ArticlesWhich requirements does 4Images 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. | Y | |
| CAT1 | C | Photographs grouped into albums by event | Y | |
| CAT2 | C | Photographs tagged with people | Y | |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | N | |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | Y | |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | Y | |
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | Y | |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | N | |
| 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 | N | |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | N | |
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | ? | |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | Y | |
| S+L2 | I | Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. | N | |
| S+L3 | I | Link to other photos with same tag across my albums | N | |
| S+L4 | I | Search of tags by keyword | Y | |
| S+L5 | I | Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. | Y | |
| S+L6 | D | Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites | N | |
| S+L7 | D | Search of album names by keyword | ? | |
| S+L8 | D | User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword | N | mod_rewrite might work |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | N | |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | N | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | Y | |
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | ? | |
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | ? | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | ? | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | N | Bzzzzt! |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | N | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | N | |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | N | |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | ? | |
| PQ7 | D | Support for long video | ? | |
| PERF1 | I | Quota > 0.5 TB, if any | Y | |
| PERF2 | I | Low-cost | Y | |
| PERF3 | I | Fast response time | Y | |
| PERF4 | I | Scale to thousands of tags | Y | |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | N | |
| PERF6 | D | Free | Y | |
| UI1 | C | Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. | Y | Too hard to find! |
| UI2 | D | Slideshows | ? | |
| UI3 | D | Display of many thumbnails at once | Y | |
| PRIV1 | C | Their email address should never be published on the web. | Y | |
| PRIV2 | I | Registration and logging in not required for general use. | Y | |
| PRIV3 | I | Robust privacy features for photographs | ? | |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | ? | |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | N | |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | Y | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | ? | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | Y | Schema available |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | Y | Schema available |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | Y | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | Y | |
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N |
Summary
At this stage in the evaluation process, it is a great pleasure to be able to simply rule-out one of the serious contenders as inappropriate. So, I am kind of happy that 4Images failed. I didn’t like it much from the beginning, but it took a while for its fatal flaw to show.
It only has two picture sizes – thumbnail and original. It has a resize function, which meant I didn’t flag this as an issue early, but the resize function actually changes the “original” image to the new size. Unless, of course, it turns out to be too large (one of my images was 960K – which is what I called “print sized”; it isn’t nearly a full-sized original), in which case it crashes with an out-of-memory error, and leaves the album corrupted.
Other issues include: ugliness, clutter, poor discoverability and poor documentation. It took me 10 minutes searching the web to find out how to do bulk uploads (I could find the feature, but not where to put the files to make it work.) It turned out I had to work out the id of the album, to find the right subdirectory to put the files. Ugh.
When I did see all the images, they were displayed straight back at me in print-size, so I couldn’t even see the whole image to mark the keywords.
Anyway, 4Images is off the list. Yay!
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