Flickr Has Lots of Competition

For a long time, it seemed as if Flickr was going to be satisfied with having an iPhone-optimized website and not a "real" app when it came to their iPhone/iPod Touch offering. That left the door open - wide open - for a number of developers to create their own Flickr tools. Do a search today for "flickr" in the App Store and you'll see a page filled with thirty-some results for alternatives to the official app. Although not all the apps are uploaders or photo browsers (some just mention "flickr" in their descriptions), many are. From Flickup to Flickr Sendr to Flickr Search and one of our personal favorites, FlickIt, the choices for interacting with Flickr from your iPhone are plenty.

But Flickr doesn't just compete with other Flickr-based apps, they also have to deal with the multi-site uploaders...which some could argue are even more useful than Flickr's own official app. For example, Pixelpipe supports uploading to social networks, micro-blogging services, photo and video sharing sites, blogs, online storage sites, and much more. It's an incredibly useful tool for anyone who shares photos on multiple sites or just feels more comfortable knowing the data is stored on more than one service in the cloud.

Why the Delay?

There have been rumors that an official app has been in development for some time, as noted by this VentureBeat article back in December 2008. Yes, 2008.

We have to wonder why Flickr decided to wait so long to develop something for the iPhone platform. The app itself isn't all that complicated and it could have flown through the app review process, so it seems to be a case of the company just not feeling it was a top priority. That's an odd business decision for a company who reported that the number one camera used on their site is the iPhone. Not to mention the fact that after releasing the iPhone-optimized site, they saw a 50% increase in mobile users year-over-year. In fact, it's not just an "odd" decision - it was a bad one.

Although we're sure the company will gain plenty of users for their app in no time - the simple app is well-designed and does a good job - it is somewhat funny that a universal search in iTunes for "flickr" today doesn't even return the official app in the top four results displayed in the "Applications" window. And considering the large number of Flickr competitors, it's possible that it never will.

In order to choose contributors, Picasa lets you access your Google contacts, and you can invite individual contacts or groups that you have already set up in Google Contacts (think: co-workers, family, etc.).

Sadly, you won't be able to use the Picasa desktop software to upload images to these albums if you are an invited contributor - only the actual owner of the album can. Also, if you use Internet Explorer, you can only upload five photos at a time.

New Desktop Features

On the desktop, Simplify Media's application now also includes a Photo Viewer, which replicates the iPhone app's functions on your desktop, including the map view. One nice feature for Mac users is that the latest version of the desktop tool also allows you to connect iPhoto to these remote libraries and view them right from within iPhoto.

Your PC as a Media Server

As Simplify Media basically turns your computer into a media server and doesn't store any data in the cloud, it is important to note that your computer needs to be running in order to use the iPhone app. This is probably the biggest drawback of Simplify Media's line-up of apps. However, this is also what makes the applications possible without running into copyright issues or making the storage unaffordable for the company.

If you just want access to all of your pictures without using a lot of space on your iPhone or iPod Touch and you don't mind paying a small monthly fee but you don't want to keep your machines running 24/7, also have a look at Phanfare's Photon app, which we liked a lot when we first reviewed it.

Note: if you are already using Simplify Media on your desktop or laptop, make sure you update to the latest version to get access to the photo features.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

You can go here to view a complete list of Expono's features. It's an impressive list, if not a little overwhelming, and you simply need to have a look for yourself. Here are a few of the main features we like:

Custom Location in Maps:

Geotagging has become a pretty popular thing to do with photographs. It's just interesting for us to see on a map where a photo was taken. It gives viewers added perspective, helps the photographer better organize their collections and could even help businesses attract customers. Expono has a feature that lets users drag a pin, place it on a map where the photo was taken and give that place a name for future reference. It's a simply but useful tool and a nice feature.

Language Translation:

Expono has not forgotten our Spanish-speaking friends and allows English-Spanish translations. The company is frantically working on translation to other languages like Danish, Russian, French and Hebrew and is actively searching for help translating other languages.

