23 2 comments

19 Aug 2005 @ 20:20, by Flemming Funch Yesterday I was at the launch event for 23 in Copenhagen. I'm on vacation in Denmark at the moment. "23", spearheaded by Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, is a photo storage and sharing website. Well, there are several of those already, but these guys seem to have gone a good deal further and really created a system that does what most people actually need and want. It seems quite suited to replace whatever local program you store your digital photos in. I use iPhoto. 23 does most of what iPhoto does, and most of what Flickr does, and some things none of them do. While still appearing very simple. You can add photos a number of ways. By e-mail, by an upload, either individually or as a zip file, from a URL, or from plugins to iPhoto or similar programs. You can organize your photos in a number of ways, like tagging them and putting them in albums. You have finegrained control over who can look at the photos. They can be all private, they can be public, or you can give particular people access to particular photos or albums. You can subscribe to photos from certain people or with certain tags. Even with a free account you can upload lots of photos, and with a very cheap paid account you have unlimited storage. Doesn't scare them at all that lots of folks are going to upload the multiple gigabytes they have on their disks already. The system is very new so you might well run into quirks, or things that aren't there yet. And there are less than 100 users right now. But overall it seems very well designed. They've thought a lot about the usability, and interviewed many people about how they use photos and what they need. Anyway, be one of the first to check it out.

2 comments