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.
Hi everyone – I’m Laura one of the Picurio founders. We’ll be reading this thread and look forward to your comments!
You can just use Flickr to create private albums to share with family members.
To let a closed group of friends who shares often to contribute, you can just create a private group where members can contribute to it.
These are all available for free on Flickr for several years now.
To be clear, Flickr is not free. It’s a pay site, but hides the fact that you need a pro account until you’re pretty far in (200 photos in, as a matter of fact).
@Garry: I know that; I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 5 years now. However, about 70% of Flickr users are on the free account. Many of my friends who are occasional photo-sharers find that good enough.
So I can upload some photos and look at them on a website?
Hi everyone – I’m Laura one of the Picurio founders. We’ll be reading this thread and look forward to your comments!
“cloud-based” – what cloud solution are they currently using?
nevermind, I think its slicehost.
Congrats Laura…I look forward to checking it out. Looks like TechCrunch viewers may be killing your server right now though….
LOL… this is like that demo that comes from SproutCore. You could have customized it a bit guys.
Thanks for the comment. We think you’ll find that there’s a lot of functionality behind the clean interface (Facebook sync, zip downloads, slideshow mode, etc).
It actually uses Cappuccino: http://cappuccino.org/
I’ll check it out. We used Shwup to aggregate our friends’ photos of our wedding and thought it worked well — and it was easy to download pics that others had added to our private site.
With so many options to freely host and share photos (Picassa, Flickr, etc.) why would I pay 4.95/month to keep a room alive for just 30 days. Thats a very poor business model. I don’t see what is particularly unique about it … high res photo support? downloading to zip?
I agree. It seems off putting that if you pull friends in then you get to stay up for additional time. Also, 5/month seems like a bit much when compared to other sites that do similar things.
We’ve found our users want Picurio for events such as weddings, where paying for 30 days makes a lot more sense than the annual subscriptions charged by Picasa and Flickr. And like those services, Picurio also offers a free product that we hope you’ll try out.
where did my comment go?
It looks like Picurio’s trying to tackle the most common problem facing photo sharing today. The majority of photos are still locked up on people’s HDs — so you have the ‘10 people take the same group photo’ problem. And when the photo does get shared, you can only download a low-quality version.
Picurio “rooms” are a step in the right direction, encouraging sharing from the start, and they strike a great balance between privacy and encouraging ease of use (no accounts required). I’ve used Picurio’s beta and I’ve been happy so far. Congrats to the team!
Laura,
Check out our app on Facebook called “My 3D Scenes” (http://apps.fac...y-threed-scenes). It lets users create amazing 3D slideshows and ecards using their favorite photos and YouTube videos. It’s a great way to share and showcase photos, including Picurio pics, in an immersive 3D viewer. Leave me a message if you want to learn more.
I like the “rooms” concept-what a great idea, and so much safer than sharing photos on Facebook (especially now that I’m “facebook friends” with my Dad.)
wish i had this a few months ago when i got married. sharing photos was a PITA. our photographer used a vendor website that was slow, clunky and generally didn’t work well. it had a similar biz model to this (free for a while, pay to extend). would have paid if the site was any good.
the thing i like most about this software is that it’s super fast–nice!
I agree that paying in 30 day installments is a real pain.
I also agree that the reason why so many photos/videos are “trapped” on people’s computers is that for the most part most of these sites are “non-techy” friendly (ie: mom friendly)
At vivapixel.com I can share my albums and have people upload with a password (no registration, no hassles) or they can email the album with a special email address (ie:wedding@vivapixel.com)
The email part is cool since even my mom knows how to send photos via email (saved lots of time on the phone explaining…)
Interesting! I wonder how many more photo sharing sites will come up. Not seeing anything unique and game changing. The concept of a “room” is good though.
It will be great if Picurio provides API to developer on getting, uploading photos and many more.
It’s really great to see more startups like Picurio launch with a clear business model in mind. They have a clear value proposition to their users, and have a simple way to monetize it.
Anyone heard of this site called Flickr?
lol.
When is TC going to implement downvoting for comments?
What will drive a consumer to choose this application over Picasa, Flickr, etc.? Many users being able to share in one “room” with sub-folders is attractive. However, this feature could be easily replicated. An iPhoto-like interface, although familiar, is not enough. Most importantly, this “room” concept presupposes that users do not want to upload their photos to the web for storage. Instead, they upload to share and after a short-time period the value of being posted to the web begins to decline. Is this true? I’m not sure–I think this may become an obstacle to usage.