Full Quality Photo Sharing on Facebook:

Expono allows users to share full quality photos and activities and connect on Facebook. It looks pretty straightforward and easy to do:

"Simply go to Facebook Settings on Edit Services menu, press the "Connect with Facebook" button and follow the instructions. It takes 10-30 seconds!"

"After your accounts have been connected, you will be able to tag your Facebook friends on your photos like any other contacts you already have in your address book. With your Facebook friends now on Expono, you can add them to your contact groups, give them access to the photos you want them to see and tag them on your photos.

Face Tagging and Sharing to FriendFeed and Twitter:

Expono has extended its integration with Friendfeed and Twitter that allows interaction between users of those services:

"Earlier we had automatic photo uploads announcements to Friendfeed and Twitter every time you uploaded new photos to Expono. The functionality allowed our users to inform their followers and subscribers about newly uploaded photos in a innovative way. Now we have extended that to include direct sharing of public album and photos right from the Share menu, giving your subscribers and followers access to view your full quality photos with just 1 click."

Basically, you connect your Expono account with FriendFeed or Twitter, tag your friends' photos, add them to your contact groups and give them access to the photos you want them to see.

See what Expono's small but loyal group of followers are talking about on Twitter and also on FriendFeed.

Oh, did we mention Expono's context aware media RSS that allows users to enter a URL into your Wii Opera browser URL field, run it fullscreen and watch a slideshow on your TV? Don't forget authenticated RSS feeds, GPS support, photo editing, iPhoto photocasting, EXIF and IPTC support and much, much more. We also like that Expono takes your privacy very seriously.

This hungry startup (a core team of six, including Co-Founder and CEO Magnus Jonsson) means business when it says there are other exciting things in the works. Expono team member Daniel Bentes hinted at the company's interest in a developing a mobile site, similar to Flickr's new mobile site, that uses Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Bentes says, "this kind of location awareness will be the future of not only search and discovery services, but even ad-based and paid content, giving even more value to viewers and readers alike. As of now, Apple's Core Location is the prime example of this ability". He adds that the company "...would like to implement the same kind of functionality on Expono.com for the coming iPhone version. But would REALLY love to implement it on the main web version as well, enabling this functionality to an even broader audience".

Like we said, there are other sites out there that do similar things. But when you combine all these things together and they are done well (in this case they did a great job), you get a very powerful and useful tool that just may be worth forking over your hard-earned money for. If you don't want to take our word for it, check out what our friend @CleverClogs had to say about Expono over on Friendfeed. She is quite knowledgeable and discriminating about such matters. You might want to also go to the Expono Customer Support Community on Get Satisfaction to see what others are saying and to throw in your own two cents.

Be sure to read the Expono blog for even more information and follow the company's Twitter updates @expono. The service is still in Beta, but you should have no problem getting an invite if you sign up at Expono.com.

Flickr, which hosts a rapidly increasing number of photos, is increasingly using location as a means to organize photos. Earlier this year, for example, the company announced that it now hosts over 100 million geotagged photos and in order to make this data more accessible, Flickr also unveiled a new 'nearby' page on its web site, which displays a map with images that were taken close to another photo.

Flickr's mobile site is also becoming an increasingly valuable asset to the company. Last December, Flickr announced that traffic to the mobile site had increased by more than 50% over the last year, and it has made various smaller updates to the site since then. As smartphones become increasingly better at taking pictures and surfing the web, it is good to see that Flickr is bringing these two worlds together nicely on its mobile site.

As we reported last week, Photobucket is highly dependent on MySpace for a large share of its traffic. Keeping this in mind, it makes perfect sense for Photobucket to try to reach out to a wider audience across the Internet by giving its users more and easier options to share their content.

