When browsing through websites we see hundreds of images a day that we think are cool. Some of us may download these images to our desktop. Others may bookmark them in their browser or add them to their Flickr account. However, as the web changes and we look for more useful ways to manage our interests, services are popping up that manage our interests for us. Here's a look at 3 neat sites to save images to and share with friends.
Vi.sualize.us is a great social bookmarking service for images. You can think of it as the Delicious for images. A place where the cool photos hang out. If you head to their homepage, you'll see a ton of great images that users of the service have recently added. From fashion to architecture, you'll have a blast going through the archives of users on vi.sualize.us. We recommend using their Firefox plugin to bookmark images whenever you'd like by simply right-clicking on an image to save it. You can also embed your latest bookmarked images on your blog or subscribe to a friend's RSS feed for vi.sualize.us.
Ffffound! was one of the first image bookmarking services to hit the scene. With a fantastic selection of images to browse through, the only downside to this service is that it's invitation only. A bookmarklet and IE extension are provided to make it easier for users to bookmark images to their Ffffound account. A neat twist that this service has is that the more images you bookmark, the more the service will recommend personalized images for your viewing pleasure for a more dynamic experience.
We Heart It appears to be more of a Ffffound! clone with a better user interface. Still, the service is pretty appealing with great images, social tagging, and commenting, which Ffffound! happens to lacks. We Heart It provides a bookmarklet for saving images and videos from Vimeo or Youtube. However, this bookmarklet does not work in IE.
Bookmarking is going further than we might have originally expected. We can now bookmark images, links, save webpages just the way we found them and tons more. I'd love to see these sites incorporate the ability to upload photos that we take from our cellphones. After all, those are images too. Let us know what you think the next step for bookmarking will be. With We Heart It's ability to bookmark videos, what will we see next?
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Most of the saved and popular images are come-ons for poster companies and websites. The images are just ads, basically. Interesting for one visit, then, beh.
Posted by: Beh | August 3, 2008 10:16 AM
Great sites, three of them!
My 2c with weheartit: I've been using wehearit for almost three months, and when at the beginning I have no complaints but lack of some needed features imho, lately using it is a pain in the ass. Speed sucks, thumbnails got black most of the times and the bookmarklet is so sloowly. The last post in the blog is talking about server issues, for more than a month ago. I think the guy give up with it, or at least, he's not taking it seriously (I still have two unanswered mails). Truth is, I don't care the reason, but I need a bookmarking site for my job (I'm graphic designer), and now I know I can't trust wehearit as service.
A ffffound invite would be nice, meanwhile I'm testing vi.sualize.us. Until I test it during some time I'm not going with it seriously. Fool me twice...
Just my2c ;)
Posted by: Ian | August 3, 2008 11:06 AM
Friendfeed integration, please.
Posted by: Pete Delucchi
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August 3, 2008 11:24 AM
Thanks for the update. Haven't tried any yet...
Posted by: Mitchell Tsai
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August 3, 2008 11:28 AM
It would be much better if Delicious would build in this capability as well. If I could right-click on any image and "save to delicious" like I can a link then that would be great. In delicious, I should then be able to look at all bookmarks saved that are images. Instead of having them in the same listing as the links, delicious would automatically separate any item ending with an image format extension (.jpg, .tiff, .gif, etc) and then provide a section of my page (probably in a tab at the top) that would "images".
Posted by: Govy | August 3, 2008 11:42 AM
Thanks for sharring... Great collection of sites. Before now I had used StumbleUpon for bookmarking photos :)
Posted by: Mihalcea Razvan | August 3, 2008 12:56 PM
Who needs 3 Cool Sites to Bookmark Your Favorite Images on the Web??
Why not just use delicious, or stumbleupon, or you browser?
Or any of the 200 accounts that a poor web2.0 user already has to manage?
The answer would be: because they offer some extra features. Most importantly, social stuff ( sharing, tagging ) and a specialized user interface.
The social features, however, are available in almost any bookmarking service. It's the UI that makes these sites better for tagging images.
