-effective (but not as fancy looking). And this program is just sooo slow in comparison with Picasa. As a user i have yet to understand why.

• As for iPhoto, i didn't use the latest version but a very good description is given on all forces and the double functionnality given to the tags is strange. One way you filter, the other you tag. It is not very user friendly and is defnitely bound to introduce some confusion. (We ran into similar issues when deciding how to allow people to interact with tags on pikeo, and keeping a consistant behavior ended up being the best solution).

In the end it is easier today to tag and batch tag pictures using online tools than desktop applications. Aren't these supposed to be the superior ones as far as rich interface is concerned? When will Google, Adobe and Apple really invest time in this and show faith in tagging? You can do better...

Tags:desktop tagging photo pikeo picasa photoshop iphoto web2.0 

Zooomr gets better

Back from the SFWIN event yesterday evening, I can tell a little bit more about zoomr today. Techcrunch talked about this (yet another) photo sharing site a month ago. Since then, zoomr introduced new features that are worth talking about.

First, it is now localized, meaning that it is available in 14 languages (including in French). Of course, it makes it way easier to have users from all over the planet. it also means that in some countries like in France where there is no similar product, zooomr can answer a growing user need.

Second, Kristopher Tate, the main developper, introduced Smart Sets, which are the equivalent of our Smart Albums in pikeo. What is really cool to me (but I haven't tested it yet) is the fact that, providing you tagged your pictures, you just type in a phrase like (An album of the ski season in 2005) and it will recognize the tags inside of the phrase and create the album based on those.

Finally, details like the Light box which allow you to see a large size of the picture without leaving the thumbnails page, or the integrated maps (that we also have in pikeo) are also pretty good.

Overall, I think it's a pretty good photo-sharing site even though it is really slow those days! Oh, and I also think that the name, with the three "o" make people often end up at zoomr.com, which is not that good!

tags: sfwin zooomr photosharing smartalbum smartset pikeo

A view on Yahoo! photos

We are almost in the middle of April so, like many others, i was wondering what was happening with the new Yahoo Photos that Techcrunch first talked about. It's probably just a small delay, there's nothing surprising here, but it made me look back at the presentation of the product made at demo06.
I have to say, Will Aldrich is good, the message is clear, simple and repeated several times in the few minutes they have... and overall i couldn't agree more with it:

1. Enhancing the web with the power of a desktop UI
2. Bringing tagging to the mass market
3. Increasing the importance of a user's community

These are messages we have had in the back of our heads since we began working on pikeo. And if you tried it, hopefully you saw it.

One feature i particularly like is the smart album that gets updated automatically. The plus is the fact that you can automatically add pictures from your contacts in there, "provided that everybody shares the same tag" says Will. Well it's a big "IF" and relying solely on the users to make it work is a small shortcoming.
We have had such a feature for quite a while now, with the purpose of easily sharing the trips we do together. That's why helping you tag your pictures with recommendations coming also from your contacts is a big plus for us. It is here to help you use the same tags as your community, thus making the smart album work better.

Overall though, it is great that companies like Yahoo! introduce tagging to their mass market photo service. It means the market acceptance is getting there.

Tags: pikeo photos yahoo!