OddThinking

A blog for odd things and odd thoughts.

Online Photo DB: Stage 4h – Evaluation of Phanfare.com

This post is part of the Online Photo Database project documentation. Learn more about the project’s current status.

After a long delay, I return to my quest to find a decent photo site.

Which requirements does Phanfare.com meet?

Id Pri Requirement Pass? Notes
GEN1 C Accessible by a typical web-browser Y
GEN2 I Active development of new features Y
OWN1 C Ownership of photos is retained by me. Y
OWN2 C Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours Y
OWN3 I Ownership of meta-data is retained by me.
CAT1 C Photographs grouped into albums by event Y
CAT2 C Photographs tagged with people N
CAT3 I Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities N
CAT4 I Performers tagged with real and stage names. N
CAT5 I Attribution of photographer details N
CAT6 I Attribution of copyright owner’s details N
CAT7 I Rating of photographs N
CAT8 I Sorting/Filtering by rating N
CAT9 D Albums grouped by type N
CAT10 D Albums grouped by date Y
CAT11 D Areas or points of photograph tagged N
CAT12 D Simple contact management of subjects N
CAT13 D Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people N
CAT14 D Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching N
CAT15 D Corrections to names update everywhere
CAT16 D Attribution of copyright details N
CAT17 D Control over (default) ordering Y
S+L1 C Link to other photos with same tag within an album
S+L2 I Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. N
S+L3 I Link to other photos with same tag across my albums
S+L4 I Search of tags by keyword
S+L5 I Cross-promotion of other albums and sites.
S+L6 D Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites
S+L7 D Search of album names by keyword
S+L8 D User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword
COMM1 D Multi-user Tagging
COMM2 D Notifications of appearance in photos
COMM3 D Comments permitted Y
COMM4 D Notification of comments
COMM5 D RSS or Atom Feeds for comments Probably
COMM6 D RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects Probably
COMM7 D RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos Y
PQ1 C Web-quality images shall be displayed by default.
PQ2 I Print-quality images shall be available. Y
PQ3 I Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions.
PQ4 D Archive-quality images shall be stored. Y
PQ5 D Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.)
PQ6 D Support for short video Y
PQ7 D Support for long video N
PERF1 I Quota > 0.5 TB, if any Y
PERF2 I Low-cost N $US55 p.a.
PERF3 I Fast response time
PERF4 I Scale to thousands of tags
PERF5 I < 1 minute face-time per photograph
PERF6 D Free N
UI1 C Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album.
UI2 D Slideshows Y
UI3 D Display of many thumbnails at once
PRIV1 C Their email address should never be published on the web.
PRIV2 I Registration and logging in not required for general use. Y
PRIV3 I Robust privacy features for photographs Y
WF1 I Hint to original location on my harddrive
WF2 I Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input
WF3 D Read EXIF data from image
WF4 D Support unpublished draft state
MIGR1 C API to add photos
MIGR2 C API to add tags
MIGR3 I Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo
METR1 D “How many visitors?” metric Y
METR2 D “How long does a visitor stay?” metric

Summary

I initially looked at the price, and thought “There’s no point spending much time on this.”

Then I noticed that the “cheap” requirement was only rated as “important”, not “critical”. Fair enough. If this was a particularly impressive site, maybe I would be willing to spend that much.

So, I registered.

No tagging?

Never mind!