the Onda

I've held off writing this post for a while, mostly because I was afraid it would seem like too much inside baseball for me to talk about how photo sites (which Tabblo attempted to be a superset of) basically still suck almost a decade after the first one launched. But the combination of recent usability testing I attended with my own frustrations using Tabblo and Flickr have overflowed the dam of self-restraint, so here goes.

Three Major ways in which photo sharing sites still suck

Most photo sites are still not geared towards pleasing the most important user, the person giving you their valuable time to see yet another album of your kids doing X, Y, or Z. Why is it that the predominant model for consuming photos online is a contact sheet interface (a grid of X by Y photos) along with a clickable "large" version that is often way too small? Sometimes you might get a half decent slideshow too, though these are very un-webby, and after you've seen 2 of any one theme, you've seen them all.

It is interesting that back in the day when Tabblo could freely call itself a photo site, this is the reaction I'd get from people when I'd talk about this consumption interface challenge: 20% of users would get it right away but 80% of people would give me this "huh?!?" look which was meant to make me feel loony. Here is the example I'd use to escape from Loontown: imagine that you bought a copy of National Geographic but instead of the beautifully art directed layouts of the articles, you'd have all the text of the piece followed by a number of contact sheets of all of the photography followed by a page per photo of all of the individual pictures. How many issues would you subject yourself to before canceling the subscription?

Most photo sites don't have fast enough interfaces for the author, especially around photo organization/selection: Try dealing with a collection of 25,000 images to get all of the pictures of a family member for a birthday. The best of the desktop applications can barely do this (and those are the GPU accelerated ones) to say nothing of how far behind the websites are. And manual tagging is only going to take us so far as it is in effect one of many kludges that enable batch operations (a poor substitute for snappy direct manipulation and search).

On this particular challenge, I would have thought that we would have made more progress by now, but as it turns out, I think most people see the assets stored/created on a photo site as a read-only projection of their photo library which tends to live on their home computer. This allows users to leverage the storage/CPU of the local machine for the heavy lifting, and use the web for sharing and output fulfillment. Apple's iPhoto is perhaps the best example of this: books, cards, and calendars can be assembled 100% on the client out of the entire photo library, and manufactured through a set of partner services. This makes activities like collaborative editing and composition more difficult (though not impossible), and sharing is at best very vanilla on dot mac these days, but it may just be something we have to live with, especially because...

Upload of photos is still horrendously broken, and getting more so as image resolution increases. This is what made me think of this topic in the first place again. Watch a novice user uploading photos and you will get all sorts of understandable errors at the boundary of the desktop and web metaphors. They will drag pictures into the browser window and have them open locally. The will go looking on the website for their C: drive. And perhaps most alarming, often times they will not know how to find their images on the local filesystem in the first place (which points to how expired the desktop metaphor is). Watch an advanced user and you will literally see the hair falling out of their head as they deal with the challenge of sucking a watermellon through a straw (the physical equivalent of uploading 12MP images via a 300kbps asymmetric cable connection). While there are solutions to this problem (a software agent running on your PC uploading everything, wi-fi camera cards, etc.), most of them fall short due to intermittent connections and the challenge of organizing/finding photos once they are living online (see above).

Until we as an industry (camera makers, browser vendors, OS vendors, output vendors, etc.) fix these problems, photo sites are going to remain relegated to the backwater of 4x6 production while the rich hybrid solutions (of which only iPhoto really works) continue to take output share while not really advancing the state of photo sharing. It's a shame too because of how inherently social story telling via photos could be.