UPDATE: I complain below about some limited functionality (none) when asked to select a country, and in a surprising, (and much appreciated) twist, Benjamin from Imgembed commented and said they’ve already fixed the issue. I tried and sure enough, I was able to easily change the country field and add relevant data. Great customer service and a dev team that is responsive and quick to act has the potential to set Imgembed apart. I hope they keep it up! Thanks, Benjamin.
I read on Peta Pixel earlier this week about a new image hosting and sharing service that treats images more like YouTube treats video.
Imgembed allows embedding of images, but with better attribution and always from the direct source of the image (well, as long as the source is Imgembed) – like when I put a video up here on my site, it actually stays living at on YouTube servers and only gets streamed over here. The format allows YouTube to better track what happens to videos and it also allows more creative methods for advertising (and yes, I miss the late 90’s before Google got it’s ads all over everything).
I decided to give it a shot. I signed up and tried to upload some photos.
As you can see, it works alright. I found some limited functionality issues on the website though – but I admit it’s my first time using the service – so I might be doing it wrong. In the photo above, it says it was created by “Someone” – it should say “strayfoto” or “Quinn”. The reason it doesn’t is because the site won’t allow me to save any personal information until I select a country I’m from and the country selection tool is useless – it won’t offer me any country options and won’t let me simply type in USA.
So I can’t really change my name or anything else because I can’t pick a country from a blank drop-down box. Oh well. Also, images are limited to 1000 pixels along the long side, which seems small to me. Another negative I noticed was that the service doesn’t seem to read metadata tags in photos. This is an essential function in my opinion – Flickr does this well. An image hosting service needs to be able to read metadata tags on photos to use them in the search function. I’m not adding metadata tags to my photos in Photoshop and then typing them in again in Imgembed. No way.
If you want to embed the image for “free” them it seems the embedded image is limited to 550×412 pixels, which is fine for most web-viewing.
One of the biggest caveats Imgembed claims is that it will cut down on theft of images by hosting the images and directing viewers back to the original artist’s page at Imgembed. This, really, is exactly what Flickr already does. Sure, a user can perhaps more easily download an image from Flickr and use it without permission, but most images people have used from me on Flickr almost always redirected back to my Flickr account. Since I enabled copyright notice on my Flickr account, very few of my images have been used anywhere.
All of these I embedded with Imgembed, and it was about as easy as Flickr. Although I wasn’t used to the interface at all (I literally signed up this morning) I managed pretty easily. One great bonus, if you visit the site using Explorer you’re greeted with a hilarious plea to embrace a better browser. While I’m still not convinced about Imgembed, I’m behind them on this one for sure.
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Don’t forget to check out some of the fine art prints for sale in my Etsy shop. I’ve also written and illustrated a children’s book for the Kindle Called Coyote Life. If you’ve got kids, check it out. If you enjoy it, please leave a review. Thanks.
My wife Leah makes and sells some pretty neat leather stuff like minimalist wallets and camera straps. Check out her Etsy store for some cool gear.
