Finally, more photos!

Ah, the wonders of Web 2.0. Social networking, project collaboration, photo and file sharing... if things got any more familiar the Internet would start to seem like a creepy place sometimes.

For all the greatness that is this already-happening techie mini-boom, there's certainly a problem with the photo-sharing aspect of that. Sites like Yahoo photos and Photobucket all have the same problems: clunky interfaces, no rapid-fire way of putting hundreds of pictures online, storage space limitations, no interfacing with popular desktop software (iPhoto, Picasa, ACDSee, etc). I've actually been meaning to rant about this for some time, because while I love what Picasa does for my photos on my desktop, it's a bitch and a half to get those photos online onto my university webspace - and my UT-allocated 75MB is about to run out.

But! Here to save the day is Zoto, essentially the Gmail of photo-sharing. 2GB of storage space, automatic conversion into 3 images (thumbnail/web-compressed big file/original file), super-easy organization into albums, and mass file uploading. All of that stuff is essential for use with my new camera, where full-res pictures take up 3.1MB a piece. Yeah, there are a couple kinks: the uploading software is buggy for really big uploads, there's no captioning, and it doesn't interface directly with Picasa, but seeing how Google is going to need a photo solution I could see an acquisition in Zoto's future, which would fix all of those problems. Despite the kinks, it's still better and easier to use for me than the old HTML+webspace, and it's easier for you guys to navigate. So without further adieu, I give you:

snagger.zoto.com! I'd recommend checking out the 'UT Orange Tower' gallery - it's a demo for the new camera and it shows one of the coolest things happening in Austin right now.
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