I have always wondered about the different bookmarking tools, which seems so popular around the Internet, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, or even Delicious. Forgive my ignorance on this but even though I extensively bookmark (with my browser…), it never occurs to me it would be useful to share them via “social bookmarkers“.
However, for a while now I have been looking for a way to keep track of images, and eventually share them. I first used the ‘Favorites‘ tool from my Flickr account. A great way to bookmark nice pictures quickly and if I ever need to, search through the faves. Two huge disadvantages though: only Flickr pictures could bookmarked and the searchable tags are set by the owner of the pictures.
I later found out about ffffound.com ; which seems to do a good job but requires an invitation. One of the author of a blog I like (binkybinky) mentioned it as well so I took a closer look again.
ffffound.com
It works great, I believe to find inspiration and particularly must well worth it for designers (it looks like the invitation process is a way to control the contents). I do not have an invitation and it is not possible for a non-subscriber to search through registered users’ bookmarks…
So I looked elsewhere.
And here comes vi.sualize.us! It makes it possible to bookmark almost any pictures you can find on the Internet and you can have your own tags 😀 ; there is also no invitations and no reservations so I gave it a try.
vi.sualize.us
The only drawback for me is the limited numbers of pictures per page. However, I have to say Victor, who runs and manages the site always answer any comments, including on requested features. Which of course does not mean he will implement whatever you ask for, but at least he is open to suggestions and critics.
Finally (and thanks to a link on vi.sualize.us) I discovered cooliris.com
cooliris.com
Cooliris does not run on Chrome 3.x ; which forces me to use it with either Chrome 4.x beta (…) or Mozilla. I chose the latter option for now; and wow! The effect is great, makes browsing large amounts of pictures easily and it is compatible with a long list of websites (as long as they provide standard RSS feeds), including all of Flickr and ffffound.
With the combination of vi.sualize.us and Cooliris, I can easily “pick-up” pictures from different sources and bookmark them all in one place, made them searchable with my own terms and review them with a great 3D interface.
Only point though: the RSS feed of my bookmarks on vi.sualize.us is limited to the last 30 bookmarked pictures…
Links
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on Photography 