Picurio, a Y Combinator startup from its Winter ’09 session that makes photo sharing between large groups incredibly easy, has taken the beta label off. While there are an innumerable amount of photo sharing sites and applications out there, Picurio is focused on making photo sharing simple and user-friendly between groups of people.
Picurio’s site has a similar user interface to Apple’s iPhoto, except Picurio is on the web and cloud-based. The idea behind Picurio is that you upload photos to a “room” (which has around 2 GB of storage) where you can then create subfolders of different groups of photos and then invite as many people as you want to see the photos. In order to allow others to see the site, you send them a link, (that can be password-protected for privacy) and then they can upload photos of their own to the “room.” As a user, you can share some collections of photos with certain friends and share other rooms with a different set of friends.
Picurio also lets you publish and download photos directly to and from Facebook. Ad you can download any pictures from a room into a zip file while you are viewing the page. Picurio is free if you keep adding friends to your rooms. For every friend who joins a room, Picurio will add another two weeks on to the lifetime of a room. There is no limit on the number of albums you can create, or the number of people who can use the room. You can also pay for rooms to be extended; $4.95 adds 30 days to the lifetime of a room.
In essence, Picurio is a subset of photo sharing sites like Divvyshot, Photobucket, Flickr etc. which all let you share a basic album. Picurio rooms allows for multiple albums within one room and selective sharing of rooms. Of course, Picurio also features the ability to drag and drop photos, create slideshows and more. It seems that Picurio would ideal for large events where many attendees are taking pictures and need a central, and potentially private online space to store and share photos.
