Feature: Community Galleries emphasize and enhance interaction among their members
Motivation: The sites can appear like a cross between match.com and shutterfly.com

Okay, there is a bit of a stretch - but not a lot as the whole set of Web photo gallery sites work out exactly how and where to position their gallery services in the light of the ever burgeoning growth of digital photography. Mobile phone cameras have further accelerated the move to digital over film - and have created along with sites like myspace.com and photography's own flickr.com (see summary review just below and full review here) - a demand for personal public photo/image spaces. But precisely what and how those personal spaces should be shaped and functionally formed is right now being worked out on the Internet as users/photographers try out different site and services and vote with their dollars and usage of some of the different sites we are covering in this series.

Flickr.com

Flickr was not the first gallery site but when it arrived in late 2004 early 2005 it created quite a stir for its Ajax technology based features as much as for its great community and sharing sevices. Flickr offered not just personal galleries but also easy to use sets and tags, contacts, and group collections where photographers with common interests could share their photos. This was an innovation because the Flickr has less emphasis on ratings and photo contests and more on cntacts, commentary and shared photographic experience.

The other innovation that Flickr brought to the photo gallery scene was the extensive use of AJAX technology. What AJAX allows a web browser to do is update portions of the screen instead of requiring a complete screen refresh as in traditional browser appplications. This makes quite a difference in operations. Flickr feels more like a desktop application like Corel Photo Album or Photoshop's browser. Flickr supports drag and drop operations as in the Organizer shown in the screenshot above where users can drag their sets into a new order sequence. Or drag and drop images from the gallery strip on the bottom into a new set or group(just press the group tab to see a list of the groups you belong to). With the use of AJAX Flickr set a convenience and ease of use standard that all the other Photo Gallery services are working to match. For example, Fotki hass added AJAX (a bit too quickly - a major rollback had to be done at Fotki because of unexpected bugs).

The Flickr features that other galleries are still working to match include the Organizer, groups, easy commenting and a complete set of contact features. However, other community gallery services that Flickr has yet to show or include are things like Fotki's journals and print services or Pacbase many contests and the great PC-based photo organizers and uploaders of Kodak Easyshare or Shutterfly.

Finally a unique aspect of Flickr is the Explore option. Just click on it and see the many different ways Flickr makes exploring aspects of image making and sharing a lot easier.


Fotki

Fotki is a print Service - you can get some of the best prices for pictures at Fotki even considering the Print Service we have reviewed here. No - Fotki is a photo-resellers site where yu can sell your photos and images in the size and formats you want and for the prices you set. No - Fotki is a community site with the ability not only to create albums but also add tags, maintain journals, enetr various Fotki created photo-contests and enjoy a photo community as much or as little as you want. Will the real Fotki stand up ?

First a list of what Fotki has. Photo albums with uploading uptp 50MB of photos for free and unlimited for Premier members who pay $50/year (discount to $30 on in late August 2006). Ths albums can be assigned to user named f but olders - and the whole tree of albums and folders is displayed in Explorer-like fashion. Tags for photos to allow searching not only your own but other mebers photos that have been made public. A user profile that looks a lot like a dating/match making service that users can reveal selectively to friend, Fotki-members and/or casual browsers. A Journal or Blog system.

Pbase

Pbase has the advantage of being one of the first entrants into the market for online community photo galleries. I have friend that have been online at Pbase for 4-5 years and have encouraged me to join up. Bu lacking a good web connection I posponed until I could access DSL. By that time Flickr, Shutterfly and several other gallery sites had appeared - so now I use Pbase as touchstone - a place to go to find out what is happening in the photo world. However, colleagues in the Toronto camera club scene do more than that - in an informal poll, Pbase is one of the most popular gallery sites.

And the screenshot above tells one reason why - the Pbase people love photography and maintain lots of services geared to photo buffs like the cameras database - just a great place to go to find pics and info on a very wide range of cameras including my Minolta SRT101. This spirit of camera camraderie carries through to the Pbase forums which is an online bulletin board service discussing such topic as cameras, photo edit software, travel being some of the popular discussion topics.

But the strength of Pbase is its galleries with users having a tree structure very similar to what Fotki supplies. But Pbase adds one more important ingredient which will be attactive to grahic artists and web savvy photographers - CSS stylesheets and HTML are available to the gallery owner to customize thier sites. This is no small atraction to all those who use the WordPress blogs. It really does allow for a lot customizing/personalizing the look and feel of your galleries which is hard t match in Flickr and Fotki.

Finally click on the Help tab at PBase. This reviewer found it to be one of the better aids to navigation and help

Summary

Flickr still sets the standard among all photo gallery sites for communicating and sharing images. But Fotki with its journals and print service is breaking new ground while PBase with its forums and abilty to customize galleries extensively has a large and loyal following. In short, each offers anumber of unique and compelling characteristics. So it pays to check each one out. And since each offers at least 30 day free trial privileges, it behooves you to do so Upload a few photos and try out the different galleries and features plus see how well the members interact. Then decide which gallery most closely meets your needs.