Sunday, July 1, 2012

Online photo hosting: a peek into one of the worst designed concepts at the moment

Seeing as though it's the main reason sites like Facebook are as popular as they are, that there would be a myriad of wonderful choices in the web photo hosting world. Let me tell you, there are not.

To me, one of the biggest issues that ALMOST EVERYONE has, is a complete lack of true organization. This manifests itself mainly through the lack of any "folder within a folder" options (Skydrive now finally has this option). NONE of the online hosting sites offer this! Why is this important? Well, let's say I want to have a folder that is for photos of my Family. Cool! But how about I have the option to ORGANIZE the photos inside that folder, according to events? How could one do that, you might ask...why, by having the option to create SEPARATE folders inside the main FAMILY folder. Very simple, cut and dry. You might argue that some sites like Flickr let you use TAGS on your photographs, and that you could sort your photographs that way...but there are two issues with that argument: 1) I shouldn't be denied the option, especially since 2) There is no clean way to easy organize subsections of photos using tags on any website.

And speaking of organization...most of the websites seem to favor Facebooks bullshit assertation that what matters is what just happened...namely, that organization will be base solely on a matter of WHEN something was uploaded, not anything of the users discretion. Flickr falls into this too, where if you go to look at my SETS they show up in reverse chronological order, not an order in which I deem to be useful.

While I understand that there are a lot of disorganized people out there, this lack of an option to have a clean archive of your photos online is not helping the matter at all.

Another big issue with these sites is the lack of vanity URLS, which makes it harder to share these things. On facebook you can direct users to your profile with a vanity url, but not one for individual albums. Instead, you get some random bullshit ass # that's 20+ characters long. Ease of use in this case, is eschewed in favor of poorly thought out url schemes.

I think I'm going to test out Skydrive for now, for my bulk photo uploading needs. Here are some notes on why i didn't like the others:

Facebook: bad album organization, too many ads in the new photo viewer
Flickr: not good for large sets since it's set up more like a gallery for individual photos. Poor album organization
Google Plus: good image viewer and album views, but album organization itself is poor, and Picasa Web Albums is a huge mess. No vanity url
Skydrive: Some cool features, including album in an album. Photo viewer is pretty good. Only real complaint so far: no way to leave a comment on the photos.

 

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