Where the Cool Photos Hang Out
Remember when Flickr used to be the elite hang out of the visual digerati? By initially embracing talented photographers, Flickr developed a reputation as the place to go to check out amazing amateur and professional photography on the web. But then Yahoo! came along and encouraged users of its Photos service to migrate to Flickr, opening the site up to anyone and their vacation pictures. Has Flickr become boring and mundane? Where should we turn to now to find all the cool photos?
Flickr is still a great photo hosting platform used by a large number of amazing photographers, but cutting through the increased noise can be a chore. The six sites below will help you locate the more artistic photos out there on the web without having to wade through any photos of Aunt Millie at the beach. (NSFW warning: Some of the sites mentioned below do not censor out artistic nude photos -- as such, there may be unsafe for work content displayed on the main page.)
vi.sualize.us is something like del.icio.us for photos. The site allows users to tag, categorize, and share photos from any photo hosting site on the web. The site pops up pictures in a Javascript light box at a reduced size and encourages visitors to view the photos at their original location and in their original context (i.e., if a photo was from a blog post or news article).
Pixrat is another social bookmarking site specifically design for photographs. The India-based site lets users tag photos and organize them into albums. Users can also comment on photos or leave notes, as well as vote for photos using an up/down, Reddit-style voting system.
FreshPhotograph is a daily photo blog from the FreshArrival folks. While FreshArrival -- which is one of my favorite blogs -- is about delivering a link to one cool item or product each day, the similarly spirited FreshPhotograph posts "one amazingly cool photograph, every day." The photos come from the personal sites of professional or amateur photographers or photo sharing sites like Flickr and always link back to the artist's web site. The blog is a great way to locate unknown photographic luminaries, and their taste is excellent (in my opinion).
FFFFound! is a photo bookmarking site that displays like a group photo blog. Using a bookmarklet, users add photos they like to the site as they browse the web. FFFFound! then attempts to ascertain your taste based on the kinds of things you've added to the collection, and recommends photos you might like. I generally visit FFFFound! a couple of times each week to scour for cool stuff to titillate my image receptors.
Unlike the other sites in this round up, Deviant Art Photography actually hosts photographs. DeviantArt has long been known as a place where elite digital artists like to hang out, and many of the photographers that maintain accounts there are oozing with talent. A trip through their massive photo section can quickly become addictive and I've often found myself "wasting" hours paging through the thousands of awesome pictures housed on the site.
But what about the normal social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us? Well, most of them don't have dedicated picture sections, which makes finding cool pics a hit or miss activity that isn't the easiest undertaking. Enter PicURLs, a site that aggregates the "buzziest pics" from Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Flickr, Simpy, Furl, Boing Boing, and Wired. With all that picturey goodness, you'll be kept busy for hours.
What are you favorite sites to find cool pictures? Leave your favorites in the comments below.
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My best picture site is: http://damncoolpics.blogspot.com/. Lots of urban art photos.
Posted by: trademark registration | November 8, 2007 10:21 AM
Another amazing site that is for pros only is zenfolio.com. I use it and it is amazing! People need to check it out!
Posted by: Nature Wallpaper | November 8, 2007 10:34 AM
I didn't know Freshphotograph, I'm going to add it to my feeds ! Thanks
That's funny, I've just launched a few days ago a blog with the same purpose but with quite different tastes :
http://www.instantdes.com
Posted by: Xu | November 8, 2007 1:03 PM
sites like flikr are great to store photos so that you dint have to take up the space on your personal computer.
Posted by: levi | November 8, 2007 1:25 PM
You forgot Incredimazing:
http://incredimazing.com/
Posted by: Preston Danforth | November 8, 2007 1:59 PM
But then Yahoo! came along and encouraged users of its Photos service to migrate to Flickr, opening the site up to anyone and their vacation pictures.
Please. That isn't what happened. Flickr has always had a mix of a few good photographers, a lot of good amateurs, and all the rest of us. There's always been a lot of crap to wade through on popular tags like "me" or "home."
Flickr does a great job of highlighting great photos on their blog or through clever features like "interestingness", but they certainly didn't have a higher proportion of great photographers than any other site. And the Yahoo changeover hasn't changed that mix.
Posted by: Thomas | November 8, 2007 5:08 PM
ZOOOMR! Zooomr is like flickr if all users were pro photographers. also smugmug.
Posted by: Ben Gold | November 8, 2007 6:57 PM
Deviant Art is a good site, and aside from excellent photographers there are excellent artists (digital and traditional) there as well.
But there is a hell of a lot of worthless crap there, just like many other sites that host art or photography.
Posted by: rm | November 8, 2007 10:17 PM
Now, the question is - did all of these sites have pretty much all nude pictures before or after R/WW posted this story? I would probably enjoy them a lot more if not for that. One of my favorite sites for looking at awesome photos every day is this:
http://www.flickrleech.net/
Basically gives you all the Flickr interesting photos from the previous day (or any day you choose).
Posted by: Matt | November 9, 2007 3:20 AM
I'm a marketing manager at: http://www.panraven.com
My company's website has a library of over 30,000 photos from around the world. We are a community where anybody can make their photos and videos public, but because we are still a young company the majority of our library was generated from highly skilled photographers from around the world. All photos are tagged so that you can easily search for any location of interest.
Using a combination of your media and public media, you can create stories on our site that can be shared online or printed in professionally hard bound books.
I think you will be impressed with the consistent level of quality.
Posted by: Andy Katz | November 9, 2007 6:31 AM
You didn't mention photo.net. It's been around for a long time and the quality of pictures and the talent of the photographers taking them amazing.
Posted by: Donv69 | November 9, 2007 7:20 AM
I love http://flickrbabes.com , it's a daily dosis of the best photos of girls on flickr
Posted by: gone | November 9, 2007 7:24 AM
IMHO, fffffound has the best contents of all the bookmarking sites you mention *but* the worst interface and has the registration closed. I can't try it out, because found an invitation seems a tough task.
visualice us has pretty good contents also, but as far as I know, it was released only 3 weeks ago, so is still starting. The interface is lovely, much similar to delicious and the developers seems to pay attention to the details, which I like.
And pixrat looks ugly to me, and for what I can see has the worst contents of all three. Basically porn.
Posted by: Mark | November 9, 2007 8:38 AM
Zooomr. I wish it weren't so difficult to spell correctly. Thomas Hawk is such a good photographer, and many of its users are outside the US.
Posted by: francine hardaway | November 9, 2007 2:29 PM
May I suggest http://www.photoblogs.org/ ? :) The reference IMHO.
Posted by: Pierre | November 9, 2007 10:38 PM
Just find out: visualize.us has a very cool bookmarklet to post images
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dp9auFMpoFs
Posted by: Peter | November 10, 2007 1:08 PM
nice infos ;)
FlickrDownloader ;) great software ;)
Posted by: papuas | November 10, 2007 10:47 PM
great list!
Posted by: Jill Warner | November 11, 2007 2:52 PM