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'Photo sharing' is the publishing or transfer of a user's digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others (whether publicly or privately). This functionality is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images. The term can also be loosely applied to the use of online photo galleries that are setup and managed by individual users, including photoblogs.
The first photo sharing sites originated during the mid to late 1990s primarily from service providing online ordering of prints (photo-finishing), but many more came into being during the early 2000s with the goal of providing permanent and centralised access to a user's photos, and in some cases video clips too. This has resulted in different approaches to revenue generation and functionality amongst providers.
While photoblogs tend only to display a chronological view of user-selected medium-sized photos, most photo sharing sites provide multiple views (such as thumbnails, and slideshows), the ability to classify photos into albums as well as add annotations (such as captions or "tags") and comments. Some photo sharing sites provide complete online organisation tools equivalent to desktop photo-management applications.
Desktop photo-management applications may include their own photo-sharing features or integration with sites for uploading images to them. There are also desktop applications whose sole function is sharing photos, generally using peer-to-peer networking. Basic photo sharing functionality can be found in applications that allow you to email photos, for example by dragging and dropping them into pre-designed templates.
Photo sharing is not confined to the web and personal computers but is also possible from portable devices such as cameraphones, using applications that can automatically transfer photos as you take them, to photo sharing sites and photoblogs, either directly or via MMS. Some cameras now come equipped with wireless networking and similar sharing functionality themselves.
The same technology that allows digital photographs to be shared can be used for other electronic image formats. This can include computer-generated art or scans of hand-drawn artwork or photographic prints just as easily as it can include digital photographs. Even though 'image sharing' is a more general term and would include photo sharing as a subset of the available options, the term 'photo sharing' is more widely known.
Photosharing sites can be broadly broken up into two groups: sites that offer photosharing for free and sites that charge consumers directly to host and share photos.
Of the sites that offer free photosharing, most can be broken up into advertising-supported media plays, such as Imajr, Pixamo, Photobloggers, ipernity, Pikeo, vMix, AlbumTown, Flickr, FotoFly Twango, Euro Photo Club, Fotki, Fotolog, Fotopic, PicPublisher, Ringo, Webshots, Photobucket, Box.net, Woophy, Zillauser.com, pix01,imeem, ComBoost, and KlikShare and online photo finishing sites, such as ImageStation, PhotoBox, Snapfish, MyPhotoAlbum, Ofoto and Shutterfly, where photo sharing is a vehicle to sell prints or other merchandise.
Paid sites typically offer subscription-based services directly to consumers and dispense with advertisements and sometimes the sale of other goods. Examples of paid sites are Fotki, PBase, Phanfare and SmugMug.
These designations are not hard and fast and some subscription sites have a limited free version. A new example of a limited, free version is My Photos Made Famous, which organizes photos by calendar date. Some smaller sites like Atpic offer a non limited free version. Consumers can share their photos directly from their home computers over high speed connections through peer-to-peer photosharing using applications such as KoffeePhoto, Pixpo, Picasa and Qnext. Peer-to-peer photosharing often carries a small one-time cost for the software. Some sites allow you to post your pictures online and they will then project the image onto famous buildings during special events, while other sites let you insert photos into digital postcards, slide shows and photo albums and send them to others.
Because printing at home for consumers is potentially time consuming, costly, or low quality, a number of providers such as ImageStation, Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Shutterfly offer the ability to create high quality prints from digital photos, printed digitally on photographic paper. Typically the customer uploads their digital photos to the site and then orders prints and gifts which are then delivered by mail. To facilitate the sale of prints and gifts to family and friends, these sites typically offer a limited form of photo sharing. Because the primary revenue model is to sell the consumer back their digital information in the form of prints and gifts, the online albums typically do not allow friends and family to download the full size original images, and the images may be deleted if no purchases are made. Nevertheless, because the primary revenue model of the printing sites is to sell prints and gifts, the photo sharing service is free and hence attractive to many consumers.
