Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

My photos from Bloggforum are online. Raymond beat me to it, but I have more photos than him. I was delayed partly because the Swedish winter made me sick, partly because I wanted to take the opportunity to check out the photosharing service 23. I first noticed 23 in Jonas' sidebar and when I met Thomas Madsen-Mygdal — one of the creators of 23 — at Bloggforum I figured it was time to try it out.

23 has some really nice features — it's especially in the small details that the service shines. Uploading a batch of photos was easy. 23 accepts zip files, so I could create a zip file on my desktop and drop photo files into the zip archive. The downside seems to be that there is no way to control the order of the photos. Right now my Bloggforum photos appear in random order and not reverse chronological order, that's too bad because the zip upload was really nice.

The limitation on the free account is 20MB/month, otherwise it's identical to the plus account (€29/year; no upload limit). This gets rid of my main problem with Flickr where free users are only allowed 200 photos total making the free account next to useless. A 20MB/month limit seems reasonable, bandwidth is after all not free. Flickr also has a limit on the amount of photosets (albums) for free accounts. Photosets are virtually free for Flickr to maintain. 23 has no such artificial limits on the free accounts, so you can actually share a large amount of photos with 23 for free (provided you scale them down prior to upload).

But like I said the value is in the details. For example the tag pages (e.g. snow) contain links to tag pages at other services like Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us. This is great because the tag page on 23 can serve as a hub. It's what Technorati could have been, but chose not to be. Another nice feature are stories where you can mix photos and text (example). 23 seems to really have thought about different ways to present photos — you also have a calendar to browse photos. It's nice to see some real thinking being done in that area.

Other random small items:

• 16 photos on each page is nice.
• No easy way to go from your own tag page to the global one is not nice. I just didn't see the link
• Likewise not being able to go to a global tag page from any photo is not nice.
• Links to other users on tag pages is nice.
• Having contacts and subscriptions seperated is nice.
• Pages written in Danish is nice.
• Half-translated pages are not nice (especially the FAQ is lacking).
• “Can't read” is a bad error message. It should've said “You've reached your monthly bandwidth limit, pay up”.
• Being able to see “more properties” without a page reload is nice for a guy like me who's trying to learn how to take pictures.

Update

I've posted additional thoughts on 23.