Because of this I have tried out quite a number of the various image services over the last year or so and have very mixed feelings about most of them.
This article was born out of a desire to compile my thoughts, but also the thought that this research might be of interest to a few of you too.
Firstly, let’s lay out the main criteria:
I want to find a service/site that allows me to easily upload, share, and allow interaction with my images, while keeping the sharing restricted when necessary and open enough to allow most (if not all) of the viewers to access them freely and easily no matter what platform or device they are using. Oh, and I need to be able to do this entirely/mostly from my Android smartphone.
This is a big ask of any service. Let the adventure begin!!!
The candidates:
- Facebook
- Google Plus (Picasa/Google Images)
- Flickr
- Instagram
- Imgur
- Dropbox
Ok, so my main social platform at present is Facebook. It is where I have most interaction, despite my huge preference of Google Plus as a sharing/discovering platform. But where my friends are I suppose I must follow...
Facebook offers image sharing, which is easy through the official app and makes it quick and easy to share something instantly upon snapping it. It allows me the options to title, group, and tag the images, and to restrict the access to limited (pre-defined) groups of my acquaintances.
Once uploaded there are options for sharing to non-Facebook folks through the web browser, however this option is not available through the app, and is fairly well-hidden in the web version too. The sharing option takes you to a Facebook page and you can’t link directly to the image itself - or certainly not easily :)
The quality of the images you upload are reduced drastically to allow for quick browsing and speedy page-loads, but this obviously affects the quality of your pictures and so if you are a photographer, or anyone other than a casual snapper then you might be a little disappointed.
My test images were taken on an LG Nexus 4 at 8MP. The uploaded images were processed HARD, being resized down to 2MP and using roughly 75% jpg compression. This brought the file-size down from 2.5 Mb to around a tenth of that.
I can understand the point of that, but it is a shame that you lose so much. It basically means that any images uploaded to Facebook and shared cannot then be downloaded and printed as they wouldn’t look very fancy after all the digital jiggery.
(If you are interested in a full break-down of info about Facebook images and sizing take a look at this interesting blog post: http://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/images-photos-facebook-sizes-dimensions-types)
Next up is Google Plus.
GPlus does adjust my images when I upload them individually, however they are still high-resolution. The issue I have noticed is that due to the automatic processing performed on them some images end up being a larger file size than the original. My 3 Mb test image ended up as a 6 Mb file!
The sharing options on GPlus are more granular than Facebook, so you can widen or restrict access much more easily. You can share externally via email, however this isn’t simple from the mobile app, and the recipient had better be using a modern version of Firefox or Chrome, otherwise they may struggle to see/interact with your images on the image page.
As with Facebook there are plenty of options for tagging, naming and describing your images, and Geo data is saved and visualised nicely on Google Maps when you delve into the Gallery options. Facebook’s Geo data integration is a little less impressive.
Option 3 is Instagram - which is for food pictures and embarrassingly bad filter effects.
DO NOT WANT!
Flickr next.
This is a huge boon for professional image sharers and people who take gorgeous photographs. Once uploaded (which is easy through the mobile app) the viewer can view the default ‘medium’ sized image, however they can also choose to view larger and smaller versions as well as view or download the original full-res file. Great stuff!
The downside as far as I’m concerned is the sharing. The Flickr terms state that all links (whether created by their site, the mobile app, or any other app/service that ties into their API) should be to the image options page, and not to the image itself. That means that sharing on certain platforms can be cumbersome. In fact, once I had uploaded an image using the mobile app I was faced with the Flickr app not even tying into the Android sharing menu, which made sharing to various applications tricky and time-consuming.
I am not a fan of signing into one service from another, as it means putting eggs in baskets in an insecurity soup that I don’t find fun.
As such I refused to do this and in an effort to share my images successfully I even had to resort to opening the desktop version of the webpage on my phone in order to retrieve a suitable link to the image page. And even then you can’t share a link directly to the high-res version, making the process just one step harder than it should.
I love the storage options from Flickr, but the implementation is not quite there yet for me.
Onto the next, Imgur...
Uploads are quick and easy through the website or one of the unofficial apps. (The official app is still labelled as Beta at this point, but is definitely worth giving a try.) And beyond any other service, sharing on Imgur is amazing!
When you upload a piccy you are given a link to the image page, which can include the title and other related information, along with other images in the gallery if you have shared it on a registered account and selected ‘Public’.
However, the big win for Imgur is that you can also easily share a link directly to the image, meaning you can simply embed the picture in a webpage or email, or share without any other clutter going on.
