I have had access to Expono for a while, but never gotten around to use it. Before you read this review, know this: I have been using Flickr 3-4 years already, and have all my pictures there. I have only briefly tested Picasa. It is difficult to review Expono as a start-up company, as it is competing directly with two of Internet’s biggest players, Google and Yahoo. Both Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr are popular services and just about feature complete. So the questions for this review are: Is there space for Expono and what extra does Expono give, that should make established users of Picasa and Flickr consider to move. I consider it wrong to ask the question: If I was to start sharing pictures today, what would I choose?

There are a fair number of photo sharing sites available, and it was therefore strange to see the announcement of Expono opening for the public on the very same day as Fox Interactive Media lays off one third of the staff (of 120) at the competing photo-sharing site Photobucket. I hope Expono makes it.

Expono is fairly easy to use and comes with a clean and simple user interface for most of it’s functionality. I found the connections to Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed a mess. The uploads have an ok speed, but miss not having the possibility to upload directly from Adobe Lightroom and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Perhaps someone will make a plugin in the future? Expono has all the features you expect to find on a media sharing site: Online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging (also face and geo tagging), find duplicates and iPhoto photocast support. It also comes with a fine-grained access control, actually quite a bit better then the one in Flickr. Just take a look at Expono’s feature list, and you will be convinced. There are a lot of people that has not chosen a photo sharing solution yet, and Expono has timed there launch well, opening their service to the public in July. Just in time for people to upload and share their holiday memories.

Launching after Flickr and Picasa gives them the advantage of knowing what functionality users want, and also an opportunity to implement the features in better ways! Expono is for instance far easier/better on creating a new album and then adding photos to the album. And these functions are key functionalities in any photo sharing solution!

Expono is also one of the best examples I have seen of cloud computing so far. The company does not have their own server park, but have rather based their service on Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Services) combined with RightScale Cloud Computing Management Platform.

My question is, what do you do when you have 8.000 + pictures uploaded in Flickr and happy with the service? Not to talk about, the friends that you have gotten to subscribe to the Flickr service? Expono has a focus on the social web, but none of my friends are using their service. They are mostly on Flickr and some on Picasa.

Flickr has a great community and there exists a huge number of applications that makes your “Flickr life” easier. It isn’t easy to move away from Flickr, when you have collected all your pictures there and when they are now counting over 8.000 photos. All the photo sharing sites are silos, it is easy to get photos in, but “difficult” to get them out again. So in many ways, I am locked to Flickr. Another reason why I will be staying with Flickr is the price.

None of the photo services are free, you get a limited free account with all of them, just enough to test the service out. In other words, you don’t get far with Expono’s free account. 1GB data storage is not much when you have a SLR. The $45 Plus account allows for 100GB of monthly data transfers, 10GB or more of storage space and up to 10 custom groups. Plus, as always, paying users have access to a lot more features. Flickr costs $24.95 a year, and that gives you unlimited uploads and storage, unlimited sets and collections, and HD playback for high-definition video uploads. So price is not a reason to choose Expono.

Expono seems to target sharing your photos on different social sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, etc. Flickr has recently opened a connection to Twitter as well. I find this almost uninteresting and I don’t even have a Facebook account. Ok, one thing is to send out a Twitter message that you have uploaded new photos to your chosen photo service, but I don’t like the focus on my activities on Twitter appears on Expono. Why isn’t Expono just communicating out, but also receiving messages? Luckily there is a way to turn this off. Here is how to: Click on the Me pop-down menu and choose Edit Services. From there, edit the Twitter service and disable the checkbox Display Status On Homepage. It will not remove your already posted Twitter messages from your Expono page, but at least future Twitter messages from being posted there.

Expono: Twitter message

Sharing is easy, you can with a few mouse clicks share your photos with more or less every Web 2.0 service you can think about. But why isn’t embedded part of sharing? Isn’t embedding a photo or an album in to your blog sharing? Having said that, Expono comes with great editor for embedding albums, letting you set both colors and transitions (there are 9 transitions, plus random):

Kampen, Galgeberg & Vålerenga

I have been a great fan of geotagging for some time now, and blogged about it on various occasions, and would like to point to the following article: Geotagging Photos – A Review of Sony GPS-CS1 and HoudahGeo. It’s interesting for people looking at pictures to see on a map where the photos were taken. It simply gives the viewers more perspective, and helps me as the photographer to better organize my collections. Expono only let you search on names of towns and cities, and not parts of the city. I found it dreadful to navigate down to street level, but when first there, it was easy to drag the pin to the point on the map where the photo was taken and give the place a name for future reference. It also saves information about the street name, some that Flickr don’t. But I must say that I found editing geolocation easier on Flickr. That disappoints me a bit, cause I have not found geolocation to be one of Flickr’s strongest points.

When it comes to geolocation, it didn’t take me long before I found my first bug in Expono. Have a look at this screenshot. The two locations that I have tagged are above and below what Expono generated:

Expono: My places

The geolocated places are shown correctly when there are 3 or more places added to the map.

If you are looking for a photo site where it’s easy to share your photos, Expono is one that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The service is feature complete, just as Picasa and Flickr. Before you choose a photo sharing site, find out where what services your friends and relatives are already using. Go try it and say hello to me at http://www.expono.com/frankps if you decide to join. I am considering publishing some of my pictures here with text and metadata in Norwegian. I have everything in English at Flickr. If you don’t have an account at a photo sharing solution already, then please consider to open an account either at Expono or one of the other services. They are all inexpensive backup solutions, and you don’t want to loose your family photos, great memories from holidays etc. do you?

Belinda Isabell Klein from Expono contacted me after I had posted this blog entry and told me a few things that I were allowed to post. The first thing is that Expono and it’s staff is listening to their users. Expono is still under heavy development and they want feedback from their customers. I would like to add that there is even a feedback button on the right handside on the Expono service. Another thing is that I was also contacted by Belinda during the closed beta and asked for feedback. So this is not just empty words. They also have also gotten a lot of feedback from the readers of NRKBeta. The staff is also quite active in the Expono community, commenting others photos. I suggested some ideas for future features to Belinda and got a great thank you back, and I can only hope that I will see them implemented in the near future.

Regarding what I wrote about Flickr and geotagging, she came with the following information: They are looking in to the possibilities of both exporting to Flickr and importing to Flickr. And when it comes to geotagging, improvements will be made available in the nearby future.

So let me end with a thank you to Belinda Isabell Klein for reading my blog entry and taking time to comment it privately to me. I hope to be able to follow up the Expono service with future blog entries.