Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something, because I don’t think I’ve ever used a site’s full functionality without consulting a single FAQ or other instruction.
BubbleShare allows users to upload photos without registration (this isn’t really a trick either - later registration is absolutely bare bones). There is a tour linked from the home page, but you really don’t need it - just start uploading photos and you’ll get how it works (they use the Flash 8 upload feature for photo sharing).
Things are album based. The free service allows users to create albums of up to 100 photos each, with a permanent URL for sharing. Photos can be dragged and dropped to change the order, resized and a voice comment can be added. Comments are available for visitors as well as an RSS feed.
Another key BubbleShare feature that many photo sites don’t have is a multi-uploader tool that allows user to upload many photos at once.
The only thing that BubbleShare is missing is photo tagging and tag search.
BubbleShare is now my second-favorite Canadian web 2.0 company. 
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It definitely the easiest photo sharing service that I have used to date. It has definitely gone through quite a bit of changes since I last wrote about it. But, the support from the creators was excellent, and you don’t see that much these days. Great service, great support. So, as for your question, “Best Photo Service Yet?” Not sure, but it’s my favorite when it comes to sharing photo albums.
easy doesn’t mean good: it’s crazy to manage a photoalbum via email!
I wish I could rotate my pictures. Or am I just too slow to figure out how?
Well ok I agree this is extremely simple. i love it too. The only thing is I really hate that name. I mean c’mon, BubbleShare?
Probably ok for their target market but its not earning any brownie points from me.
Really great - you can record audio clips to your images with flash - anybody who knows how that work?
I thought your first favorite was Ludicorp.
It definitely wins points for being something useful (not just a registration page like most other sites profiled here). The registration process is great !
A really nice and simple interface too. All that’s missing is a community and an API. How do I see other peoples photos ?
well, site design is erally simple and useful. i tried to build ap an album and everything was okay until at my 4th step after few minutes waiting for ‘making album’ it said
Bubble Not Found
The file you are looking for ain’t here…
bad bad bad
Have you tried Shutterbook? It is not quite this simplistic, but includes some neat features. Bubbleshare looks very interesting and I think the audio caption thing is pretty cool.
Michael: Thanks for the comments. We tried very hard to streamline the sharing process for folks like my mother that are often confused by more complex offerings.
One new feature that is my current fav, that I hope your readers will take a look at is our enhanced thumbnail view with “zooming,” you can check it out here:
http://www.bubbleshare.com/alb.....thumbnails
(Drag the zoom button left and right)
Its the first implementation of this type of UX with AJAX that we’re aware of.
With regards to multi-photo uploads, for IE users we have an ActiveX uploader, for FireFox and Mac users we have the first implementation of Flash 8 uploading on a photo site (that we’re aware of…). For Mac iPhoto folks, we also have a plug in (thank our resident Mac-head: Maz!).
As for your request for tagging and tag Searching, we hear your request for that. Frankly, we’ve steered away from that in the initial release as we really want to build the service out based off feedback, AND also focus on simplicity (and easy of use/understanding for my mother). We may implement tagging in the future, but for now, we feel “less is more.”
Next year, we’ll provide more album management functionality, so stay tuned for that.
Brain: What would it take for us to be the best photo service in your books?
Rajat: No, we’re too slow.
I’m sorry you’re not able to rotate your pictures yet on the service. Although this isn’t really an excuse, its more of an explanation: we have limited development resources, so we had to focus on the core user experience. Your feedback is important to us, and we are working hard towards getting photo rotation in a future release (amongst some other stuff that has to take a bit of priority). I’m afraid you’ll have to rotate your pictures before you upload them for now.
Cadence: does the name suck? what demographic “range” do you fall into? What demographic do you think we are targeting? I’d love to get your feedback. I’d really like to know who we’re polarizing with our name.
- Albert Lai, CEO, BubbleShare
Walter:
I’ve forwarded your requests/suggestions to the team. We are actually hard at work on one of those two things you mentioned. The community aspect of the site needs to be fleshed out, but check back in a week — and I hope you’ll see the start of something that you might like on that front.
