Group Photo Sharing 2.0

Today marks a big day for the ZangZing team. After weeks and months of designing, coding, tinkering, tweaking, editing and improving (and lots of finding and fixing bugs, with more to come, we’re sure), we are launching our private beta for Group Photo Sharing 2.0. This means we will be sending out hundreds of invites every day to start letting more people experience ZangZing.

You can sign up and learn more at our page at Photo Sharing – ZangZing.

What is Group Photo Sharing 2.0?

We started ZangZing because we were frustrated with the state of photo sharing on the web. First, we found it difficult for groups of people to share their photos in one place. Second, we found that most of the sites surrounded our photos with horrible ads or complicated user interfaces. Lastly, most of the services made it hard to control the privacy of who can see our photos.

Group Photo Sharing to us means making it easy for groups to share photos in one place – simply and beautifully – and with only the people you want.

Group Albums

We decided that every ZangZing album is a group album. You determine who can add photos and who can view photos. And, people can decide to “like an album” to stay up-to-date whenever anyone adds more photos.

We made it easy for people to add photos to an album from their computer, smartphone or other photo services like Facebook, Flickr, or PicasaWeb. And every album has its own email address, so adding photos is as simple as sending a message.

Privacy Matters

Each album has its own sharing and privacy settings, so that you can share certain albums with friends via Facebook and Twitter, and keep other albums password protected for only specific people to see.

Simply Beautiful

We’ve also created a simple and beautifully designed (if we do say so ourselves) browsing experience that puts your photos at center stage. Photos are displayed at high resolution without any advertising (sorry Living Social and Groupon!). And, our browsing experience leverages the latest in technology to make the browsing simple and fast. To see for yourself, you can check out our photo of the day album at www.zangzing.com/zangzing.

And we made it social

Just because privacy matters, does not mean photo sharing can’t be social. You can share photos on Facebook, Twitter or through email. You can Like a person to see all of his or her public albums. Like an album to stay up-to-date when new photos are added. Or Like a photo to mark that photo as one of your favorites.

We are thrilled with the number of invite requests that we have received and can’t wait for you to start exploring, creating, sharing, inviting, and enjoying those special photos on the Web like never before. This is just the beginning and with your help we hope to make ZangZing great.

To get on the Beta invite list, simply go to www.zangzing.com.

Thanks,

Kathryn, Mauricio, and Joseph

Jerrygag

This is almost the smae concept like divvyshot was but some extra little features.
Anonymous

I’m very impressed with ZangZing so far. I know it’s early yet, but I hope to be able to comment on user’s photos soon, and I’m especially interested in the Buy functionality. Will that allow users to have their own photos printed, as well as buying photos from others?

I will probably find a lot of answers in your blog. I’ve just started perusing it.

Great job,folks!

Anonymous

Thank you so much for the compliment. We are working hard to impress.

Providing the ability to comment is one of the next features that we are focusing on. We are hoping to roll that out in short order.

And, the Buy functionality would enable users to have their photos printed.

Thank you the enthusiasm!

Wimac

I am liking it so far! It’s great to have an easy to use, ease to secure solution for photos! Would love to see plug in with eyefi, just an idea!

Anonymous

Thank you. It is so nice to hear that you are liking ZangZing. And, thank you for the idea on eyefi!

Cheli Hull

We just got back from Africa and I was put incharge of finding a great group photo sharing site–one that I will upload my photos into, send everyone the link and let them add their photos. My readings concerning your site makes it sound like your site would be wonderful for us but I have 3 questions I’ve not found the answer to yet:
1) When I upload pictures to the site am I able to put the photos into categories i.e. Gorillas, Camp, etc.?
2) Will those I send the link & password to be able to download or export each other’s pictures onto their own computers–to add to their folders of pictures?
3) What is the memory limit to each album & what are your charges for album sizes, as well as for exporting photos…?

Anonymous

Cheli,

Thanks for the comments and questions.

1. Categories and Tags – we don’t yet support tagging of photos within an album. That said you can create a master album with all your photos, and then create new albums of photos from that album for Gorillas, Camp etc. To do that, after you have your Africa album, then create a new album and on the Add Photos screen you can scroll to the ZangZing folder and you will see all of your albums. Open the Africa Album and then choose the gorilla photos to create a Gorilla album. It’s instantaneous to add those photos since they are already uploaded. And for the future we won’t double count this towards your free usage. (More on that in #3 below…)

2. Letting others download photos – we are testing that right now actually and expect to roll it out tomorrow. You will be able to choose to let Everyone that can see the photos download, or Contributors to download the photos, or of course No one other than you as the album owner. Next we will soon allow people to pull photos from albums that they Like to create a new ZangZing album directly from within ZangZing without having to download first but that still has tobe finished.

3. For limits, the service is currently completely free as we continue to roll out new features and capabilities that people expect. We will eventually have a free level of at least 2 gigabytes of photo storage and maybe more. We don’t plan to have any limits on normal downloading or exporting. They are your photos and we don’t believe in “pic-napping” them.

Hope this helps and look forward to seeing your photos. Send us a note via help on some of your favorites if you’d like us to use for our photo of the day.

Enitgugua

1. What’s the size limit per photo?
2. Do you store the original size photo, or only compressed versions?
3. Do you support video?

Anonymous

Currently, the limit is set at 20 megabytes per photo which should allow just about any photo size to be upldoaed.

We also keep the original photo, uncompressed, so that you can always download it later. Keep the high resolution photos and ensuring you can get them back is very important to us as we know it’s very important to people using photo services. We create smaller versions for displaying in the browser but support a resolution up to the full screen size of 2560 by 1440.

We don’t currently support video but it’s on our list. Right now we are working on comments, products, and our iphone app so stay tuned and thanks for the comments and questions.

Enitgugua

Excellent.

I think video will be critical to your success. People take short video clips as often as photos–especially on mobile devices like iPhone.Time to me to go and try the service. May have more comments later.
Enitgugua

20 Mb may not always work. I have a 7121 x 4096 pano shot I just did that is 27.7 Mb. I’ll downsize it to upload it, but you may want to reconsider the 20 Mb limit.

Anonymous

Based on your request we’re going to increase to 40 megabytes. That will roll into production in the next week or so. Thanks for the feedback!

Cedar Park Swimming

Joined in search of a good photo sharing product for sports teams (in our case swimming). What we need is a link to a main page/album that we can then have a group able to see and upload too. Your hidden link works OK for that, but it appears we can’t have one link that drops into a album with sub-albums or a page with all the albums. (albums would be things like general, at the pool, swim meet 1,2, 3, banquet, etc.). We think have photos link from our website. It appears I would have to have a separate link for each album and worse yet create a new group for each album. In the end it would be ideal for anyone (kids in particular) to upload via their phones pictures from the meet and adults would then clean up after or add more.

Sorry for the long post, but your ability to allow multiple people to upload is great. The ability to share from a website a single page with all albums appears to be a road block. I suspect there is a huge potential out there for teams of all sorts with multiple events.
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