fotopic.net

Fotopic.net was established in February 2001 by husband and wife team Joel and Nicky Rowbottom, and lets photographers - professional or otherwise - display images on the web at no charge. More importantly perhaps, there are also no annoying pop-ups and intrusive advertising banners.

Over 8000 images are published every single day, by more than 22,000 registered users in 131 countries. The total number of photos published reached the ...
...Uploading your pictures to the fotopic.net site is easy, and there are a number of options. You can either upload them through a web browser such as Internet Explorer, up to ten at a time, by browsing for the files to upload either on your computer or directly from your camera, assuming it's connected via your computer.

Alternatively, you can use an FTP client such as CuteFTP or similar, or even email the pictures directly to the fotopic ... more

Fotopic.net was established in February 2001 by husband and wife team Joel and Nicky Rowbottom, and lets photographers - professional or otherwise - display images on the web at no charge. More importantly perhaps, there are also no annoying pop-ups and intrusive advertising banners.

Over 8000 images are published every single day, by more than 22,000 registered users in 131 countries. The total number of photos published reached the 2 million mark in January 2004, and they expect to hit 10 million this month (March 2004). That's some rate of growth!

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Registering
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To publish photos, first you have to sign up for an account. Registering only takes around 5 minutes, and you need to provide a working email address, contact details and a password. Registering is easy, and pretty standard as compared against a multitude of other websites that also now demand registration.

You need to ensure you give a valid email address, as a confirmation email will be sent to it. You need to click on the link they send to confirm your account. If you have not done this within 7 days of it being sent, your account will be lost from the system, and you'd have to start again.

You use the email address given and the password selected to log in on future visits.

When you register, your first gallery is automatically created when you click on the large text that says "Create my first gallery", and you can begin publishing pictures immediately.

You can also choose which web address your photos can be accessed from. There are a number of domain choices (see below).

The standard level account includes a massive 250 MB of space, which means around 1500 photos - although exact numbers depend on resolution, of course. Also, when you have used up your 250 MB of space, you can request more space. This space used to be free, but there's now a small charge of £5 for an extra 250 MB, getting less per MB if you buy more. If you choose to have a premium account, you will automatically get a gigabyte of storage and be first in the queue if you need to increase the amount.

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Galleries
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Once logged in, you will find that a gallery has been created to hold your photos. You are given the choice over what this gallery will be called (eg mine is called "Photos by Cate") and who the copyright notice should be assigned to. At the bottom of all published pages that show your pictures, there will be the copyright symbol with the name that you choose associated with it. This is important, as Fotopic does not retain any copyright over your pictures, however does mean that you should never publish pictures to which you don't own the copyright or have the copyright holders permission to use their photos, as you will be infringing someone else's rights.

You can also give your gallery a description, and choose whether it should be listed in Fotopic's public listings or not.

Each gallery can contain various collections of photographs, for example of a specific subject or event. So within "Photos by Cate" I have groups of photos from various holidays we have been on, parties I've been to, and so on. There's nothing to stop one individual having several galleries, you can create new ones quite easily from the "my.fotopic" pages.

When publishing pictures, you may find that a collection has been referred for manual checking. This usually is completed very quickly by the team at fotopic - I have never had it take longer than 12 hours as far as I can remember.

This happens because every user has a particular karma associated with them. When you first sign up, you'll have a karma of 20, which means that 20% of the time new collections will be passed automatically. The more karma you have, the less frequently you are randomly selected for manual processing up to a karma value of 99, when your collections are hardly ever processed manually.

Your karma value increases by 1 every time you publish a collection without incident (ie, there's no illegal or offensive material published). If there is an incident, then your karma rating could be either decreased by one of the moderators, or reduced to -1, which means that every single collection you publish will be manually checked.

Changing gallery settings is not something I've had a problem with, although it does usually take me a minute or two to find which setting I'm looking for. There are little help icons included all over the place, and more being added all the time, so it's relatively easy to figure things out. One of the only criticisms I'd have about the site is that you can't always tell which setting does what, and a bit more information about them would be welcome!

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Gallery addresses:
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The first web address you're given for your gallery probably won't be very user friendly (user5972346gallery8475.fotopic.net, or something like that at least). However, don't despair! Once logged in, you can choose a better web address than that poor effort. To do this, use the gallery settings menu and choose the Gallery Web Address icon. If you then choose Free Address (assuming you don't have your own domain name, in which case you can use that if you want to), this takes you to various options you can choose from.

You can use any of the following domains, and just have to find a simple word or name that isn't already in use on that domain. xxx here indicates the space that your chosen user name will appear in.

