Photo Searching and Storing: Who’s On Top?

There’s something nibbling at Flickr’s piece of the photo hosting pie. It’s “the others.” Among them stands Photobucket, king of the ‘second-class,’ though describing them as such is really doing them a great disservice. In fact, there are several aspects the underdogs feature that allow you to control your gallery/portfolio/individual images in ways that would surely show Flickr a thing or two about photo sharing 2-point-0.

Photobucket, as I’m sure many of you know quite well, is dueling it out with Flickr for the top spot. It offers an easy way to send an image you like straight to your mobile phone, allowing you to paint it as a background or wallpaper. Also sharing and linking to said photo is far easier than you can do through Flickr. You can find the similar options available on Flickr, but you really need to love the system in order to find doing those relatively menial tasks anything less than cumbersome.

Fotki is a far smaller operation that showcases a similar layout to Photobucket, though with more search options from the get go. It’s not as pleasing to the eye, either. Frankly, it looks… weird. It’s complicated and sparse-looking at the same time, but if you care little about the visual particulars around the photos you’ve uploaded, searched for, or just browsed through, Fotki’s unattractive packaging (an entirely subjective viewpoint) won’t take away from its core functions.

I still think Flickr gets it right on presentation. Nothing beats a blank slate, its lack of distractions and its easy-to-access slideshow features allow it to retain the blue ribbon in my book. But, in a time when YouTube and Myspace see hundreds of millions of views every day/week/month, sometimes function doesn’t need a decent complement of form to hit the jackpot. Social networking can be messy, sure, but like the real world, will the virtual space eventually become an intensely selective pageantry as well?

Links: Flickr, Fotki, and Photobucket