From flickr to ipernity (part 3)

Pro accounts

I didn't remember what free accounts miss on flickr, so I had to go there and read about it. And then compare it with what ipernity pro account offers. This gives me the chance to try tables on the blog so that's what I'll do.

There you have it. Before giving the vote on this item, I'll just say that, while ipernity mentions "no ads" as a pro feature, I haven't seen a single ad on my few days on a free acount. But maybe that has to do with Adblock Plus...

So, loking at the table I'd say ipernity gives you more for free but it's the same on pro accounts even if the price on ipernity is a bit higher due to the low dollar performance. Personally I could live with the free account either on ipernity or flickr, but I like to pay for good service so this one is a tie.

ipernity 7.5 - flickr 5.5

Not only pictures

Until now all this match has been focused on photo and image sharing, because that's what flickr is specialized on. However on ipernity photography is only part of the picture (pun intended). While photo sharing is the major aspect, ipernity allows us also to uploadand share videos, music and other types of documents.

I'm an "old fashioned" photographer, so video is not my scene and while I love good music I don't have any kind of talent to create it. This means I won't take advantage of the enhanced media type support but I do realize that many creative minds will be envolved on various aspects of the arts and ipernity does offer more support for them. So I'll add one more point for ipernity.

ipernity 8.5 - flickr 5.5

Help!

On flickr it is quite easy to find the information we need. On ipernity there's no help yet. Actually, there's some help if you select the french language, but that's not what most people will expect.

ipernity 8.5 - flickr 6.5

Policy

Browsing over flickr's community guidelines and ipernity's member guidelines, theres not much difference to be found, just standard talk. The major difference is that flickr recentely added the obligation for users to mark their images whenever they are "not safe for children". This was in response to government laws yadda yadda yadda... For now there is no such obbligation on ipernity but something like that is on it's way. Tie.

ipernity 9 - flickr 7

Third-party support

Flickr is built on and around a very powerful API that allows third-parties to create applications that supply a wide range of services. This is used by companies that offer printing services, programmers that offer extended functionality for users or create fantastic sites like photophlow and communities that were built around flickr, like Utata. As far as I could find, there's no such API available for ipernity.

ipernity 9 - flickr 8

Freedom level

Both sites support and recommend the use of Creative Commons licenses. The technology behind both sites is based on free software. Neither site publishes it's codebase under an open source license. Both sites work well with Firefox and Konqueror on Linux, though ipernity takes a small lead by stating that "only Firefox is fully supported". Also at the moment ipernity is more relaxed about things like a woman's nipple. And Microsoft didn't announce it was going to buy ipernity. (update: as Yahoo! rejected the bid, this is a non issue, so both sites are about equal)

ipernity 9.5 - flickr 8.5

next: the conclusion...

[ part1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 ]

Small print: This review is from someone who has been using flickr for over two years and only has a couple of days with ipernity, so if you have more experience with ipernity and notice that I'm missing something, please mention it.