Facebook is one of the most popular photo hosts on the Web, but when it comes time to get your shots off the service it's also one of the worst at providing tools to do the job.
A solution called simply "Get my tagged pics" does the heavy lifting for at least some of your shots, or rather shots of you. Any pictures that are tagged with your name gets grouped together into sets of 10, which you can pull down to your hard drive as a zip file.
The system is not entirely perfect. For instance, if you're looking to archive the 300 or more shots of yourself that have been accumulating over the past several years this is a tedious system. Also, the shots the application grabs are full size for Facebook, but not the original quality of the shot. Facebook squishes them down for the sake of page load and storage, and as a result you can't enjoy some of the full-quality goodness of the original copy. Still, it's better than going through your photos and saving them one-at-a-time.
Having had a lack of similar options on photo host Flickr, and with no official support for FTP backup, many developers have created archival tools that leverage the service's API. The same ecosystem has been noticeably absent from Facebook, which in the case of an eventual move to another service, could mean leaving your photos behind.
[via DownloadSquad]
Get my tagged pics lets you grab up to 10 shots at a time of photos that have been tagged with you.
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I'm always on the lookout for new ways to host images for quick and dirty sharing. Worth checking out is Photie, which is an incredibly simple photo host. It's light on features, but offers unlimited storage and file sizes (great for people with 14 megapixel SLRs), along with generous sharing options both for downloading shots and hosting on external sites and social networks.
What might be its killer feature, however, is that it gives you a detailed listing of when and where your photos have been viewed. It's something you find on YouTube and Viddler for videos, which can make tracking the buzz of a certain shot more fun for the creator. Many photo services simply give you a view count, which isn't nearly as useful.
While the tracking is great, the service is not without its small annoyances. Thumbnail previews are slow to load, and tags can only be added to shots one at a time. Users of Flickr will yearn for more.
Photie isn't all that different from other photo hosts, but the layout is clean and free of ads, and there are simple ways to share your shots in all manner of sizes. (click to enlarge)
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DPhoto is a photo-hosting and sharing service that uses a Flash interface for both organizing and sharing photos. It's no Flickr-killer in terms of price or community features, but it's got a really easy to use uploader, and the slide shows look great. Give it a look if you want to make a cool-looking slide show or gallery with a few of your photos.
Adding your shots to DPhoto is very user friendly. The uploader tool lets you pick out your photos one at a time or select entire folders on your hard drive. There's also a custom e-mail address that lets you send pictures from your phone.
The free version of DPhoto is limited to 100 photos, and also limits individual file size to 3MB, which is about the size of most people's photos, assuming they're shooting in something around the 5-megapixel range. DPhoto charges $2 a month to upgrade to their Lite account (and $7 for Pro), which is on the steep side. Both premium-level accounts net you the option to upload more shots. The Pro level account increases the cap on individual photo-file uploads from 3MB to 20MB, and lets users download entire photo albums as .ZIP files, which is handy if you intend on using DPhoto as a business tool.
I can't wholly recommend using DPhoto over some of the more established photo-hosting services, especially since at $84 a year, the Pro subscription is a hard sell over typical mainstream photo services (Flickr, Fotki, SmugMug) that come in at about $25 to $50 a year. I'd like to see them build on the looks with a little more backing on the community and support. The service is a still a little rough around the edges and certainly is capable of improving its offerings in both departments. Either way, the site navigation and photo browsing are very well designed, making it a joy to use.
For more shots of the interface, keep reading, or give DPhoto's sample gallery a look.
DPhoto's slide show might look a little familiar to Flickr's newly updated one, but DPhoto's does full-screen, too.
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