Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Thing 26: Photobucket



In Learning 2.0, we looked at Flickr, an excellent resource for finding photographs of places and things, and an excellent place to post your own photography.

Photobucket competes with Flickr, although they have slightly different target audiences. Like Flickr, Photobucket is a photo sharing website, but it also lets you share other kinds of images (including animations) and video clips. Photobucket dominates the photosharing website game with 40% of the market in April of this year. (No other site has more than 6% of the market; only Yahoo! Photos has over 5%, and Yahoo! Photos is set to be discontinued in favor of Flickr, also a Yahoo!-owned website, before the end of the year.)

In addition to photo and video storage and sharing, Photobucket also lets you save animated clips, create slideshows of images, "remix" videos and create avatars. Oh, and they have lots of pictures of celebs and other newsworthy items. (By the way, Photobucket is being purchased by Fox Interactive Media, the company that owns MySpace. FIM is, in turn, part of NewsCorp.)

You may have noticed a few "things" ago at LetterPop that you could import your images directly from Flickr, without downloading and uploading them to and from your PC as an intervening step; Photobucket has a similar arrangement with many, many websites, notably social networking site MySpace and others. One big difference is that from Flickr you can only use photos you have posted; at Photobucket, add any image or video you like to your album (or further organize your choices into sub-albums), and you can use it, no matter who originally posted it. In other words, anything you add to a public account at Photobucket is fair game for any other Photobucket user to see and use on a blog or profile at any website (as long as it's not for commercial purposes).

Discovery Exercise:
  1. Create a Photobucket account.
  2. Use the "Find stuff" tab to browse for items (instead of searching).
  3. Be sure to click the "My album" tab - that's where you'll add your own photos, create slide shows and avatars or remix videos.
  4. Comment about your experience.

2 comments:

Pleiades said...

I guess some of these images could be used on the multiscreens but just imagine, if you'd walked in to your local library and saw one of your own images there!!! That was fun and I hope the emails go through. I'll bet they're stuck in GWAVA

Learning 2.0 program said...

They got through, and were beautiful! You'll have to come visit a tiny cottage I have up in the moutains, no light pollution and I'm thinking about a telescope...