For consumers who want photo sharing without the distraction of advertisements or the promotion of prints and gifts to cover the costs of running the service, subscription based photo sharing services are the solution. The primary revenue model for these services is the subscription revenue from account holders. Such services include Photagious, Phanfare, Fotki, PBase, Zillauser.com, SmugMug, Box.net, Apple's dotMac service and Webshots, all of whom have operated on this basis for at least several years. Notably SmugMug is one of the few services that offers no free service, whereas most services also offer a free account supported by advertising. The benefits of paid sharing to consumers are that the company may offer greater guarantees about keeping the photos online and allow friends and family to download the full-size original files. They are also a great way to backup your pictures as many photographers are finding that they have lost many years of digital pictures because they forget to back up their computers continuously. Typically no ads are allowed on paid accounts since their presence would remove one of their main distinguishing characteristics. In addition, some of these sites, most notably Phanfare are now integrating video sharing as well.
With the introduction of high speed connections directly to homes (broadband), it is feasible to share pictures and movies without going 'through' a central service. The advantages to peer-to-peer sharing are reduced hosting costs and no loss of control to a central service. The downsides are that the consumer does not get the benefit of offsite backup, consumer ISPs often prohibit the serving of content both by contract and through the implementation of network filtering, and there are few quality guarantees for recipients. However, there are typically no direct consumer costs beyond the purchase of the initial software, provided the consumer already has a computer with the photos at home on a high speed connection. Examples of free private P2P photo sharing include KoffeePhoto, Qnext, PiXPO, and FotoSwap. Examples of free public P2P photo sharing include Shwup.
While peer-to-peer solutions operate without a central server this can create problems since some users don't leave their computers online and connected all the time. Using a server as an intermediate point it's possible to share photos peer-to-peer with the reliability of a central server solution. Photos are stored on the server and downloaded back as needed. An example of such a service is PicMe Photo Sharing.
A variation on the peer-to-peer model is peer-to-browser, whereby images are shared on one PC with the use of a local (on the computer) software service (much like peer-to-peer) but made available to viewer through a standard web browser. Technically speaking this is may still be described as peer-to-peer (with the second peer being a web browser) but it is characteristically different as it assumes no need to download peer software for the viewer. Photos are accessed by regular URLs that standard web browsers understand natively without any further software required. Consequently photos shared in this way are accessible not only to users who have downloaded the correct peer software (compatible with the software in use by the sharer). The advantages to peer-to-browser sharing are, similar to peer-to-peer, reduced hosting costs, no loss of control to a central service, and no waiting for files to upload to the central service. Furthermore, universal web browser access to shared files makes shared files more widely accessible and available for use in different ways, such as embedding in, or linking to from within, web pages. The downsides, like peer-to-peer are lack of offsite backup, possible inhibition by some ISPs, and limitations in speed of serving. Examples of free peer to browser photo sharing include izimi, weezo, orb, and zapr.
Software can be found on the internet to generate your own photo albums usually to share photos on the web, using a home web server. This is in general for advanced users that want to have a better control over the look and feel of their web albums, and the actual servers they are going to run on. Examples of free software include Panraven, Umibozu, Picasa, and jAlbum.
Some photo sharing sites will allow you to share your photos in a slideshow format. These slideshows can be easily added to places like MySpace, Ebay, Blogger, etc. Examples of sites that offer slideshow functionality include: pxSpot,slide, and SlideShare.
Photo sharing sites usually propose several ways to classify images. Most sites propose at least a taxonomy where images can be grouped within a directory-like structure in so-called "galleries". Some sites also allow users to classify images using tags to build a folksonomy. Depending on the restrictions on the set of users allowed to tag a single document and the set of tags available to describe the document, one speaks about narrow and broad folksonomies. A folksonomy is broad when there is no restriction on the set of taggers and available tags. When there are limitations, the folksonomy is called narrow. An example of narrow folksonomy is Flickr. An example of broad folksonomy is Atpic. Atpic introduces also a mechanism coupling taxonomy and folksonomy where tags associated to galleries and artists are cascadated to the galleries and artist's pictures. Broad taxonomies have interesting properties like the power law.
# Brown, F. (2007). "Metadata Goes Mainstream — about online photo galleries and the lessons we can learn."
# Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies."
