However, the founders of Picuous saw a problem, or at least a limitation, with almost all of these services. The company cites the story of James Duncan, the TED photographer who took the now-famous photo of Bill Gates releasing (supposedly) malaria-infected mosquitos loose in the conference, as an example of a photographer whose photo was infringed widely because there was no easy way to share images on the Web.

Picuous, however, aims to fix that and it seeks to do so by being the “Scribd” or the “Vimeo” of image hosting, making it easy to share and embed images without actually transferring the file. Along the way, it hopes to offer both better analytics and better copyright enforcement.

But how well does Picuous work? I decided to give the service a test and find out.

How Picuous Works

The big idea behind Picuous is that other media types, including audio and video, have an embed feature that make them easy to share on other websites while ensuring the original author gets credit and, sometimes, revenue. However, images are usually just saved and reuploaded or hotlinked to get them on other sites. Along the way, both attribution and revenue opportunities are lost.

To fix this, what Picuous does is offer a simple HTML5-based means of embedding the mage on the other site. Though Picuous doesn’t use Flash, it’s a very Flash-like experience and one that users of Scribd and YouTube should be very familiar with.

The big idea is that others, if they see an image they want, they will be more likely to use this embed code than they will copy the image or hotlink it as this is easier, faster and more reliable.

So how does Picuous stack up? My experience was, in a word, mixed.

My Experiment with Picuous

by jonathan on picuous

In order to try Picuous, I attempted to upload and share a photo of my dog, Calico, deciding that he wanted to drive the park. To do that, I created an account, uploaded the image and pasted the embed code as-is in the first part of this section.

The registration and account setup process went very smoothly. It took only a few moments to sign up, get my beta invite and then log in. Uploading the image was easy as well as I was able to simply drag and drop the image from my computer and have it upload automatically.

However, I quickly found out that Picuous is fairly limited as an image host. Though it’s very simple to use, other than setting the license for your images, editing their names and embedding them, there strangely isn’t much else you can do with them. There are no folders you can put them in, no tags to organize them and no additional sharing tools. In fact, the embedded image actually has more features in that it integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Posterous, things that the backend of Picuous doesn’t do.

Still, the embed code was easy to grab though I learned quickly, as you can see above, that there is no easy way to make it flush left or right, thus forcing the image to sit awkwardly on a new line. There is also no way to resize the image should the default size be wrong.

Once again though, you can at least edit the size of the image when re-embedding the embedded version, though there is still no easy way to align it.

All in all, Picuous was extremely easy to use and worked great, but it has a limited feature set, at least at this time. Still, what it does, it does well and most of the limitations can be overcome easily with a bit of work, such as the (quick and dirty) fix I made below.

Is Picuous Worthwhile?

To be clear, Picuous isn’t going to stop infringement. Though it prevents people from being able to save your image directly, I can still screenshot images that Picuous stores or get around the protection by simply looking at the HTML code. However, it does make it more difficult and, at the same time, it provides a path of lower resistance, one that those who are interested in being even remotely legitimate with their use will likely take.

While I think that using Picuous would not be right for PT or similar sites where most of the images are either stock photos or screenshots, it might be appropriate for those who run photo blogs or post a large number of professional or semi-professional images.

That being said, Picuous is far from a Flickr or a Smugmug replacement. You’ll still likely need to use another photo sharing service as your “home base” as there are too few features and no social elements to Picuous (other than an RSS feed for the stream). Still, it might be a good way for getting photos into your blog if you want to encourage sharing without having the file itself passed around.

In short, it won’t stop infringement, but it will encourage healthier uses of your work and that may be worthwhile for some.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, Picuous is still very much a beta service. This means that the service is limited at this time but that, possibly, many of the issues will be addressed before the final release.

Still, the big idea behind Picuous is a neat one and has a lot of potential. It’s similar to what Picapp has been doing for professional stock images but making the process available for smaller photographers and artists.

There’s definitely a lot of potential here and it’s a site photographers and artists should definitely both try out and keep an eye on. It may not be everything one needs right now, but it certainly has a lot of potential and can provide a useful, if somewhat limited, service already.

The announcement has been largely well-received and the addition of statistics was one of the most-requested features according to Flickr.

However, those who are interested in using the new tool to track where their photos are used on the Web and check for violations of their copyright license will be sorely disappointed to know that this new system does not track images that are embedded into other sites.

Though Flickr has still introduced a useful and powerful system that will provide some much-needed insight for its pro members, it missed a golden opportunity to help its users, and the rest of the Internet, understand how the embedding feature is used.

Screwing the Pooch

The problem with Flickr is pretty straightforward. Even if you are comfortable with image hotlinking, as more and more people are, using an image hosting service such as Flickr takes away all control over it.

Since you don’t have access to the server or its logs, you can’t check to see who is using your content and how they are doing so. It is nearly impossible to check and see if the people who are using your images are attributing them correctly or using them in a manner that complies with your license.

Flickr, through this product, had the opportunity to put that information back into the hands of its customers. Since they run the service, it is at least physically possible for them to track embedding and display the information to its users. Since no other photo sharing service I know of does that, it would have put them head and shoulders above any of their competition.

However, for whatever reason, they did not. That seems especially strange considering that Flickr is designed as a repository for artistic work, something mentioned in their community guidelines, and is not just a generic image host.

Artists and photographers, it would seem, would have much more reason to track their content as it is embedded than those, like myself, who use photo sharing sites primarily to embed logos and screenshots.

Combine that with the linking requirement for embedded images and a strong partnership with Creative Commons and it seems only logical that there would be not only a heightened interest in embedding photographs, but an equally heightened interest in tracking and following those embeds.

This omission seems to fly in the face of those initiatives and would indicate that Flickr feels their own site really is the central offering, not the sense of sharing and community spirit.

Whether this is justified or not depends heavily upon statistics and information that only Flickr has and statistics that Flickr will now be holding on to, at least for some time to come.

Conclusions

The decision to limit stats tracking only to pages on Flickr’s site not only provides a very narrow picture of how photos on Flickr are being viewed, but misses out on a great opportunity to obverse, track and understand how the embedding function is being used.

If you want to allow hotlinking but wish to reserve some of your rights, such as attribution or non-commercial use, your best bet is to secure your own hosting account, perhaps on a cheap domain host such as DreamHost and use the server log analysis tools available to you there.

No matter what you do, be sure to follow the image fingerprinting tips I mentioned previously as no amount of hotlink monitoring, or even outright prevention, will stop people from saving the image and re-uploading it elsewhere. In those cases, you’ll need to use other techniques to track your content and fingerprinting can greatly help.

All in all though, Flickr missed a great opportunity to help their pro users not just completely track their images, but monitor their use and enforce their rights.

Hopefully, this is just an initial release of the system and that a future update may add this feature in later. However, Flickr has given no indication that this is case and it appears unlikely that it will be added in the future.

This is frustrating, but just the nature of the beast when you are entrusting third-party services such as Flickr with your precious content.