Group Photo Sharing after Flickr; ZangZing
What does the next Flickr look like?
“Flickr isnt doing it for me anymore and it hurts to say that out loud.” - bijan
Bijan’s post struck a chord, which is really hard for me to talk about too. I’ve been a paid user of Flickr for many years. Flickr was the first web2 company I fell in love with. It made it easy for average people to share photos publicly and privately, and it built a community that encouraged people to push themselves to take better photos. It was the first prism with which I looked at how a community website could subtly use game mechanics to drive behavior without building “a game.”
But at this point it feels overly clunky in too many ways. I’m curious what folks feel like is missing in their Flickr experience, but for me the next Flickr would have one huge difference and a few smaller ones.
1. A new orientation, not around the author: virtually every photo site is first prioritized around who took the photo (like a blog). But for almost everyone who is just a casual photo taker this orientation is secondary at best. My kid Kaden just had his sixth birthday and there were probably 5 people taking photos with various devices. Most of those photos I will never see, or they will get randomly emailed and then lost. I wish someone had an elegant and natural solution that actually mapped to how people use photos now. I just want to see the photos from my kids birthday all in one place, in an easy way to share with other friends and come back to a year from now.
Other stuff on my list:
2. Seamless cross-client posting and reading (mobile, mobile, mobile)
3. Public and private clearly delineated
3. Dropbox-style access/syncing of photos
4. Simple group email interface for upload since so much is still conducted that way (make it as easy as Tripit, I want to be able to get a photo from my Dad via email, forward to this service to keep it there but attribute to him)What’s on your list? And if you’ve already got an elegant solution I’d love to hear about it.
These comments highlight so many of my personal frustrations with managing photos, both for personal use and broader distribution. I had the maddening experience of trying to get many photos to a dispersed group (of various technical abilities). I wanted the ability to upload content, and then simply no longer have to be the point person for its maintenance and distribution. For that matter, my own photos from a multi-family Thanksgiving celebration lie unearthed, long irrelevant, on my phone.
A few things have evolved that I think work well in my applications.
First off, Dropbox finally enables painless multi-file uploads. Finally a cable-free way to painlessly move photos off my “camera” — I’d previously used an app called CameraSync which worked OK.
Recently, I’ve been test driving ZangZing — it’s reminds me of a fusion of drop.io (but actually set up for photos), Dropbox’s Auto-Gallery, and your favorite current flavor of photo sharing. While it doesn’t do everything for everyone (yet), it simply works.
Fire it up, create a new album, and it’s painless to free your photos from wherever they might be (I actually have Facebook photos backed up now). Or add from many sources.
To my delight, Privacy is dead simple (as per Nabeel’s point 3). After that, it takes seconds to invite some collaborators and Tweet or mail a link to the album. Album’s also have an email address for submissions (per point 4).
Still some things I would love to see:
- Static image linking
- Easy downloading from other albums (this is coming)
- Distributed album ownership…or at least the ability to clone albums (Who wouldn’t want github for photos?) [This might address point 1]
- Mobile, etc (Dropbox iOS uploading a band-aid at present)
- Bonus: desktop sync (per point 3)
- Extra bonus: perhaps some simple, quick editing tools on the web (just simple crop, contrast, etc…not filters)
My hat’s off to the ZangZing folks at present. (I should add that I don’t personally know any of them nor have been encouraged to write any of this!) It’s still in a private beta, but should you be eager, the folks I share albums with seem to be able to create accounts just fine…