# Pietro Speroni (2005). "On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws."
★ Online file storage
★ Image hosting service
The first photo sharing sites originated during the mid to late 1990s primarily from service providing online ordering of prints (photo-finishing), but many more came into being during the early 2000s with the goal of providing permanent and centralised access to a user's photos, and in some cases video clips too. This has resulted in different approaches to revenue generation and functionality amongst providers.
While photoblogs tend only to display a chronological view of user-selected medium-sized photos, most photo sharing sites provide multiple views (such as thumbnails, and slideshows), the ability to classify photos into albums as well as add annotations (such as captions or "tags") and comments. Some photo sharing sites provide complete online organisation tools equivalent to desktop photo-management applications.
Desktop photo-management applications may include their own photo-sharing features or integration with sites for uploading images to them. There are also desktop applications whose sole function is sharing photos, generally using peer-to-peer networking. Basic photo sharing functionality can be found in applications that allow you to email photos, for example by dragging and dropping them into pre-designed templates.
Photo sharing is not confined to the web and personal computers but is also possible from portable devices such as cameraphones, using applications that can automatically transfer photos as you take them, to photo sharing sites and photoblogs, either directly or via MMS. Some cameras now come equipped with wireless networking and similar sharing functionality themselves.
'Image sharing'
The same technology that allows digital photographs to be shared can be used for other electronic image formats. This can include computer-generated art or scans of hand-drawn artwork or photographic prints just as easily as it can include digital photographs. Even though 'image sharing' is a more general term and would include photo sharing as a subset of the available options, the term 'photo sharing' is more widely known.
Revenue models
Photosharing sites can be broadly broken up into two groups: sites that offer photosharing for free and sites that charge consumers directly to host and share photos.
Of the sites that offer free photosharing, most can be broken up into advertising-supported media plays, such as Imajr, Pixamo, Photobloggers, ipernity, Pikeo, vMix, AlbumTown, Flickr, FotoFly Twango, Euro Photo Club, Fotki, Fotolog, Fotopic, PicPublisher, Ringo, Webshots, Photobucket, Box.net, Woophy, Zillauser.com, pix01,imeem, ComBoost, and KlikShare and online photo finishing sites, such as ImageStation, PhotoBox, Snapfish, MyPhotoAlbum, Ofoto and Shutterfly, where photo sharing is a vehicle to sell prints or other merchandise.
Paid sites typically offer subscription-based services directly to consumers and dispense with advertisements and sometimes the sale of other goods. Examples of paid sites are Fotki, PBase, Phanfare and SmugMug.
These designations are not hard and fast and some subscription sites have a limited free version. A new example of a limited, free version is My Photos Made Famous, which organizes photos by calendar date. Some smaller sites like Atpic offer a non limited free version. Consumers can share their photos directly from their home computers over high speed connections through peer-to-peer photosharing using applications such as KoffeePhoto, Pixpo, Picasa and Qnext. Peer-to-peer photosharing often carries a small one-time cost for the software. Some sites allow you to post your pictures online and they will then project the image onto famous buildings during special events, while other sites let you insert photos into digital postcards, slide shows and photo albums and send them to others.
Online photo finishing
Because printing at home for consumers is potentially time consuming, costly, or low quality, a number of providers such as ImageStation, Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Shutterfly offer the ability to create high quality prints from digital photos, printed digitally on photographic paper. Typically the customer uploads their digital photos to the site and then orders prints and gifts which are then delivered by mail. To facilitate the sale of prints and gifts to family and friends, these sites typically offer a limited form of photo sharing. Because the primary revenue model is to sell the consumer back their digital information in the form of prints and gifts, the online albums typically do not allow friends and family to download the full size original images, and the images may be deleted if no purchases are made. Nevertheless, because the primary revenue model of the printing sites is to sell prints and gifts, the photo sharing service is free and hence attractive to many consumers.
