Out in California, Serge and Larry at Google are working away on the future of search. Meanwhile, we're working away on something even MORE important, the ability for readers to upload pictures to their personal pages. We're actually doing a lot of work this summer on a total redesign, but nothing is more crucial to us than building out the ability for readers to begin to upload their own info to the site, so that we can really complete our community and feature more reader homes, ideas and inspiration.
The question we have before us now is: for those of you who do a lot of photo uploading, what's the best user interface for uploading pics to websites that you've seen, especially those that you've seen integrated into blogs or websites that are not only about photo sharing (ie. Flickr)???????










I've found facebook's photo uploading system really easy to use, and I think they have two different options for uploading so it can be compatable for everyone...I don't know any of the tech stuff on it, just that it's easy...
view Rosie's profile
Flickr by a loooooooooong shot. We used it for Alaska Youth for Environmental Action when we had students uploading photographs daily updating our blog with students simultaneously in Iceland and in Alaska.
But Facebook's great 'cause you can tag photos of your friends and if your friends use Facebook they get the quick update and everyone of your friends can gawk at you so in that sense it's much more effective.
But there's so much you can do with Flickr shots on their page. I usually upload photos to Flickr first with full-res shots and then I send crappier smaller ones to FB for my friends to see since no one wants to flip through all the Flickr pages when they're already in FB.
view cvaldaisnotbig's profile
Hey, thanks! This is already very helpful. Anyone else??
view Maxwell's profile
definitely flickr... and I'm not very keen on uploading my photos to multiple places. I'd rather have a way to "blog" my photo from flickr, particularly since flickr has very sensible terms of service with regard to hosting content that is copyright the uploader (facebook is TERRIBLE in this regard).
view angorian's profile
Winkflash's uploading system is great. I think it's the Java option... in any case, I can see thumbnails of the photos in the folder that's selected and then I can drag them into another folder, where I can still see them. Then you just press the Upload button. It's so much easier than anything else. (Snapfish has a Mac plugin that also speeds things up.)
I like Flickr for photo sharing, but their upload interface could be friendlier.
(sidenote about the profile page: any way to put more than one url on one's profile?)
view Eliza's profile
(ditto eliza's sidenote! i'd like to link to both my flickr set and my website)
and yes, flickr rocks! i am all about it!
view kdkaboom's profile
I love flickr.
view KBinBC's profile
I too love Flickr - especially their uploading tool you can download (Flickr Uploadr). Great for all the pics I upload for my blog.
view kim.desiretoinspire's profile
How come nobody said Photobucket? Is that not what you mean? I have tried flikr but can't access it without changing settings on my computer. I think photobucket is super user friendly. Maybe I am wrong?
view sam's profile
My boyfriend has a great workflow for sharing his photography using Flickr. The abbreviated version is, he organizes the photos in iView Media Pro on the Mac, then uses an app called PictureSync which automatically resizes and uploads your photos to Flickr. Once they're up there, he uses a small interactive application called PictoBrowser to easily display the flicker photos in blog posts. It's pretty darn easy to use, and the results look very nice.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pictobrowser
view SisterRae's profile
I'd second the Flickr photo auto-import suggestion. Facebook's picture handling is good too, but I think since most of us already have Flickr and have our pics on it, it'd be easier to keep them there. Since Flickr has a good API, it wouldn't be terribly hard to connect AT to it (there's probably a prebuilt solution for doing this somewhere), or heck, you could just have people put in their flickr photos RSS feed URL and get their photos that way. The downside of that would be that you could only get the most recent photos... using the API would probably be a better solution.
Anyway, that's probably wayyy too complicated, but however the feature turns out it'll just be nice to have photos on our profiles.
view Graham's profile
Why recreate the wheel and force people to upload to multiple places. Most blog platforms have the ability to incorporate some type of code to show pictures from flickr. Most likely you can just add some code if the custom platform here doesn't have the ability already. You can always make it so that photos tagged with a specific tag show up in the profile page.
view darwin's profile
I know I'm jumping on the bandwagon with Flickr, but it just works so well (and hopefully Jerry Yang will keep things moving along). Flickr is not just about sharing. Sending photos to blogs and websites are already well known features. I like it better than any other social networking site that I use, it's really easy for anyone to use and there are lots of ways to integrate with it.
view charlenemcbride's profile
As much as I hate MS, check this out.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
view Print Geek's profile
Me and Flickr just don't get along all that well...
I just started using Picasa, from Google, and I love it!!!
They have a little button for "Blog This" and the uploading is fast and easy. It's a great way to organize your own pictures at home, and they have the web interface as well.
Highly recommend checking it out!
view Marie's profile
I love flickr and use flickr uploader.
view nobugsonme's profile
Just in case you want to use somethings besides flickr, i find the uploading at vox is super easy.
I have no idea what they use, but I'm not very knowledgeable about the tech stuff, I just find it simple, which I think is the most important thing.
view carriegood's profile
Thanks to all of you! This thread has been read by me and our tech team and has been very helpful and confirmed our suspicions. We're moving ahead right now with the concept of providing at least two ways of uploading: direct to the site and via your Flickr account.
view Maxwell's profile