Salmanov: I’m sorry you had encoutered a bug with the system, I’m passing the comment to the dev team to have a look into it, if you have any additional info about the error (i.e. platform, file type, etc.) please drop us an email at feedbackATbubbleshare.com. I’m possible that it was a one off even due to the sudden load on our systems. Thanks again for the bug report!
Great.
SO EASY (!) to add a quick slide show to my blog.
It’d be nice to be able to add a title to each photo (maybe I just didn’t see how)
NICE
Very, very slick. The iPhoto plugin works like a charm. Can’t wait to see what services BubbleShare provides in the future (blog plugins, blog autopost servicees, maybe an image auto-uploader extension for Firefox which works with the new Performancing blog extension, or…er…something).
Nice stuff.
Well not as great as first hoped.
Maybe scale problems from extra visits due to your coverage? I made a slide show for some family and friends. Worked great when I made it last night.
But now many of the photos won’t load. frustrating for the friends that received it (and counter to their simplicity goal).
Oh well,
Will, I’m sorry you had problems with your album. We had an outtage for a short period of time (we’re still in beta), and are back up and running strong.
Please give us another try and if you have any problems, feel free to email us/me at feedback*AT*BubbleShare.com
- Albert, BubbleShare
Flickr still rules. Hands down although the GUI could use a bit of work.
Will,
We’re sorry that you had problems accessing your photos. There was a very short period of time when we had access issues. We’re still working on the kinks, but the outage should have only been for a short period of time. Please check again and I trust everything will be back to normal.
Please feel free to contact us at Feedback*AT*BubbleShare.com if you require any further assistance, and we’ll make sure we resolve your problems as quickly as we can!
Thanks,
Albert, BubbleShare
Please consider this new Web 2.0 app to come out of Canada:
http://www.nuvvo.com/
hi bakra eid party
Dangit,
I was about to transfer all my photos onto Flickr (about 3Gb’s). Now, I’m not so sure…
Flickr’s content, features, flexibility and highly accessible API makes it by far the most superior photo sharing service on the Internet.
No others come close.
BubbleShare will certainly evolve into something more than it is today, but to use words like “wonderful” and phrases like “may be the best photo sharing site on the web” makes one wonder if advertising money plays into the utterance of such accolades.
i’d better wait for http://smartimagine.com
API’s baby… I don’t even HAVE a photo sharing site that I use - BUT, I can tell you that I seek Flickr everywhere… on my mobile (WidSets), on just about every blog I see, on Yahoo’s new Widgets, and just about any “Customizable home page” offering I come across. I still can’t make the leap to decide on one because, as previously discussed, once you’re photos/data is locked into one, you’re bound to it for life or until the company tanks. Who am I going to trust with my data, and who has the most offerings when it comes to flexible API’s?
Bubbleshare looks fantastic Albert - love the zooming features too. Where are you with your future plans in terms of API’s?
I loaded some photos onto Bubbleshare and when I came back to add more photos to the album, I couldn’t log in! Had to go to dotphoto.com to create another album for another trip. Have a lot of pictures on this album and hate to give up and start over…. Any advice out there?
ps I sent an e-mail to Bubbleshare a few weeks back and no response.
Brain,
thanks for your comments. We have had a simple API for quite some time, and have had RSS access to your data since day one. If there is something specific you’d like to see please email me directly at albert (“AT“) bubbleshare.com
Perplexed,
I’m sorry to hear about your problems and am suprised you didn’t get a response (we do get a lot of emails, and we try to make sure we don’t miss replying to any of them).
Let me see if I can awnser you right away here:
If you uploaded photos without creating an account you’ll need to reclaim them by using creating an account and reclaiming it via verifying the email address in which you used to upload the original photos.
Every single photo that you uploaded in the “unregistered” instant uploading mode is registered to the email address that you upload with, and you’ll get an email to a private link in your mail box with the URL to which you can get back to your album.
If you create an account with the same email address, you’ll find all your previously uploaded photos in your account the moment you sign in.
I hope this helps, if you have any further problems please feel free to email me direct and mention your posting at albert (#at#) bubbleshare.com
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