I've been thinking a lot about photos recently because, frankly, it's not that easy to upload and manipulate photos on Blogabond right now. It's certainly doable, and not much of a chore if you just want to upload and tag a half dozen shots for a Blog entry. But, as users have been mentioning with increasing frequency lately, it's really time consuming to dump all 500 shots from your memory card onto the site.

That, in my mind, is a good thing.

I see this as a feature of the Social Interface to Blogabond.com, rather than a shortcoming of the User Interface. While it's true that we offer unlimited photo storage for free, we do so with the Hope that our users will limit themselves to only posting the best photos that they have, and the ones that best compliment the journal entries that they write. The theory is that since it takes a bit of time to get a photo up and viewable, our users will be a bit more selective with the pictures they choose to share. At least, more so than they might be if we made it easy to dump the 4GB memory card from a digital camera straight onto the site.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of good sites on the web that offer free photo storage. And realistically, anybody using Blogabond.com simply as a place to store and view their photos would probably better served moving over to Flickr. I think of Blogabond as a something like a cocktail party. Just a bunch of friends sitting around, telling their travel stories and showing off some cool photos. The last thing you really want at a party like that is somebody setting up the slide projector and running through all 4000 photos of his trip to Peru. It's all about selectivity, and I think that making it just a little bit difficult to set up that projector might turn out to be a good thing.

Let me know what you think.

written by  Jason Kester on May 18, 2006

written by  Adam on May 18, 2006

Forgot to mention in the above that we've got a new tool live to make it a bit easier to manage your photos once you get them uploaded:

http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoTag.aspx

Tag, Title and assign locations to a bunch of photos at once instead of having to dig around and edit them individually.

Let me know what you think!

Jason

written by  Jason Kester on June 6, 2006

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Two quick thoughts:

How about limiting the number of photos that can be uploaded on a per blog-entry basis? Say 10 or 20 or whatever total photos per blog entry. Then you can get creative and say give 50 more for being a featured blog, or traveller. Or sell more space etc.

Also, how about allowing photos & blog entries to be tagged by lat & long as well as by "nearest place." Sometimes the photos are not from anywhere near anywhere ;)

Some people are starting to geo-code their photos using GPS data to auto-tag the photo with the location, so using lat, long to locate photos on a map would greatly simplify import of geo-coded photos.

Third thought:
Great site, like it a lot and I'm sure it will be huge so better start planning for that now!

written by  farrago on June 16, 2006

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