Nothing to write home about

Over on ipernity, some folks are getting het up about pixrat, billed as a social bookmarking site for photos.

On the surface pixrat might sound like a great idea. It’s just another social bookmarking site, right? And social bookmarking is good, because it’s sociable. That’s the theory.

It’s been called delicio.us for photos by Michael Arrington on techcruch

If I was doing photo based research, this would be a very useful tool

He’s got a point - it is a novel way of collecting your favourite photos in one place.

It’s been reviewed by Download Squad and killer startups among other places.
Here’s how pixrat describes their service:

Collect pictures of interest from webpages as you browse them, at the click of a button.

Organize them into Albums and Tag them. Add your notes. Manage your lists via the picture bookmarks. (e.g. “Favorite movies”, “Books to read”, “Places to visit”, “Nature photography collection” …)

Share your picture albums with your friends, family and everyone else. Your bookmarks are visible to everyone unless you choose to make them private.

Discover what is popular with other Pixraters. Comment on and Vote for bookmarked pictures.

So far so good. The collector gets to share their favourite pictures with the world and the photographer gets their photos to more people. And they’d want that - obviously. By putting their photos online in the they are already sharing them, and this is just more of the same.

Well, not quite.

One of my “bookmarked” photos

For many photographers, it’s not a useful way of getting extra exposure but just another way of getting ripped off.

Pixrat falls down is at stage 2, where they’ve forgotten one minor detail. Sure, you can categorize them, tag them, add notes, there’s even a link back the the original photo, but what you can’t do is credit the photographer. And when you get the the voting and sharing part, the lines are so blurred that it’s easy to think the collector took these photos.

Ipernity users have a lot to say on the subject

As for the websites doing this, I don’t care that they have linked back to ipernity, flickr, pbase, photonet, zoomer etc. - it’s a site that is encouraging and facilitating people to receive comments and votes on work that does not belong to them. It’s so wrong in my eyes. (picsbymac)

The problem as I see it is the absence of respect for others’ work and privacy. (Aref Namari)

i don’t feel so angry at the ignorant people who are encouraged to use that site and find images and comment on them but i’m angry that it’s possible and that the website exists. (melpomene)

Photo sharing sites do have to take some responsibility here - these sites encourage people to go down the photography route by the same means that pixrat uses - there is an inbuilt measure of how popular you are from comments, favourites and the explore facility. And by encouraging the use of creative commons licensing (more on that another time) the stage is set for operations like pixrat to exploit.

I have a feeling that that’s exactly what pixrat are doing - a rash of user accounts were set up a few days ago and only used to bookmark photos on ipernity. Many of the photos were commented on with a link back the the pixrat site - a cheap and easy way of advertising their new service. Only it backfired - users complained and team ipernity took immediate action, contacting pixrat and suspending the offending accounts.

I know that many people won’t see what all the fuss is about. If you do something good, like take a photo worth collecting, isn’t it natural to want to take the credit for it? When a couple of my photos were bookmarked, my heart sank to see them listed under someone’s name.