RobsHouse.net

I recently had the opportunity to do a little bit of field research to see what kind of image upload technologies various sites were using. To investigate I signed up for free accounts at three sitew which were largely unfamiliar to me and explored some of their offerings, including whether or not they had desktop clients for uploading content to the site. I looked at webshots.com, snapfish.com and flickr.com. Here are some of the results of my investigation.

Webshots.com

Start by downloading a client application for Windows or Mac. Download is 2.2 MB.

License snippett:

“The Webshots images cannot be used outside of the Webshots software, and are for personal screen saver and desktop wallpaper use only. Exporting the Webshots images into ANY OTHER SOFTWARE product is expressly prohibited. No other distribution of the Webshots images is authorized.”

Uploading images requires making a user account. Sign-up form asks for username, password, email, first name and date of birth.

Annoyingly, robertDouglass was already taken.

Making the first photo album required that I confirm my email address by clicking a hyperlink sent to me in an email.

There was a list of topics, none of which really seemed appealing to me since I hadn’t even decided what to upload yet. Oops, topics are required… so bite the bullet - Seasons, Spring - general. Very helpful, I’m sure.

The website offered basic no-frills http upload, one image at a time.

There were opportunities to buy prints and other products based on my photos on every screen.

Signing on to the site via the desktop client required separate authentication. My album showed up nicely as the starting point after logging in.

Selecting images to upload via the desktop client was a little akward as the file selection window couldn’t be resized and I prefer to look at my folders in thumbnail view when selecting photos. It did allow me to select multiple photos, however, and took me straight to a wizzard to prepare each one for upload.

All done, ready to upload! Oops, not quite - must select the storage size. I guess this is because each member has limited space on the server. How much is determined by whether or not you are willing to pay money. Ok, so make’m small.

Upload must be FTP as there was an accurate status indicator and the upload was very fast. Uploading went smoothly,

The client also allows you to upload all of the images in a folder. Very handy.

Snapfish.com

Getting started takes you right away to a registration screen. First name, last name, email, password and acceptance of the user agreement are required.

License snippett:
“In order for us to make your photos available to you and your invitees, as well as to use images to offer you our special variety of online services, we need the rights to make use of all Content on the Service (in accordance with and subject to these Terms, of course). Accordingly, as a condition to your Membership, you hereby grant Snapfish a perpetual, universal, nonexclusive right to copy, display, modify, transmit, make derivative works of and distribute any Content transmitted or provided to the Service by you, solely for the purpose of providing the Service.”

The upload screen featured 12 file upload forms. Very cool was a feature that allows you to preview the images you’ve chosen in a javascript popup window before you upload them. I’ll have to do some research and see how they did that! Very crafty.

Upload is done via http with no progress indicator, only an animated gif.

Snapfish also allows you to email your photos as attachments. It uses the from: address in the mail to authenticate and promises that your photos will be there for you next time you log in.

Hidden in a text link at the bottom of screen is a download for a desktop client which can also upload photos to Snapfish, among other things. Disconcertingly, installing this program created folders for slideshows and downloaded 10 MB of something from the Snapfish server, including the photos which I had just uploaded.

The application, upon launching, goes into full-screen mode (meaning the windows toolbar and start button go away). Clicking the resize button at the top right does not, as one would expect, resize the application, but rather switches to VGA mode so that everything looks horribly ugly on my high-res monitor. I was unable to find where to upload photos with this application so I quit.

When I went to see what it had downloaded in my Demo Album I found six stock landscape photos that I never asked for, not the photos that I had previously uploaded as assumed above. I know they’re trying to be nice, but it borders on evil and falls squarely within ill-conceived.

Flickr.com

License snippet:
“We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Flickr service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any private images you have stored in the system. However, by setting your uploaded images as “public”, you agree to allow other Flickr users to view and share your images and you therefore agree to allow us to display and store them.”

Flickr’s upload screen consists of 6 http file upload forms, a text field to “tag” all of the photos, the option to make the photos public or private, and indicator of how much (in %) of your bandwidth you have used (10 MB per month for the free service, measured in throughput, not storage space), and the upload button. Uploading takes place while looking at the customary animated gif.

After the photos are on the server you have the chance to give them descriptions and captions, as well as update your tags for the individual photos.

Flickr offers an impressive set of tools to help you get your photos onto the site.

1) a Flickr Uploader client for either Windows or Mac
2) an iPhoto plugin for Mac OS X
3) an extension to Windows Explorer (not to be confused with Internet Explorer) which allows you to publish to Flickr directly from your filesystem
4) and a “Send to Flickr” Bookmarklet for your browser which allows you to send any picture you are looking at on the web to Flickr.

The Flickr Uploader is a sleek, uncomplicated and lightweight desktop application. It installs fast and when started, immediately asks you for authentication to make a connection to the flickr.com site. After loggin on, there are only two options - real simplicity! You can either click the green plus to select files from your filesystem using a (properly sized) file explorer, or you can simply drag-and-drop files into the application window. If that isn’t easy enough, you can also right-click on any image on your file system and choose the option “Send to Flickr…” Cool!

After selecting your files the application allows you to set the same options (tags, visibility) as the web interface.

Back on the Flickr site, I looked more closely at one of the photos I’d uploaded. Delighted, I discovered a “Blog This” button. I was given a list of popular blogging software which did not include Drupal but did include BloggerAPI, which Drupal supports. I then entered the API endpoint, which is any Drupal site where I have a user account and which has the blogapi.module turned on. In this case I decided to post to NowPublic.com, so the URL was http://www.robshouse.net/xmlrpc.php. It worked like a charm, with my image appearing on my personal blog (it’s since been erased). One potential pitfall here is that it was published with the default content filter, “filtered html”, and the tags were therefore stripped and it did not appear at first. Changing the content filter of the post to “full html” fixed this. Alternatively, one could increase the number of tags the filtered html allows to include all that Flickr emloys to make the blog.

Flickr is really great! I’m sorry that I’ve taken this long to really look at it.