Webware

Over Thanksgiving break I got to field a lot of strange tech questions from friends and family. One of the most frequent was what photo services were worth using and why. Nearly everyone has a digital camera now, and there's no limit to the number of places designed to share your shots online. It's no secret I'm an unabashed Flickr user, and despite writing a newbies' guide on the service, even I'm a little hesitant of using it for honest to goodness photo backup (more on that later). Like any critic, I'm peeved by some aspects of the service--especially some of the perks that even a pro membership can't offer. I've put together of five things I love about the service, and five I loathe.

Love

Clear Creative Commons licensing tools. Savvy uploaders can set Creative Commons licensing restrictions on any of their shots, both individually and in batches. By default, you can also choose what kind of licensing you want any of your shots to have, which makes it easy if you're a professional photographer to limit what people can do with them. In addition to giving you tools to tweak photo licensing, Flickr also provides fairly simple explanations of each license type, along with links to learn more. Also, photos that have been given more restrictive licensing can't be downloaded, making it easier to keep control of your intellectual property.

Easy uploading tools. Flickr's latest effort to make photos easier to upload to the Web is a big step up from their previous iteration. We took a look at the new version in August and came away impressed. Well, it's still worth using one of the software plug-ins to get right-click mousing access for contextual uploading on any photos from your desktop, the new Web uploader is really great for updating a ton of shots all at once while away from your home machine.

The API. Flickr's API has allowed for a ton of third party applications and services for both personal and communal use of photos. From business cards to coffee mugs, a hosted photo is more useful when you can do more with it than a quick glance.

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Admist some of last week's hullaballoo regarding Flickr's censorship on some of the photos of its German language users, it's timely that the creators of The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, have recently launched their own censorship-free image-sharing service called BAYIMG. It's similar to other image-hosting services like ImageShack, TinyPic, and DivShare, with one exception--the only person who's able to remove uploaded photos is you. That is, assuming you don't forget the secret removal access code you picked when uploading.

Despite this well-advertised stance on free speech, the service claims that if contacted by the law, it will take down illegal photos, which means no sneaky shots of unreleased operating systems, or anything else that's under copyright law. However, it's unclear whether these laws are by local country, or Sweden.

Like other modern photo-hosting sites, BAYIMG employs tags to let users sort through shots, but that's about as far as the user friendliness goes. It's basically been designed as a way to send your friend a photo with a URL. There's no user login system to keep track of uploaded shots, and no way to keep track of viewing statistics. There's also not a way to browse or search for shots besides grouping other people's photos by their tags.

Despite these shortcomings, BAYIMG is getting quite a bit of attention for its stance on free speech and censorship. It's also pretty generous with its file formats, with compatibility for 140 different types of image files, and a limit of 100MB per upload.

I do find it depressing censorship has reached such a level that mainstream photo hosting sites don't, and seemingly can't, offer censorship-free service. Time will tell how long BAYIMG sticks around before being shut down or sued out of existence. If it's anything like The Pirate Bay, it should be fun to watch.

Note: since many of the images on BAYIMG may be intentionally mis-tagged (or random), you're bound to run across potentially objectionable content. If you're perusing the site while at work, or if you get offended easily, you may want to steer clear.

[via Download Squad via TorrentFreak]

XMG Image launched its public beta yesterday. The photo hosting and editing service gives you 200MB of free storage, with a bigger pro plan on the way. XMG Image offers the standard fare of individual and batch photo uploading, but adds extensive album and tag creation and management. There's also customized sharing for forums, Web sites, and blogs.

What differentiates XMG Image from other photo hosting sites is its use of new Web technologies like Ajax. Ajax pop-up dialogs are quickly overtaking regular old pop-up messages on sites, and XMG is no exception as nearly all the command options are implemented this way.

XMG Image is still a little early in development, but it's got some neat features--like the ability to see both the before and after effects of editing an image using some of the built-in filters. You also can sort and organize your albums by dragging and dropping. You can do this in Flickr too, but XMG is a bit speedier. Keep an eye on this one.

See also Picnik.

[Found on Museum of Modern Betas]

Flickr member Hamad Darwish is now a part of computing history, with two of his photographs included in Windows Vista. Usually Microsoft doesn't approach people with (we're assuming) large checks unless they're vying for a name or settling a lawsuit, but Darwish's work wowed Microsoft so much they hired him for a photo shoot.

Apparently there are three more images from Flickr users shipping with Vista, along with a few from Microsoft employees, too.

This is a cool use of services like Flickr. While Corbis, iStockPhoto, and Getty Images are all a hotbed for finding good wallpaper material, Flickr and other photo hosting services are a great place to find budding photographers who likely will be eager to have their work showcased and purchased.

[Found on Flickr blog]