more photos from acl

While feeding the ego this Sunday morning (a wonderful exercise, though somewhat tiresome if done too often) by surfing Technorati for reference to 23 I learned a few thing. Firstly, Jonathan and Jonas at labkloud9 put us on their Top 5 of Europe 2.0. Although that label seems quite void of actual content, we accept the compliment — and we’d urge anyone to compile a Top 50 list. That could be interesting.

Secondly, it seems that the our multilingual efforts have paid off. For example, I had to do a Google Translate to have my narcissism fully nurtured. Mejor que Flickr es 23 (translated) illustrates that point.

Then, it turns out that 23 is only a “normal” photo sharing site. Though, luckily, “there’s nothing wrong with that”. In fact, we’ve made something of a virtue out of appealing not only to the übergeeks with a digital camera − mostly because we’ve learned that non-geeks have been taking digital photos as well.

This brings us to the final point of the day: Uploading photos to 23 is very easy through the site itself. But we’ve often been asked for an uploader that works from the desktop. We wrote a while back that Mac users are spoiled in that regard with at least two very good tools (PictureSync and FlickrExport which has been updated since our last post). But there are tools for Windows and now Linux as well. The most recent is Pickup Photo Uploader, a Firefox extension which let’s you drag-n-drop some photos and then upload to 23 (and other photo sharing sites). My own test concluded that the tools works perfectly against 23, and, best of all, it ought to be platform independent.

This morning Guan added IPTC support to 23, which supplements the already existing EXIF support. And we’ve just put yet another version online which contains support for the Flash uploader in Opera 9. For the UI geeks out there we’ve added a small usability change when you delete photos.

A while back when we did the Flash upload feature the main focus was to alleviate the tedious task of selecting one file at a time. This made uploading photos much quicker, but there was still room for improvement in the speed of the actual upload.

Now, we’ve made that improvement. Anyone will experience the upload to be faster — and depending on the photos you’re uploading and the time of day you’re doing so you might see something like a 50 percent improvement.