Making Sharing Easier

While posting from Photobucket is now significantly easier, it should be noted that this is not a solution that auto-posts your images directly to a selection of different social sites. You still have to individually post your images to every site separately, so this is not a replacement for services like Tarpipe or Pixelpipe.

Mobile Traffic Up

In its announcement, Photobucket also points out that traffic to its mobile site tripled during 2008 and continues to grow. Given that Photobucket's users trend towards being younger than those of other photo sharing sites, this makes perfect sense, but it is also a good indicator that there is still a lot of growth left in the mobile photo sharing market..

Is This Enough to Gain Back Market Share?

Overall, these updates, which also include a new 'live slideshow' feature, look like they are putting Photobucket in the right direction. The company has lost a large amount of market share in the last few months and is under a lot of pressure from Yahoo's Flickr. These new features will allow it to become more visible outside of MySpace, though we will have to see if this is enough to make a difference in the long run.

Declining Traffic from MySpace

Last July, Photobucket still got 54% of its traffic from MySpace, but last month, that number had declined to 38%. In the U.S., MySpace has now been surpassed by Facebook as the most popular social network and given how strongly Photobucket is tied to the fortunes of MySpace, we can only assume that this negative trend will continue for Photobucket.

According to Hitwise, neither Flickr nor Google's Picasa (the number two and three in the market) get more than 6% of their traffic from social networks - instead, these services tend to rely more on traffic from search engines.

One Photo per Day

As you would expect, you can upload your photos directly to the service, or you can send them to a personalized momentile email address. Whenever you upload a new photo, you can add a short message that will then be sent out to your followers (momentile calls them 'stalkers') by SMS, Twitter, or email. However, momentile stresses that this is only meant to inform your followers about a new photo upload and should not be confused with tagging or adding a caption to a photo. Indeed, you can't add captions to a photo yourself - only your followers can add these.

You can upload more than one picture per day, by the way, but momentile enforces its one-picture-per-day rule and will automatically discard the older picture. Every day, you have until midnight to update your picture. That constraint, of course, is the focus of the service and it does make you think twice about which picture you want to choose to represent a given day.

Not a Social Network

Momentile insists that it is not a social network, but it does have a number of social features like following other users or saving other users' photos in your own 'stash.'

365

In a way, momentile codifies the 365 meme that is pretty popular on Flickr right now into one coherent app, with a focus on the mobile aspects of sharing and taking these pictures.

Overall, momentile looks like a fun and interesting app. It does have some minor usability problems, but the core idea behind the service is pretty cool. A few weeks ago, the cool kid on the blog was Plinky, a web app that asked you a different question every day. In some ways, momentile is a logical extension of that idea and it will be interesting to see how momentile's users decide to utilize the service in the long run.

Invites

Momentile is still in private alpha testing, but we have ten invites to give away for now - just send an email to 'momentile AT frederic.otherinbox.com' and we will get one to you ASAP.

While a lot of members of the Astrometry group use high-end telescopes and cameras, the Astrometry.net solver can also analyze images from consumer-level digital cameras.

While just being able to automatically analyze and catalog these images is pretty cool already, every description also contains a link that displays the image in Microsoft's WordWide Telescope.

Astronomy is one of those few scientific disciplines where dedicated amateurs can still make major discoveries and this is definitely one of the cooler applications of Flickr's API that we have seen in a long time.

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.

At its core, Photon is the easiest way to browse through all of your photo albums on the iPhone. Thanks to the Phanfare desktop app and plugins for most of the popular desktop photo apps, you can upload all your pictures to the service. Free accounts come with 1GB of space, while unlimited accounts cost $55 a year. Phanfare also offers a wide array of photo printing services.

Features

Photon's interface is similar to that of Apple's own Photo app for the iPhone, but Phanfare's app comes with a number of crucial new features - besides the obvious advantage of being able to access all of your pictures from the phone. The built-in camera app, for example, comes with an image stabilization feature, as well as a self timer.

