Review Of YouPic.com
I received an invite to this site last week. Was a bit skeptical at first since the invite was pretty spammy (god knows I already have plenty of places to put photos) but I have to admit that even though its interface could still use some work (web, iOS, etc.) it’s been more useful to me from a photography perspective than anything I’ve used to date.
Namely this is because it’s not really like an Instagram, or Flickr, etc. in which you just toss up any old thing (although you could if you wanted to). It has a *very* high quality level of photographers. And you can rate each others work, down to specifics like ‘composition’, ‘creativity’, and so on.
For people like me it’s a great place to both find inspirational photos and discuss how they were taken, but also to get useful insight into which of your own photos resonate with other photographers and what it was about the photo that they liked. Because of that, you tend to only put up photos that you think are worthy of review, which in turn keeps the overall quality level high.
As you know I don’t really review sites or applications often, I write stories. But for people like me where photography is a passion vs. a profession it’s been a goldmine. Since I had never heard of it before I assume most of you have not either.
To reiterate, it’s not really a place to keep and organize large amounts of your photos. So there aren’t things like ‘albums’, etc. for grouping photos. No facial recognition. No tagging of people as far as I can tell. It’s really more of a ‘friendly’ iteration of something like Pixoto (a site where you submit images to compete in head to head contests).
There are ‘awards’ and levels that you receive as you get more of the typical social factors like ‘favorites’, ‘repics’ (like a retweet within the platform), and engagement (comments)…as well as things like number of countries your photos were taken in and other less common items.
It does however have general tagging, keeps and displays all EXIF information as well as geotagged information if you wish. And yes, you or others can easily share a photo to any of the existing social networks. Oh, it also has a Lightroom plugin so you can upload directly from within the application. There’s also a section for education on photography, various interviews, etc. although I haven’t made extensive use of that yet.
Since they have the basic Lightroom plugin they obviously have at minimum a simplistic API so I’d like to see them support automation tools like IFTTT which would make them much more useful as we all try and manage the multitude of services where our photos are housed.
At the moment it’s free and without advertisements, which typically means there will be a ‘Freemium’ split at some point where they add certain features or split existing ones and charge for the premium options. But one never knows. The terms and conditions spell out clearly that you retain ownership of anything you upload that claims copyright, like all the other services it does give them the right to use your photo in promotional materials but unlike many of them they do have to give you credit in the process.
The key to any service such as this is to hit the minimum threshold of users needed who will engage with the service. From that perspective, it really shines. The users are high quality, highly engaged, and trolling is nonexistent so far. In my opinion it’s at the perfect ratio at the moment, will it remain as useful if its popularity goes through the rough? That remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether the team behind YouPic can keep up with growth if it were to explode, I’ve already seen some hiccups during peak periods. Nothing serious enough that it couldn’t be fixed with a simple browser refresh, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.
You can see my photos submitted so far and get a feel for the site here: https://youpic.com/photographer/techguerilla
Cheers,
Matt Ridings — @techguerilla
It should go without saying that I have no association with, partnership with, or am compensated or benefit in any form (monetarily or otherwise) for writing this review.
