tintedpane.com

I think I’m coming around to Flickr. In the past few weeks since being bought out by Yahoo, they’ve lowered their prices ($25/yr) for the paid account and increased the upload bandwidth to 2GB/month. What I’m really liking about it is the notes functionality they provide. They have this neat feature where you (or your viewers) can identify parts on a picture (using rectangular lines) and add notes to it. An example that has come out have people publishing an aerial view of where they grew up (think googlemaps satellite photo) and highlighting areas of interest. Or say you take a group photo and others who were there can fill in the names of people you didn’t know.

Another feature I’m thinking that’s great for organizing pictures is keyword tagging. Smugmug (of which I’m currently paying for) also has this feature where you can use your IPTC keyword aware photo software (Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, IRFanView, IMatch, etc) that embeds keywords and you can search through them using those sites. Unfortunately you can only search through public pics in Smugmug. (I haven’t tried out private pics in Flickr yet).

One thing I wanted to note was that Picasa2 can search through IPTC keywords embedded in photos but cannot add them. You can only add captions from what I’ve seen.

I’ve also been tracking back to Pbase and saw that they have the ability to categorize pictures by the cameras and lenses that are used to take em. That is actually pretty nice, at least for a budding amateur photographer like me. I’m not too enticed by their pricing model (they charge by overall storage, not how much you can upload a month like smugmug and flickr), but that feature is really nice to have. I can find pictures shot w/ the professional cameras and it’s like visiting an art gallery from my computer: I can see good techniques, lighting, framing, etc… And it _seems_ that Pbase is less amateurish than the point ‘n shoots of flickr.