Comparison of Photo Album Sites
There is nothing I find more annoying than signing up with an online service, using it for a while, the finding something better. This is what happened when I signed up for Flickr. So I created the below table to help me compare the available online, photo-album services and choose the service that best suits me. All these services offer paid-for accounts but I've only compared the features you receive with the free accounts.
| Flickr | Zoto | 23 Hq | Fotopic | Photosite | Buzznet | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Browser Support |
Opera / Firefox / IE | Opera / Firefox / IE | Opera / Firefox / IE | Opera / Firefox / IE | Firefox / IE | |
| Storage Limit | Unlimited Only 200 photos will be visiable to the public. |
2 GB | Unlimited | 250 MB | Unlimited Only 100 photos will be visiable to the public. |
|
| Upload Limit | 20 MB / month | Unlimited | 20 MB / month 1GB / Month during the Beta testing |
Unlimited † | Unlimited † | 60 files / month |
| File Size Limit | 5 MB | Unlimited | Unlimited † | Unlimited † | Unlimited † | |
| Pixel Size Limit | 1024 x 1024 | Unlimited | Unlimited | 500 x 500 | 400 x 400 | |
| BMP to JPG | Yes | Yes | Unsupported format | Yes | Unsupported format | |
| PNG to JPG | No | Yes | No | Yes | Unsupported format | |
| JPG to JPG ‡ | No | No | No | No | ||
| JPG Quality ‡‡ | 88 | 98 | Not applicable | |||
| Uploader Tool | Yes (Win, Mac) | Yes (Win, Mac, Linux) | No | No | Yes (Win) | |
| E-mail Upload | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
| Personal View | Selected members | Selected members | Selected members | Public password | Public password | No |
| Syndication | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes Maximum of 10 images. |
Properties/features in green are obvious positives, whilst features in red are obvious negatives.
‡ = A check to make sure JPG files are not unnecessarily recompressed.
‡‡ = A set of 5 sample images were uploaded which required the system to create a new JPG file (either through converting from an unsupported image format or resizing). The resulting file size was compared with how much compression Adobe Photoshop CS2 would need to apply (without optimisation) to produce the same sized files. The results were averaged.
† = Specification was not documented and not found in practice.
After I started testing the services I quickly got bored, so Fotopic, Photosite and Buzznet were analysed with much less detail as they are clearly floored in comparison to Flickr, Zoto and 23 Hq and I couldn't imagine anyone favoring them.
I should also point out that whilst I've said that Zoto supports Opera, they freely admit that there are a few problems with using Opera and have clearly made an effort to support Opera as best they could.
I have not compared interfaces and usability but from my limited use I found Flickr, Zoto and 23 Hq to be on par with each other.
In my opinion, Flickr comes in at third place because of it's restrictions on image pixel size and limit to the number of photos that will be displayed. 23 Hq would be the clear winner if not for 20 MB per month upload limit. So before I can choose between Zoto and 23 Hq I would need to figure out how frequently I would upload photo's and how many photos. Zoto's 2 GB limit is pretty generous. If you want to archive images in a lossless format (PNG) then 23 Hq is definitely the service for you.
If I get bored I may take a look at a few of the more popular blogging communities that also provide photo albums.
Anyway, I hope this page save you some time and trouble. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment.
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Comments
2. Peter Piper says…
There is something wrong with the HTML in this page. I think the text color is the same color as the background. You can't read the names of the sites at the top of the columns unless you hover your mouse over it.
Posted on Thu 3 Jul, 2008
Rules: Paragraphs and linebreaks are automatically created (two or more linebreaks create a paragraph). Linebreaks between code tags remain linebreaks. Block tags cannot be enclosed by inline tags. Red attributes are required and green is optional.
Use "<" and ">" for "<" and ">". Enclosing PHP code in <code> tags will highlight the code (i.e. <code><?php echo 'hello world'; ?></code>).
List of valid tags:
<blockquote title="" cite=""></blockquote><cite cite="" title=""></cite><a href="" title=""></a><strong title=""></strong><em title=""></em><code title=""></code><abbr title=""></abbr><acronym title=""></acronym><ol title=""></ol><ul title=""></ul><li title=""></li>
1. Wayne says…
You might want to identify in each column which photo album site is being described.
Tnx
Posted on Thu 21 Feb, 2008