Negative stuff: Ok, it’s not all fun and roses. Apparently you can’t just be brilliant for no recompense, so Imgur only allows you to use your fancy account for free with the following limits:
- 225 photos maximum
- 1 Mb image files, otherwise they are resized to under 1 Mb
- 2 Mb maximum size for animated GIFs
- Images are deleted after a period of 6 months without being viewed
The file-size limit is still bigger than the Facebook ones, but a shame to miss the full-res files. But wait - there is a solution! If you throw money at the Imgur people they will give you the following benefits:
- Unlimited image storage
- 5Mb maximum file size
- 2Mb GIFs
- Images never expire
- No ads
- Additional gallery organisational tools
And what is the cost of this feast of treatfulness? $23.95 per year.
For us in the UK that works out to just about £16 (at current exchange rates). Honestly I’d say that the benefits you get for fractionally over £1 per month are pretty impressive. If the claim of unlimited storage is true then you are being offered better than Flickr’s impressive 1Tb, and all much more easily shared and accessed.
In fact you could use this as your image storage for a pretty fancy photographic webpage and not have to pay through the nose for your web hosting package as the traffic would be very minimal.
The limit of 5 Mb for files is a shame if you are creating digital images using Photoshop/GIMP/Illustrator etc, but if you are sharing on the web I guess you don’t need poster-size images available, so just share a decent res image, or flatten to a PNG or JPG and you’re set.
In addition the range of file formats accepted is pretty great - JPEG, PNG, GIF, APNG, TIFF, BMP, PDF and XCF
Note that this includes GIFs, which of course can be animated. Oh yeah.
One final aspect is the security. While you can upload anonymously and sharing is through a randomised link, this is the only thing stopping someone viewing your image. Randomly guessing URL strings could allow you to find images that weren’t intentionally shared, although the chances of coming across an image randomly is tiny needle, massive haystack sort of territory.
Final round: Dropbox
Clearly you can easily upload and share from Dropbox, but the image aspect of this isn’t perfect. Sharing to Facebook may not always pull up the thumbnail of the image as the link is to an image ‘page’ (again...), but there are no file-size limits, and you can of course upload any type of file, although not all image types will be supported in the browser-based viewer.
Dropbox go out of their way to stop you sharing the image link itself, even down to blocking right-clicks on images. Getting around this is trivial for the tech-savvy, but it is nevertheless an absolute pain on a mobile device, so is not going to be the solution I am looking for.
The storage limits depend on the size of your account, which increases if you refer friends, or upload certain files, link to an app and so on. Also you can pay lots of money for additional storage, but for my purposes this is overkill.
OK, I think I should sum up the info in an easy to consult chart:
| Name | Storage | Cost | File-size | Sharing (*) | GIFs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infinite | Free | 1 Mb | 1 | No | |
| GPlus | 5 Gb | Free | Full | 1 | Yes |
| Flickr | 1 Tb | Free | Full | 2 | No |
| Imgur | 225 imgs | Free | 1 Mb | 3 | Yes |
| Imgur Pro | Infinite | £16/yr | 5 Mb | 3 | Yes |
| Dropbox | Varies | Free | Full | 2 | No |
(*)Sharing ease:
1 = hard to link externally
2 = easy to link externally
3 = easy to link to image itself
BONUS ROUND - PhotoSpheres
The topic in question is sharing PhotoSpheres.
As previously discussed, Google Plus offers great hosting for images, but the sharing options to non-Google Plus devices is a bit limited at present. Additionally, the photo options are really best suited to sharing across Plus, not externally. While it does work to share this to an email address, the process is clunky and certainly time consuming from a mobile device.
May I therefore introduce you to... SphereShare.net
SphereShare is a social site created specifically to share (and rate) PhotoSpheres. It works on any modern browser, is easy and quick to upload and tag images, and there is a great app that Android users will really find easy and fun to upload and discover with.
Sharing PhotoSpheres anywhere other than on Google Plus is made an awful lot easier with this site.
If you want to share your image from the app, then your limit is just which apps integrate with the Android sharing menu, and sharing from the website includes the obvious choices, alongside over 400 other sites/services from across the interglobe.
Conclusions: My image approach
So, while I now have accounts for all the mentioned articles I have now decided on my image-sharing workflow.
Backups will still be done automatically by the Google Plus app, uploading all of my images forever.
Image storage, albums and sharing will happen through my Imgur Pro account, which I have splashed out on and am not building up with pictures and albums I’m pleased with.
And PhotoSpheres are going to SphereShare, where I can share them and interact with them.
I hope this post has been at least interesting to you.
I am aware that there are MANY other image storing/sharing options available out there, so this may not be my forever plan, but for now I am jolly happy to have a solid plan and the confidence to invest in these chosen platforms, rather than spreading myself thin over a bunch of them.
Oh, and one final thing.
Maybe it's an experiment too... All the images in this post are actually hosted on Imgur. Who'd have thought?
Happy photo-sharing!
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