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Ugh, all of my friends insist on uploading their pictures to Facebook constantly instead of a decent photo sharing site and it’s aggravating to say the least. The biggest reason is that Facebook doesn’t let me grab the full resolution photo. I’m welcome to take the tiny one they’re happy to show on the screen, but if I want a version that will look decent being printed, my only option is to use their printing service. That’s effing ridiculous.

I think people just get too excited about when they get an email that says “Your drunk frat brother tagged you in a photo!”. Facebook has taken a great idea of tagging and turned it into an abomination of only allowing the tagging of people’s names. Not places, locations, descriptions or anything you want (as Flickr does), but just names. Oh, how useful! Seriously though, what’s the appeal of using Facebook for photos? It’s got nothing on Flickr or any of the other photo sharing sites. I don’t get it, but they’ve captured the minds of college kids everywhere and pissed off anyone who wants to get a real photo.

I doubt it will ever change, but it would nice if people would start realizing that Facebook’s photo “service” is a POS and should be avoided. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each.

Facebook Pros:

  • You can tag your friends and they get an email that you did so. WOW.

Facebook Cons:

  • Who knows how long these pictures will stay?
  • Your friends can’t get high resolution copies easily
  • You can only print through their service
  • Tagging limited to people names
  • 1 level of organization
  • Lame privacy abilities

Flickr Pros:

  • Better organization
  • Limitless tagging (names, places, descriptors, etc)
  • Group collaboration abilities
  • Geo-tagging
  • Use any printing service
  • Archived copies of 4 different sizes of your photo
  • Full resolution copies available
  • Licensing options on your photos
  • Fantastic and flexible privacy settings

Flickr Cons

  • It’s not Facebook?

I don’t get it! Someone please explain the mass-appeal of this POS feature on Facebook to me! Is it because nobody knows of better services? I’m telling you right now - it’s called Flickr. Photobucket, Webshots, etc. Anything is better.

2 Comments

  1. why not use facebook’s developer platform thingy to make an application that allows for high resolution photos? If I knew anything about code I’d do it, Im surprised nobody has done it yet. It could even use flickr as a storage source.

  2. I agree with you 110%!

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