In addition, you can apply effects like grayscale, sepia, or auto levels to your pictures. For slideshows, you can upload your own music to Phanfare, but you have to do so through the company's website. The app also lets you crop your pictures and add captions to your images.

Of course, you can also publish new galleries to your public Phanfare sites, and invite friends and family to view your new pictures online.

Because the app caches your images on the phone, most of Photon's features even work when you are offline. You can choose how much disk space on the phone you want to dedicate to the cache.

One feature we did miss from the app was the ability to zoom into your pictures, though Andrew Erlichson, Phanfare's CEO, tells us that this will be included in the next release of the app, which should be available within the next four weeks.

Import

Phanfare's desktop app is also quite well thought out,  though it doesn't quite match the polish of the company's iPhone app. It does, however, present the easiest way to batch-upload your photos to Phanfare. After that, you can use plugins for iPhoto, Picasa, and a number of other services to upload your pictures instead. You can also import your images from Snapfish, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, and SmugMug.

Verdict

Phanfare's Photon is currently the best photo sharing and photo management app on the iPhone. It is important to note that Photon puts less emphasis on social feature than other services like Radar, which we reviewed last week. Instead, it concentrates mostly on giving you easy access to all of your photos, while also providing you with the option to share them with your friends.

Phanfare's CEO Andrew Erlichson strongly believes that the iPhone and other smartphones will disrupt the traditional point-and-shoot photo camera market in the long run and will allow new players like Apple to get a foot into this market. This app is Phanfare's first step in following the market in this direction by marrying the iPhone's camera feature with a very capable cloud storage and photo sharing service.

Overall, the PhotoPeach site feels very straightforward, as it just focuses on the essentials of creating an online slideshow. PhotoPeach only features two themes for its slideshow, a 'spiral view' and a standard slideshow view with zooming images. A small library of sound effects that you can add to your captions and a selection of background music round out PhotoPeach's core feature set.

Thanks to a major update to PhotoPeach that was released yesterday, you can now also embed your slideshows on your blog, as well as on Facebook and MySpace. Of course, PhotoPeach also provides you with a link to your slideshow on the company's servers. In addition, the company has introduced a new Java uploader, and you can import your photos from Flickr, Picasa, or Facebook as well.

There was only one feature that we didn't like on PhotoPeach. While you can use PhotoPeach's own music library, you can also embed music from YouTube videos. This is a great idea, but these videos appear in a little window at the bottom of your embed, which is not only incredibly distracting, but it also blocks some of the navigation features of the embed.

Easy and Straightforward

PhotoPeach is one of those sites that don't stand out because of their amazing features, but simply because they do one task, and they do it very well. If you want to embed a slideshow into you blog post, MySpace, or Facebook page, and you don't care for fancy effects, then PhotoPeach is one of the best tools we have seen for doing this lately.

Radar, at its core, is a photo sharing community that is not unlike Yahoo's Flickr, though Radar puts a stronger focus on the community aspects of the service than on the pictures themselves, which makes sense, given that most of the content on the site was taken with camera phones.

Because of this, Radar's web service and iPhone app emphasize communication between users. You can, of course, leave public comments on every picture, but you can also send private messages to other users.

Radar features a good set of privacy controls, which allow you to set your pictures to be private, or to make them visible to all of Radar's users and the rest of the Internet. Radar also provides you with a widget that lets you display your images on your own website.

It Just Works

What makes Radar's iPhone application special is that it provides you with an amazing amount of features (including some basic editing functions for your pictures), without overwhelming the interface. Every picture, for example, comes with statistics about how often it has been seen, liked, and commented on.

Using the application is a lot of fun because everything pretty much works the way you would expect it to. When you email pictures, for example, Radar's app nicely integrates with your iPhone contacts. Double-click on a picture and you get the full-screen version.

As you would expect from a mobile photo sharing application, you can easily upload your pictures to Radar's web service and see the latest updates from your friends.

