Pix.ie Understands How I Want To Share My Photos
3rd of September 2007 by conor
Pix.ie is a new photo-sharing site with an Irish focus, some smart features and a great name. It is too easy to pigeon-hole a site like this as Yet Another Flickr Clone but I think it has enough to stand out in a crowded market.
It is an unapologetically Irish site which will be very important to catch the eye of the ever increasing numbers here who use international sites or Irish-domained sites like PhotoBox.ie. One differentiator that they push is the fine grained access control. Flickr's awful binary approach to sharing has always been my biggest complaint about the site. Pix.ie allows you to define access based on various degrees of contact relationships and groupings.
Another particularly useful aspect of the site is photo aggregation so that pictures from multiple members can be combined into one collection for events like weddings etc. Again this gives far more fine-grained control over the collections than is possible with simple event specific tags.
I have to criticise Pix.ie in the same way that I do many photo sharing sites. I want the ability to invite people to view pictures without them having to be members of the site. This could be done using a private URL so that it is not secure but it is also not broadcast. I have too many relatives (particularly older ones) who have never signed up for a web-site and never will but have figured out how to get email and click on a link.
They have the usual tag exploration and social networking features which are must-haves on such a site. I found that aspect to be a lot easier to work with than Flickr. In general the site navigation required no thinking which will be crucial in getting late-adopters to start using Pix.ie regularly. The same is true of the photo uploading process which I found particularly easy.
A site which has just soft launched is not going to be a slick as Flickr but it's far superior to something like Canon Imagine and easily competes with the sharing features of PhotoBox. You can upload 500MB of photos per month and they say there is no overall storage limit. It is currently ad-supported but they are promising to provide Pro accounts in the future – something I would happily pay for. I can see Pix.ie becoming our family photo sharing site very soon.
Comment posted by Donn
at 9/6/2007 7:04:57 AM
Thanks for the heads up on pix.ie, I had recently been looking for a good photo sharing / storage site. A while ago I signed up for a Photobucket account which was grand until I found out it had been bought by Rupert Murdoch which was not grand, I have no interest in anything associated with him.
I have never been fond of Flickr or the other countless popular sites. I must say I'm really liking pix.ie, it's got a nice clean design, no flashing crap or unnecessary clutter to distract / confuse you, it does exactly what it says on the tin.
Keep up the good work Marcus and I look forward to seeing how it develops and grows over the next while.
Comment posted by Marcus Mac Innes
at 9/4/2007 9:53:10 AM
Cheers for the mention Conor!
Yes you are quite right; on the invite and guest pass front we are definitely falling short. We've got changes planned to allow users to be able to invite people to view their albums directly and we'll throw in the old guest pass for good measure!
James, glad to be on board Although I've got to convince myself that the idea of me being able to take a whole week off away from the office isn't just wishful thinking!
Marcus
Comment posted by James Corbett
at 9/4/2007 5:54:39 AM
And it's great to see that Marcus has now signed up to the Paddy's Valley trip.