Actually, this is true for many different things. When bookmarking places ( geo tagging ) becomes a regular practice ( just around the corner with the new iPhone ), we will see new sites that will offer a better UI for bookmarking / sharing places.
And any combinations of sharable items might also create the need for specialized interfaces: images + places, places + websites, places + music + notes + events, etc.
So, you can see where this is going. We will have a million sites with weird names, that are actually doing the very same thing, only wrapped differently.
But people can only handle so much identity / access fragmentation and will eventually move to a unifying concept, or platform. The Semantic Web can help here, but only as a unifying data model and integration framework. We're still missing some pieces. The last mile.
My 2 cents is that generic knowledge management platforms ( like Twine ) will need to grow some sort of integrated "mashup editors" to cope with the UI specialization issue.
Eventually, we will start seeing the web through these agents, and the integration will happen on the back, not by using our keyboards and password managers.
Mashups people. You will eventually create and share your disposable UIs. They will be decoupled from data and identity and fed by your knowledge agents ( like Twine ).
Will they teach some sort of visual programming in school someday?
PERSONAL AGENT PROGRAMMING 101
Posted by: Aldo Bucchi | August 3, 2008 3:29 PM
Sweet websites!!!
Posted by: Rushil Muggan | August 3, 2008 3:35 PM
I never thought of bookmarking images, but I can see how neat it would be to share some really interesting images. Social bookmarking is certainly expanding to new horizons!
Posted by: Social Bookmarks | August 3, 2008 7:30 PM
Cool... I like these sites too.
Posted by: United Voices | August 3, 2008 10:05 PM
I would really like an invite to ffffound. I've been a fan of that site forever and haven't run across anyone with an account. Please, send me one if you have an extra... superphly@gmail.com
Thx
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Posted by: Alice | August 3, 2008 10:36 PM
I love these sites. Thank you for the insight. Very helpful
Thanks
Jay
Cyber Monday
Posted by: Jay Stevens | August 3, 2008 11:39 PM
Nice image bookmarks site
Posted by: shinesolar | August 4, 2008 12:06 AM
I love those websites but... We can't really use FFFFOUND! because it's an invitation-only service: you must be invited by someone to bookmark pictures. So if someone could give me an invite, it would be very nice! Send it to my nickname at google mail. Thanks!
Posted by: pickupjojo | August 4, 2008 5:17 AM
Good website for sharing.
Thanks
http://www.toputop.com
Posted by: kiran voleti | August 4, 2008 7:11 AM
thanks for this blog
Posted by: wed-gan | August 5, 2008 12:02 AM
If you're after quick access to your favourite websites, then http://pageracks.com is the ideal homepage that you want to set for your browser.
Posted by: page rack | August 5, 2008 12:52 AM
Okay the all singing & dancing teche stuff is not included but I love this site http://www.photographiclibraries.com as a basic simple quality resource, The Photo Archive / Historic Image collections are the best around. Just good to find a basic says what it does on the tin resource
Posted by: Jonathan | August 5, 2008 1:22 AM
I keep getting 'page error' messages for the fffound website.
Posted by: Monique | August 5, 2008 10:16 AM
For image bookmarking there's also Photoree: http://www.photoree.com
Posted by: Daniel | August 14, 2008 11:33 AM
Looks good, till now I was only using sxc.hu and istock. Thanks
Posted by: projectgrafix | August 16, 2008 2:09 AM
There's also http://imgfave.com (built on the laconi.ca microblogging software)
Posted by: Gabe | August 25, 2008 11:11 PM
Unfortunately, there aren't too many photo bookmarking sites. vi.sualize.us is great and looks.
There's also http://www.myfillet.com/
It looks like it's kind of new. The design is not great, and the UI to add bookmarks are a little quirky to me now. I can bookmark images that exist outside of myfillet, but I can't bookmark images already on the site, which is a minus for me.
But it looks like should be a great site in time to come when the usual Web 2.0 features (voting, internal bookmarking) are implemented. Seems to have a focus on travel, places, and on Japanese celebrities.
Posted by: Ryan | August 31, 2008 5:48 PM