One feature we do miss on Radar's site, however, is RSS feeds. While Radar can send out a message to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can't import a feed with your pictures to FriendFeed or other social media services. Radar, however, says that it is planning to integrate its service with more platforms in the near future.

Verdict

We got a chance to test Radar's iPhone app over the last few weeks and really enjoyed the experience. The Radar community is still small, but also very lively and encouraging. Radar, of course, is entering a very crowded market, but they may just have found the right niche to thrive in.

Features

'Moments,' as thisMoment calls your updates, appear in a side-scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the screen. They can include multiple photos and videos, which you can import from Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also upload pictures and videos directly to thisMoment.

The central element for browsing thisMoment is the timeline, which consists of a series of bars at the top of the page. You can assign a specific importance to different 'moments', which is then represented by the height of the bar in your timeline. Different types of events also come with different colors. This is a surprisingly elegant way of browsing through individual timelines, but it also makes finding specific events relatively hard, has the timelines don't actually have dates on them.

As you would expect from a social site, you can follow other users, and send messages to your friends and family members on the service.

Geared Towards the Mainstream

ThisMoment is clearly geared towards a mainstream audience. It does have the ability to send updates to your Twitter account, but there are no embeddable widgets or other export functions for your photos or videos. For the most parts, thisMoment is a closed off silo. There is also no way to send images or videos to it from outside of the service. You can't email a picture to thisMoment, for example, and have it appear in your timeline.

Verdict: Pretty, Fun, But Limited

Most users won't mind (and may even appreciate) that the service lives in a walled garden. The site is definitely a great place for sharing updates about your kids or your travels, and thisMoment's user interface is very pretty, though sometimes to the detriment of its functionality. Why, for example, is the actual content relegated to the bottom half of the screen, even when browsing through the photos and videos of an event?

Advanced users will probably want more functionality than thisMoment currently offers. We would like to see RSS feeds from thisMoment, for example, so that we could broadcast our updates to FriendFeed or other services besides Twitter.

Post to 60 Different Services

We first reviewed Pixelpipe last August when it was still in private beta, but by now, the site has opened up to the public and added a massive amount of new features. While the site itself still looks roughly the same, Pixelpipe has added support for dozens of new services since its launch. You can post images and videos to all the prominent video and photo sharing sites, including Youtube, Vimeo, kyte, SmugMug, flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Photobucket. Pixelpipe also lets you post photos to most popular blogging platforms.

Post PDF Files to Twitter

Yesterday, Pixelpipe launched a new feature that lets you posts links to videos, photos, PDF files, or any other document to text-only micro-blogging service like Twitter, Rejaw, FriendFeed, or identi.ca. Pixelpipe will simply add a link to the document to your text messages and the files will be hosted on Pixelpipe's Amazon S3 storage.

Even if Pixelpipe's internal video player and document viewer isn't compatible with a file, it will still give you a link to download the document. The upload limit is 200 megabytes. Brett Butterfield, Pixelpipe's founder and CEO, tells us that he plans to add support for a few more micro-blogging services in the near future.

Post from Anywhere

One of our favorite features of Pixelpipe is that the company has developed plugins for almost every conceivable desktop application for Mac, Llinux, and Windows PCs. You can post videos from Windows Movie Maker, photos from iPhoto, Live Gallery, or Picasa, and when all else fails, you can also just email your media files to a your personal Pixelpipe address. For mobile use, Pixelpipe provides applications for the iPhone, Android, and Nokia N Series phones.

Power users can also create routing tags (think: @friendfeed or @picasa), which allow you to selectively send items to a specific service or a group of services.

Verdict

The latest round of updates have turned Pixelpipe into an even more versatile tool. Now, sharing a PDF file with your Twitter friends is as easy as emailing it to your secret Pixelpipe address. If you often send the same document to a variety of services (or if you just want to send a picture from your phone to Twitter, but also keep a copy on Flickr), Pixelpipe is definitely worth trying.