Subscription-based photo sharing
For consumers who want photo sharing without the distraction of advertisements or the promotion of prints and gifts to cover the costs of running the service, subscription based photo sharing services are the solution. The primary revenue model for these services is the subscription revenue from account holders. Such services include Photagious, Phanfare, Fotki, PBase, Zillauser.com, SmugMug, Box.net, Apple's dotMac service and Webshots, all of whom have operated on this basis for at least several years. Notably SmugMug is one of the few services that offers no free service, whereas most services also offer a free account supported by advertising. The benefits of paid sharing to consumers are that the company may offer greater guarantees about keeping the photos online and allow friends and family to download the full-size original files. They are also a great way to backup your pictures as many photographers are finding that they have lost many years of digital pictures because they forget to back up their computers continuously. Typically no ads are allowed on paid accounts since their presence would remove one of their main distinguishing characteristics. In addition, some of these sites, most notably Phanfare are now integrating video sharing as well.
Peer-to-peer photosharing
With the introduction of high speed connections directly to homes (broadband), it is feasible to share pictures and movies without going 'through' a central service. The advantages to peer-to-peer sharing are reduced hosting costs and no loss of control to a central service. The downsides are that the consumer does not get the benefit of offsite backup, consumer ISPs often prohibit the serving of content both by contract and through the implementation of network filtering, and there are few quality guarantees for recipients. However, there are typically no direct consumer costs beyond the purchase of the initial software, provided the consumer already has a computer with the photos at home on a high speed connection. Examples of free private P2P photo sharing include KoffeePhoto, Qnext, PiXPO, and FotoSwap. Examples of free public P2P photo sharing include Shwup.
Peer-to-server-to-peer photosharing
While peer-to-peer solutions operate without a central server this can create problems since some users don't leave their computers online and connected all the time. Using a server as an intermediate point it's possible to share photos peer-to-peer with the reliability of a central server solution. Photos are stored on the server and downloaded back as needed. An example of such a service is PicMe Photo Sharing.
Peer-to-browser photosharing
A variation on the peer-to-peer model is peer-to-browser, whereby images are shared on one PC with the use of a local (on the computer) software service (much like peer-to-peer) but made available to viewer through a standard web browser. Technically speaking this is may still be described as peer-to-peer (with the second peer being a web browser) but it is characteristically different as it assumes no need to download peer software for the viewer. Photos are accessed by regular URLs that standard web browsers understand natively without any further software required. Consequently photos shared in this way are accessible not only to users who have downloaded the correct peer software (compatible with the software in use by the sharer). The advantages to peer-to-browser sharing are, similar to peer-to-peer, reduced hosting costs, no loss of control to a central service, and no waiting for files to upload to the central service. Furthermore, universal web browser access to shared files makes shared files more widely accessible and available for use in different ways, such as embedding in, or linking to from within, web pages. The downsides, like peer-to-peer are lack of offsite backup, possible inhibition by some ISPs, and limitations in speed of serving. Examples of free peer to browser photo sharing include izimi, weezo, orb, and zapr.
Web photo album generators
Software can be found on the internet to generate your own photo albums usually to share photos on the web, using a home web server. This is in general for advanced users that want to have a better control over the look and feel of their web albums, and the actual servers they are going to run on. Examples of free software include Panraven, Umibozu, Picasa, and jAlbum.
Publish your photos
Some photo sharing sites will allow you to share your photos in a slideshow format. These slideshows can be easily added to places like MySpace, Ebay, Blogger, etc. Examples of sites that offer slideshow functionality include: pxSpot,slide, and SlideShare.
Photos classification
Photo sharing sites usually propose several ways to classify images. Most sites propose at least a taxonomy where images can be grouped within a directory-like structure in so-called "galleries". Some sites also allow users to classify images using tags to build a folksonomy. Depending on the restrictions on the set of users allowed to tag a single document and the set of tags available to describe the document, one speaks about narrow and broad folksonomies. A folksonomy is broad when there is no restriction on the set of taggers and available tags. When there are limitations, the folksonomy is called narrow. An example of narrow folksonomy is Flickr. An example of broad folksonomy is Atpic. Atpic introduces also a mechanism coupling taxonomy and folksonomy where tags associated to galleries and artists are cascadated to the galleries and artist's pictures. Broad taxonomies have interesting properties like the power law.
References
# Brown, F. (2007). "Metadata Goes Mainstream — about online photo galleries and the lessons we can learn."
# Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies."
# Pietro Speroni (2005). "On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws."
See also
★ Online file storage
★ Image hosting service
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