Sometime ago, one of my contacts posted a question up on his twitter page about why people would use pix.ie over flickr. I know other people have answered this question (see Phil O’Kane’s comments here) but I wanted to put a few words together on the subject myself.
I got into social networking through Flickr. Prior to it, and people commenting on my shots, I didn’t even know the concept existed. For me, interaction on the interweb was basically through message boards, particularly special interest ones. I wound up on Flickr I don’t know how but it probably had something to do with the early days of blogging and a desire to post photographs to what was then my blog on blogspot. I believe this was the first photography I put online:
For photography nerdiness, it was taken with an Olympus OM10. Anyway, shortly afterwards I got a digital compact to make the uploading easier (all that scanning wrecked my head because there was always – literally always – one tiny little hair I missed either on the photograph or a speck of dust or something) and then I went on holidays in Australia, bought a 350D and the whole photography thing snowballed in such a way that 15 rolls of film after a holiday was somehow tame output compared to 2,500 photographs after 10 days in Morocco, for example. When I was in Australia, I pro’d up the Flickr account and joined the photography forum on boards.ie where I already knew the then moderator, a dude called rymus.
I still use the flickr account a lot but sometime later, pix.ie got flagged through boards.ie and I wound up having a look at it just to see what it had, didn’t use it much for a while, and then started to use it more recently.
On the face of it, pix.ie lags behind flickr in certain terms but it has certain advantages which have led to me deciding to host nearly all the photographs on this site on pix.ie rather than flickr which would have been the case for the older site, Dancing Shades of Light (now defunct).
Plus points in favour of Pix.ie
- 800 pixel wide images
- easy access to the support team in pix.ie who host a forum through boards.ie
- access to corporate events (unexpectedly in my case) such as the Saint Patrick’s Day Festival and they have also done things with Ruby, World Street Performance
Pix.ie, however, lacks a number of easily usable features which are taken for granted on Flickr. I am pretty sure that they are on the plan for Pix.ie.
- Groups
- Protection of large sized images
the one thing that I dislike about Pix.ie above all else is the inline advertising. I realise they need to pay hosting and network bills and I know that they have huge infrastructure. However, I’d willing pay for pix.ie in the same way as I pay for flickr if it meant I didn’t have advertising on my page.
Flickr, on the other hand, has
- the groups
- the image protection to a greater extent which means I can use the site pretty much as an offsite back up.
- larger community which has given me access to some very, very talented photographers world wide
But
- responses to problems take longer
- their image size selection goes from 500px to 1084. I’d appreciate the 800 in the middle for blog and forum posts.
- there is a lot of dross in some of the groups
- the animated trophy gifs drive me up the wall.
It’s clear to me that the flickr product is currently the more mature and developed offering but that being said, pix.ie has been doing a lot of work in the background lately. However it’s also clear to me that pix.ie is better for some of the stuff I use it for (namely the blogs and the fora) and flickr is better on the storage and also, currently, audience front.
Pretty much everyone I know who has a pix.ie account also has a flickr account. The same is not really true for everyone I know who has a flickr account.
I know, from having spoken to the people behind pix.ie that they have some nice ideas about what they want to do in the future. I am not sure how close they are to fruition per se but given that I derive some benefit out of the accounts as they exist at present, I’m not really in the business of choosing one over the other; only that when the dust settles and pix.ie eventually comes out of beta, they will probably complement each other in terms of how I use them rather than anything else.
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