A Delight Among Giants

Web-based photo solutions are… abundant, wouldn’t you say? We know Flickr and Photobucket are constantly warring for ‘number one’, and a myriad of others that have found their niches in the West, East, and everyplace in between. There’s Zoto, Pikeo, Dropshots, Slide, PBase – let’s just say there are lots of photos out there on the great WWW. So who says there’s room for another service to cater to all the digital cameras out there. The folks at You Represent say there is, and they seem to have a few nifty gems that leave the biggest photo hosts looking, dare I say, empty?

Visit Yourep.com for the first time, and you know immediately that you’re deep into Web 2.0. The mirror effects are there, the big buttons are present, and you have lots of clickable options right from the start. As an avid fan of categorization, I couldn’t resist but ‘explore by tags’ first. I’ll say this. The link leads to perhaps the most beautifully laid-out keyword I’ve seen to date. A to Z are all there; if only they incorporated a Digg-like real-time refreshing/updating scheme. If they so happen to be developing such a revision, I so want to know about it. Before I get lost in links again, let’s see what else they have under the hood.

Quickly becoming the norm among sites like You Represent, is geotagging, which is essentially just an unlimited number of poster tacks at your disposal to pin your photos to a world map. You can pin down your hometown to let everyone know where you are - or where you finally spotted that elusive ape-man you were hunting down.

A map on the right side of the homepage shows the places that have gotten the “been there, done that” treatment. Looks like Europeans are taking to You Represent. Chop-chop, America – and Asia, and Africa, and you Aussies. A lone sole is representing Greenland at the moment, but don’t be fooled by his/her singular status. Runqubit is putting all other users to shame with 5027 photos uploaded thus far.

Overall, You Represent is plain, yet powerful. The mission appears to focus first on ease of use, with developments later wrapped in a little candy coat before they’re shipped out to members. That’s a good thing, because no matter how gorgeous a site’s exterior is, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, ‘tis bound to fail.

You Represent allows 60 photos per upload, which is more than many other services can boast, and it provides you with your own gallery, which is nice to share with friends that would rather bookmark your page than search for your images. They also include a friends list feature for fellow You Represent converts, as well as a grouping feature, a way to track your favorite images, private messaging, hotlinking, backups, and even an option to copyright your photos. More items are in the works, so rest assured that this list is far from done.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. You know how one of Flickr’s best features is their sleek slideshow software, and Photobucket’s got lots of linking options? Well, You Represent has something different up their sleeves. Three words sum it up. You. Get. Paid. That’s right. If you so happen to give You Represent the green light to an ad banner below your gallery, you’re in store for 50% of the revenue generated from your page. What’s better than free? Earning money to do what you’d ordinarily do free. Two words come to mind right about now. Cha. Ching.

You Represent is currently only a 2872-strong army of snapshooters, so don’t go registering your personal space in the hopes of gaining a stash of greebacks in short time. While this is a great selling point, You Represent is truly one of the best offerings out there at the moment. You won’t find millions of photos to browse through, and they make a point in claiming their work a beta, but the feature set is as large as you’ll get from anyone at the moment, so eat up.