Struggling to keep up to date ...

As you may know, if you're a regular visitor to my photostream, I'm one of the many that migrated from flickr last year and putting to one side the fact that my photos here get fewer visitors I have no regrets making the change.

I've found ipernity to be a much cleaner, fresher and easier site to navigate. Equally important, I've found it to be a site that my broadband connection can cope with.

Yes, there are some things I miss about flickr, not least my old contacts, but on the whole it's been a wise move.

That said, there are two aspects of using ipernity that I do have problems with and which affect my enjoyment of the site and my ability to keep up to date with what other people are doing.

Now it may be that it's just me that's being thick and not using the existing tools/options to best effect. In which case by explaining the 'problems' I'm experiencing perhaps someone will be kind enough to put me right and let me know how I can do better.

However, if on the other hand the 'problems' are nothing to do with me, but are a direct result of either a glitch in ipernity or the result of some missing functionality then perhaps someone will try to make things better.

So, what are the problems?

Well, the first relates to being able to quickly and easily identify which of my contacts have recently uploaded images so that I can visit their photostream and view their latest images.

On flickr you simply brought up a list of your contacts and then you click on Last upload and it would sort the list so you could not only see who had uploaded images recently, but exactly when ...


You could then relate this to when you'd last been online and then determine who had new images to view. And, if you were keen to see if a particular contact had uploaded something since you were last online you could even sort the list by Name.

Now, I know that on ipernity you can view small thumbnails of any images your contacts have uploaded recently, either 1 or 5 per person. However, there appears to be no real order to how these are displayed. You certainly can't tell when any images that are displayed were actually uploaded and you can't, as far as I can tell, sort or interrogate the data in any way whatsoever.

Also, ipernity appears to segregate your contacts into Family, Friends and Acquaintances and you have to view each independently. As far as I can tell there is no way of viewing recently posted photos for all of your contacts regardless of their category.

To be honest, I find the whole thing rather pointless and have deduced that the only way to be really sure who has uploaded what and when is to visit each contact's photostream individually ... a rather slow and somewhat tedious way of doing something that on flickr could be done quickly and easily.

Furthermore, whilst it may be slow when you only have 20 or 30 contacts I imagine it will be impossible to do if you have say 100 or more contacts.

So, is it me that's doing something wrong or is there an issue here that could be addressed by improving the user interface?

My second problem relates to keeping up to date with new additions to any groups you are a part of. If you are an Administrator or a Moderator then this part of ipernity works well.

Simply, scroll down your list of groups and if there's anything been added that you've not yet seen a nice little NEW highlighted sign is shown next to the group title.

However, it's when it comes to groups I'm simply a member of that I have real issues. When you scroll down through the list of these groups there is nothing that I can see that tells you there is new content for you to view, so again you either do nothing or you end up having to visit them all individually ... again this is a real pain if you have diverse interests and belong to many groups.

So, once again I ask is it me or is there an issue here?

It would be so much better if ipernity could add those nice little NEW highlighted signs next to the groups you are a member of in the way it does those that you are an Administrator or a Moderator of.

Could this be something the ipernity team could look to introduce along with a way of viewing your groups alphabetically?

Don't get me wrong, I love ipernity and I want to be here for a long time, but I'm finding these aspects of the user experience are making my time here less enjoyable than it could be.

So come on folks, please let me know where I'm going wrong or let's make things better!

Kind regards

PAUL