Rourke on Technology

Techcrunch just posted a story about Pikeo, a new photo sharing service attempting to compete with Flickr and Smugmug. Pikeo is doing a couple of things to set itself apart from Flickr: (1) trying to to capture the non-English speaking market by operating the site in French and Spanish in addition to English, (2) tying your pictures and the photo sharing experience to maps more centrally, and (3) providing a rich client-like interface.

The Techcrunch article fails to point out the fact that Smugmug has been doing the map thing for a couple of years now. In fact, if you scroll down to the bottom of my Smugmug page, you’ll see that I’ve been annotating my pictures with geography data since the folks at Smugmug got the usability nailed. Photo maps are fun, both so you can see where you’ve been in the world and also so you can see pictures other people have taken in a given location.

Poor Smugmug rarely gets noticed in these articles because they aren’t effectively targeting the mainstream Internet user. Smugmug’s focus is on clean, quality presentation of your pictures over bells and whistles. To compound that, Smugmug seems to do nearly no marketing or its service. Why do I use Smugmug? The JPEGs Smugmug generates are of very high quality, the default background is black, the slide shows are full screen, and you have complete control over your prints. Heck, even the photo print service Smugmug uses is top-notch to the point where they’ll do color matching. For those reasons, I’d never use Flickr or Pikeo. The ability to highly customize my Smugmug pages is just a bonus I barely take advantage of.

I do like to poke around and see what’s out there, though. I have a Flickr account, and I just signed up for a Pikeo account and gave it a quick try. My reactions? The flash based interface is pretty, but seems very sluggish and buggy (at least in Firefox). At first I thought the whole thing was broken, but it got better after I logged out and logged back in…

Uploading was really easy; the friendliest I’ve seen. Adding tags is also the clearest I’ve seen. I like the fact that they’ve formally broken the tags down into “who,” “what,” and “where” — I’ve informally been tagging (keywording) my Smugmug pictures that way for some time. Map locations are associated with descriptive tags, which makes it easier to assign the same location to a bunch of pictures. On the other hand, the album feature is very confusing. It’s clearly there just so you can group a bunch of pictures and send out a link to those pictures or the slide show for those pictures, and not as a central way of organizing your pictures. Oddly, though, you won’t be able to explain individual pictures well, because captions seem to be completely missing.

Overall, the interface feels like a rich client application more than a web application, albeit a sluggish client application. I like that. Flickr and Smugmug are getting more AJAX-y every day, but neither is close to where Pikeo is right now.

Sharing your pictures or albums will need to be via email, though, as feeds also appear to be completely missing. No feeds? That seems a major omission in this day and age. Getting at a reasonably large version of the picture also seems to be impossible. The largest I can see the image is the size you see above in that screenshot. Even in slideshow the images are roughly that size.

The social stuff is even more front and center than what you’d find on Flickr. You’re presented with other people’s pictures and tags as soon as you log in. Smugmug could use a little more of that, as right now there’s none. I wouldn’t mind seeing my friends’ most popular pictures, for example.

Overall, though, I prefer Flickr for a site of this type. Flickr is cleaner, faster, and more full featured. I’ll still take Smugmug over both of them for clean, large, nice presentation of my pictures.

That said, Pikeo and Flickr both have one feature that I’d very much like to see in Smugmug, and that’s smart access control for your photos. Smugmug allows you to hide your pictures (anyone with a URL can see them, but they don’t show up on the main page), password protect your pictures, or make your pictures public. Both Pikeo and Flickr take the right approach and allow you to designate your pictures as public, family only, friends and family, or public. Flickr even allows you to subscribe to a feed for your Friends’ photos, regardless of whether or not those photos are public or friends-only.