We have seen our fair share of photo sharing tools lately, but Troovi sets itself apart from the competition by offering an anonymous, fast, and easy to use photo sharing service in an exceptionally well designed package. Thanks to its integration with a wide range of other social media services, you can use Troovi to quickly post links to your pictures to Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed. Because you can upload your photos anonymously, it only takes four mouse clicks to start an album and add your first picture.]]>
Features and Pricing
To get started, just head to Troovi, choose the pictures you want to put into your album, and click on 'upload.' The moment you go to the site, Troovi creates a new URL for your album, so you just have to copy and paste that address to share your album, or use the the bookmark feature to send the album to a large selection of social media and bookmarking services. Among others, Troovi supports posting to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Digg, and Mister Wong.
The free version of Troovi allows you to upload up to 100 pictures per album and your albums expire after 30 days of inactivity.
To monetize the service, Troovi has chosen an interesting freemium model. where you can buy 'premium collections' for $1.49 per album (with significant discounts when you buy packs of 5, 10, or 25 albums). Premium collections can hold an unlimited amount of photos and won't feature any advertising, though they will expire after 90 days of inactivity.
The emphasis here is clearly on the actual exchange of photos and not on creating a permanent backup of your photo collection.
Share and Download
While Troovi's core features are straightforward and extremely easy to use, it also has a nice set of additional features like RSS feeds and usage statistics for every album (views, visits, downloads).
In addition, Troovi allows you to download the full sized version of any shared picture. Complete albums can be downloaded as compressed .zip files.
All of these features are available to both anonymous users and registered users. Registered users, however, also also get additional features to manage their collections.
Verdict
In terms of features and ease of use, the Piratebay's BayImg and ImageShack look like Troovi's closest competitors, but both don't come close to Troovi's functionality.
Just like PhotoPeach, which we featured last week, Troovi focuses on doing one thing, and it does it exceptionally well. It only takes four mouse clicks to set up an album and upload your first picture, something that few other services can rival.
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