I have never been a big fan of photo-sharing websites such as Flickr.com, even when they are given fancy names like ”social networking”. It is bad enough having to fend off friends advancing towards you with fat wads of holiday snaps without having half the bloggers in the world trying to nobble you into watching their smiling faces blot out whatever building is lurking behind.
I know it is more sophisticated than that and, yes, there is a merit in having photos tagged with identifying names — say the Louvre or Hurricane Katrina — so that you can look at submissions from likeminded people around the world in one place. But the novelty of seeing hundreds of people grinning inanely at the camera in front of Buckingham Palace soon wears off.
But new applications are coming on stream which take photoblogging on to a higher plain. Take the recently launched Shozu.com: at the moment it only works on some Symbian phones (a range of Nokia, Siemens and Sony Ericsson handsets), but there are plans to extend it. Once you have downloaded the software to your phone from Shozu’s website and signed up for an account at Flickr.com — now owned by Yahoo — you are ready to go.
Now simply take a photo with your cameraphone in the normal way and when you start to send it an option springs up saying ”Save to Flickr”. When you click this it automatically goes by wireless transmission to your Flickr photo account, where it can be viewed on a computer screen anywhere in the world by other users. You can also write words to accompany the photo by choosing the ”Open Shozu” option.
So, you can forget the complications of setting up your phone for mobile blogging (”moblogging”) because sending pictures to the web can be done now with a single click. You can configure your onscreen Flickr account to display your photos sequentially with a date, rather like a conventional blog. Registration is free but photos are charged by the data they use up.
I went for a walk taking regular snaps, and they were all on the screen when I got home. Although I waited until I was back to write captions for each photo, I could have done it on the move: it’s something that could make ”citizen journalism” a lot easier since it would be very easy for one person to cover an event all day with their camera.
Opera, the Norwegian company that runs an admirable bespoke browser for cellphones, has just launched its own impressive blogging site to which you can also send photos by phone — though it needs a few more more clicks than Shozu’s because you have to access an e-mail address through your contacts list rather than this being done automatically. Flickr supports this option, too, and another application in this area to watch for is fotolibra.com, based in Cardiff. Fotolibra claims to be the ”the world’s first fully online, open-access picture library”. The idea came to the originator when a water-burst in the attic destroyed family albums full of treasured photos. The thought then occurred that if they had only been digitised, a publisher or someone else might have been interested in buying them.
So fotolibra.com was set up, enabling punters to upload any pictures — from newsy ones to archive material — to a site where they can be viewed, or purchased. If you sign up, your first five photos are free to upload, then you have to pay £6 (R72) a month, which entitles you to 2Gb of storage. If a picture is sold, the proceeds are split 50/50 between you and the company. They are beginning to build up a workable base (there are, for example, 45 art deco photos in its claimed library of 65 000 images) and it is pretty easy to upload your own photos to the library.
This won’t put the big photo libraries out of business, but it is yet another example of the innovations coming from grassroots projects on the web. Some of them will be very successful. – Guardian Unlimited Â