New picture-hosting site.

[martijn_cube]

A friend of mine started a new picture hosting site.
It's completely free and has no real limit.
You can create an account, or use quick-upload.
maybe you should give it a try.

www.smoothpic.com

 

[pjk]

Looks great. It is a tough niche to be in, since you are competing with so many big name free, photo-sharing companies (Picasa (Google), Photobucket, ImageShack, etc.). Keeping up with them is especially hard with free photo-sharing because they have the resources to power many, many more images than a typical website builder. Photo-sharing can also become quite costly. However, good luck to your friend. He could make it successful if he works at it, but you have to ask, what will SmoothPic offer that all these others don't? There has to be an incentive for people to upload their pictures at SmoothPic instead of Photobucket or Picasa.

 

[Stefan]

Looks very good, very well done as far as I can see. Slim interface, lets me upload right away instead of scaring or confusing me away like Picasa/ImageShack etc (can't reach Photobucket right now). I don't want to click through endless pages and read through endless terms, I want to upload an image and give others the link. This one lets me. A real competitor is tinypic.com, which is similarly easy. This one seems much cleaner, though.

In my opninion, ideally such a site has a title, an upload field, and nothing else. This one gets close, only offering useful additional content and being well-structured.

Suggestions you can maybe forward to your friend:
- Offer very short links without special characters, e.g., http://smoothpic.com/af834a
- Mention what's "smooth" about it. I'm a nitpicker, I want to know, and I dislike people for giving meaningful names without telling the meaning.
- Mention why I should trust him being able to keep the site running.

Btw, I wouldn't call something "new" when it started two years ago.

 

[martijn_cube]

I will show him this tread tomorrow. Then i will give you some answers. thanks for the input though.
and about the new, it had a new big update last week, one of the big updates was the quick-upload en better links under the pictures, and more things. and it was new to me

 

[Lotsofsloths]

what about tinypic.com?

 

[Dene]

what about tinypic.com?

A real competitor is tinypic.com, which is similarly easy. This one seems much cleaner, though.

 

[dinsane]

Hi all,

First thanks to martijn to help us to be populair i hope and we love to good feedback

Will clear up some things.

1 . He could make it successful if he works at it, but you have to ask, what will SmoothPic offer that all these others don't?

At the moment we keep on programming things our selfs we dont offer any special things compared to other hosters but i think we have a small advantage on the advertisment we keep it as low as possible. More tools will be added later probably ftp and email + zip files .doc .pdf support and maybe in the furture .zip .rar etc. As we speak we are translating the site in german spanish danish and dutch is already done. The main is english because thats the main part of the world.

2.- Offer very short links without special characters, e.g., http://smoothpic.com/af834a

We are building this at the moment hope to have it running soon.

3. - Mention what's "smooth" about it.

Interesting question well smooth as in easy to use it was a night of alot of brain storming and checking if a domain name was taken.

4. - Mention why I should trust him being able to keep the site running.

Well here is where i can be better then other hosters i have my own hosting company with enough cabinets to not worry about the costs free hosting + bandwidth and hardware. Well untill it becomes as big as flickr but we will see when that happens.

5. Btw, I wouldn't call something "new" when it started two years ago.

We started programming 2 years ago and had alot of test runs and just put it online to have interaction with the people who use it every bug and opinion we took serious and changed it or made a note to our selfs. This year we finally put 1.0 online and started to make it more noticable and hope we get allot of feedback good or non good we hope that we can build a host site which is just better then the rest and easier to use.

Thanks for the reaction every bit of info helps to improve our work .
And we arent really affraid of the bighosters they all end up being bought by a company which ruins it by placing to much banners and pop ups for example imagevenue.

cheers
dins

 

[GerrySly]

...More tools will be added later probably ftp and email + zip files .doc .pdf support and maybe in the furture .zip .rar etc....

Going by the website name I would keep it to pictures, but .zip and .rar would be cool, something like extracting a zip (or rar) file of images.

I reckon you should implement a javascript progress bar, a page that just loads for a couple minutes is really annoying and tedious for the end user. Something like what DivShare have.

Also it won't let me upload files with the extension .jpeg

 

[dinsane]

thanks for the tips jpeg should work will see what is wrong

the multiupload tool has a progress bar but adding one for the single upload would be a good thing indeed will make it a prio for version 1.1