SlickPic

In 2010, the nascent SlickPic service took as its mission to improve on what was available in the Web photo sharing space. With Facebook and Instagram's domination of casual photo-sharing and Flickr's deep tools for image organizing and broad photography community, that's a tall order. SlickPic does offer more for your photos than you get in Facebook, but let's dig into the service to see whether they succeeded in topping the major photo-specific sites.

Setup and Signup
SlickPic's signup page claims that it offers the "most generous free photo sharing accounts on the Web." This could be construed as true, up to a point. The service does offer uploads unlimited in number, but not in quality?free-account photos will be shrunk to 1600x1200 if the uploaded image is larger, and the maximum file size is 10MB?not much in this day of DSLRs. And like some online backup services, the "unlimited" storage is qualified by the rubric "Subject to Terms of Use and assumes normal data usage." All of which mean it's not really unlimited.

Once you move up to the $24.95-a-year Plus account level, your photo size limit is upped to 2560x1600, and your file size limit goes up to 15MB per image. But at the same price point, Flickr gives you unqualified unlimited uploading, with a maximum file size limit of 50MB.

You can sign up with your Facebook or Google account to save yourself some data entry. Failing that, you just need a name and email account to get in. An activation link in said email account gets you started with the service.

Interface
One interface peeve I have with this service shows up every time you navigate to the root Web address: You're taken to the promotional main service page, rather than to your own photo stream as you are in most photo sites. Once you get past this page, the design is quite clear and explanatory. A search box at the top lets you find photos by title or keyword, or find other photographers. Site mode options appear next to this?My Home, My Organizer, My Gallery, and My Account. A big orange Upload button is the most prominent thing on your home page. Below this are your usage stats, including page views, comments, and "credits."

A distinguishing feature of SlickPic, these credits let you submit photos for enhancement by pros. Unlike most popular photo sites, SlickPic has virtually no online tools for photo editing?not even brightness or cropping. I started out with 5 free credits in my account, and different levels of photo enhancement cost from 1 for standard edit to 39 credits for photo restoration. When you submit a photo, you can choose a color setting?warmer, original, monochrome, or designer's choice. The service only edits a copy of your photo, so you won't lose the original. I tried three 1-credit standard enhancements. After five days, I still hadn't received the edited photo, so don't expect instant response. If we find that the results are spectacular, we'll update this review and adjust the rating, but the site's lack of any do-it-yourself photo editing tools is a serious flaw.

Uploading photos is a key activity in any photo hosting and sharing site. With SlickPic, you need to create or choose an Album before you can do so. You can select multiple files for upload, and thumbnails appear very rapidly once you start. But there's no drag-and-drop uploading on the site, as is available with Flickr's Uploadr page. A more streamlined way to upload is using one of the service's plugins for software; these are available for Adobe Lightroom, Windows Photo Gallery, Apple Aperture, and iPhoto. A final way to upload photos to your account is via email; the service can generate a long complicated email address for this.

Organizing Photos
You either create a new album for your upload, or add to an existing one. There's no simply adding to your photo stream. You can't apply keyword tags or titles during upload. Once your photos are uploaded, you'll be in My Organizer mode, where you can share, move, copy, and add photos to your enhancement order. Hovering the mouse over a photo thumbnail lets you change its title, rotate it, star it, and add it to a Quick Collection, but I'd also like to see the opportunity to add keywords at this point. Collections are simply ways to group photos from different galleries in one presentation.

Clicking on the photo opens its photo page, where you can indeed finally apply a description and keyword tags in the left sidebar. Helpfully, some keywords were applied automatically based on EXIF and keywording in other apps. A couple of very useful kinds of organizing are completely missing from SlickPic, however?People tagging and geo-tagging.

The gallery view is attractive enough, though free accounts get an unlovely ad bar just above their galleries. Inside a gallery, you have several display options: one large photo, squares, highlights?with one large photo and a side group for switching among pics, wallpaper which jams photos up against each other, and Journal, which looks like blog entries.? The background is pleasingly dark, but eight buttons for social sharing below each add clutter. You can dismiss these by hovering the mouse over the light-gray text "Photo Only," if you find it. I did like the I button, which displays EXIF data such as camera model, lens, and exposure settings. Next to this, the heart and comment buttons allow feedback.

Slickpic's Slideshow view, however, is not full screen, which is a fairly big minus, since nearly all the major photo sites offer this. At least you can set the time in seconds that photos will display.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/bA-oK7RnKDc/0,2817,2413725,00.asp

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