↑chromatic orb's blog

Seven months ago I subscribed to Ipernity. I've been using flickr's online community for a couple of years but there was evidence that some form of censureship was on it's way. I don't like that so I looked around for alternatives and was pointed to Ipernity. However, some good friends stayed back on flickr and it turned out that there was a good solution to the possible censorship problem so I stayed there and almost forgot about Ipernity.

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

While considering my eventual move from flickr if Microsoft buys the place, I'm conducting a detailed evaluation of the differences a new user will find between the two sites. Bear in mind 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. Here we go...

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

In the first part of this analysis, I wrote about the basic functionality we need to share photos. In this post, I'm going to try to compare the differences on the social side of photo sharing for someone coming from flickr. In case you're interested, the score so far was something like this:

ipernity 3.5 - flickr 1.5

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

Now that I've covered what I consider to be the basic photo sharing functions (part 1) and social networking features (part 2) in flickr and ipernity, there's some more features I want to write about. The "score" carying over from the first two parts is:

ipernity 7 - flickr 5

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

It's been a week now since I started looking at ipernity as a replacement to flickr, in response to Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo!. That possibility is out of the way now, but since I took the time to explore ipernity to some extent and compare the two sites, I might as well complete the review and write my conclusions.

I've now visited hundreds of photographies on ipernity and have yet to find a single instance of those dreadful awards that litter comment pages on flickr. It's common to see some (discrete) invitations to add photos to groups bu nothing like the ugliness I was used to find on the other site, to the point I had over 200 such images blocked with AdBlock.

And speaking of groups, on ipernity groups seem to be close to dead. Sure people still place images on groups but I guess the advanced comment functionality (eg. replies and comment tracking) and blogging make groups less useful for discussion. However, groups like Canon's and Nikon's should be very useful but have almost no members and even less discussion traffic.

One thing I neglected to mention on my comparison was the search function, which in ipernity is just broken and close to useless. For example, something basic as searching for a strig using quotes just doesn't work. I've reported this to technical support and was assured that boolean search was on it's way. Search is also missing basic functionality like searching documents in a date interval, sorting groups by number of users and so on. I'm eagerly waiting for the new search function.

Going back to the awards absence, it seems the ipernity community is not suffering from the global interestingness obsession there seems to be on the other site. I don't know if this is because theres really no equivalent to interestingness, as there is at least one group for photos appearing on the front page, but as all other groups this is very low traffic.

The "digital age" and the internet have reformed the way copyright is seen by the general population. While initially it was a tool to protect the author and publishers of the written word, with the advancement of technology it soon became a force blocking creativity and freedom. While initially copyright protected works for a reasonably brief period of time, it ended being extended to ridiculous proportions, way beyond the lifespan of it's authors.