Options are:
xxx.blokes.org.uk, xxx.digimig.co.uk, xxx.fotoblog.co.uk, me.uk or org.uk, xxx.fotodock.co.uk, xxx.fotopic.net, xxx.fpic.co.uk, xxx.mediaobject.co.uk, xxx.mediaobjects.co.uk, xxx.mysnaps.org.uk, xxx.photoblog.co.uk, me.uk, or org.uk, xxx.photobook.org.uk, xxx.photonation.co.uk, xxx.photos.cn.com, xxx.photos.de.com, xxx.photos.gb.com, xxx.photos.gb.net, xxx.photos.me.uk, xxx.photos.us.com, xxx.photosnaps.org.uk, xxx.ukgeeks.co.uk, xxx.ukgrrls.co.uk, or xxx.videopic.net

*Phew!*

Some of the domains are obviously more aimed at the amateur user rather than professionals (ukgeeks, anyone?), but it's nice having so many options to choose from for free. What's also really good is that if you do have your own domain name, then you can use that instead. I can't really comment on how that works, however, since I haven't tried it out.

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Collections
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A collection is a group of photos within a gallery. It can have as many or as few pictures in it as you like. There are tons of settings that you can choose from for each collection, and the settings that you use on one collection don't have to be used on your other collections if you don't want them to.

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Pictures
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Again, there are plenty of options as far as displaying your pictures goes. You can add descriptions of what they are of, choose whether to display the date, time, description etc over the image (in different corners of it), choose whether to watermark them, and much more.

You can also choose whether the front page of your gallery should display the most viewed picture overall from your collections, or the top picture from each collection, or both.

Pictures are displayed in jpeg form. You can upload them in whatever resolution you have, but the file size when displayed is compressed. This isn't a problem so long as its for web viewing rather than printing.

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Uploading Pictures
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Uploading your pictures to the fotopic.net site is easy, and there are a number of options. You can either upload them through a web browser such as Internet Explorer, up to ten at a time, by browsing for the files to upload either on your computer or directly from your camera, assuming it's connected via your computer.

Alternatively, you can use an FTP client such as CuteFTP or similar, or even email the pictures directly to the fotopic team for them to add them manually for you.

The simplest method is to use your web browser to upload, although it can take a while. Once you've added the pictures, you can then either upload more, or publish what is there. Once you've chosen to publish what is there, you will find out whether the pictures have been picked for manual processing/approving or not. Assuming that they haven't, they will appear in your gallery within 2 hours. At least, this is the time that the site tells you, whereas unless referred for checking, I've always found my pictures to be available immediately.

You can see what percentage of space your pictures have used out of your 250MB on the main settings page in my.fotopic, with a bar coloured red and green for used and unused space.

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Customer Service
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Until recently, I had no direct experience of fotopic.net customer service. However, before Christmas 2003, my other half's laptop was stolen. On it were the only copies we had of our holiday snaps (we had written them onto a CD, unfortunately this was in the CD drive on the laptop at the time...). Fortunately, I'd uploaded all of the photos - around 100 - to my Fotopic account a few weeks previously. Fiddling with settings in order to allow me to download my pictures again (downloading is disabled in my gallery by default), I realised that the images displayed were far lower resolution then when I'd uploaded them.

I called Fotopic and spoke to Joel Rowbottom (the founder of the site) about whether I could get access to the original pictures again by upgrading my account to the premium service for a month - I was quite willing to pay a reasonable charge to get the pictures back. Although he said that this would work, when I explained what had happened, he offered to write the original files onto a CD for me and post it to my home address, at no charge.

Naturally, I am absolutely delighted by the service I've received, and I'm keen to spread the word about the site!

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Premium vs Standard Accounts
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Added benefits of having a premium account include:

Optional watermarking of images to improve protection against copying.
More customisation options, plus being able to create your own gallery style if you want to.
Add polls for your visitors to vote in, or MIDI files for them to listen to while they surf your photos (I have to say I'm not convinced that this is a good idea!).
Removal of Fotopic branding from your gallery web site.
The ability to download collections as ZIP files so your account can be your main location for storing images.
Better weekly statistics (although I don't use the ones I already get in my standard account).
Priority both for manual approvals and requests for increasing your amount of space.
With a premium account, you can also sign up to the Premium Rewards programme, letting you make money from selling your pictures. You can set your own prices for images, and Fotopic handle it for you.

To be honest, I'd say that there is plenty included in the standard account, certainly enough to suit the average user. If you are a professional photographer, or want to sell your images, then it would probably be worth upgrading to premium, but I think I'll be sticking with what I've got, at least for the moment.

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Privacy
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Collections of photos can be password protected if you want them to remain private but published on the web, this option can be accessed through the my.fotopic pages. It's not currently possible to protect a whole gallery, though.

Regarding personal details, I've not had any problems with my details or email address being passed on, not been subjected to spam as a result of signing up, or anything of that nature.

They adhere to the UK Data Protection Act 1998, so have committed to not using your personal information in ways that you are not aware of or have not agreed to.

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Fun facts
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By January 2003, 15% of the pictures published on the site came from phone cameras.

Most users are either 14-35 or over 50.

During a snow storm in early 2003, more than 3500 pictures were uploaded for publishing, in under 2 hours.

82% of the pictures published are from the UK, US, Australia or Canada. 

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