Photobucket...nice!!!

Thing 27 is Photobucket. Apparently, this is a competitor of Flickr and is owned by the same company that owns MySpace.

I really like this tool a lot. The dashboard seems more intuitive to me than that of Flickr, and it can store images like animations (Hooray! I found a place to store my Meez avatar!) and video clips.

The text in Thing 27 states:

One big difference is that from Flickr you can only use photos you have posted; at Photobucket, add any image or video you like to your album (or further organize your choices into sub-albums), and you can use it, no matter who originally posted it. In other words, anything you add to a public account at Photobucket is fair game for any other Photobucket user to see and use on a blog or profile at any website (as long as it's not for commercial purposes).

This makes me wonder about copyright. How many images there are copyrighted and being used as if they weren't? I did notice at least one box that said the image had been removed due to a violation of Photobucket rules. Wonder if it was an unlicensed image issue or something merely distasteful. I guess this is a problem everywhere, though.

A bigger concern is that if I copy an image that I find on the site to my own account and then post it somewhere else (like this blog), it identifies the image as "by" me. As I did not create the image, I would prefer that it retained the information identifying its original creator. Credit should be given to the artist; seems a bit too much like finders-keepers to me. But, I can fix that by simply not posting from my account but, instead, from the original image.

All in all, a really great find. I definitely will be using Photobucket!

Technorati tags: learning 2.1, online image servers, Photobucket