I’ve been checking out image-based aggregation websites - http://tastespotting.com/ (recommended by one of my lovely research participants – thank you)
And http://streetstyl.es/ -
I love the concept of both sites – simple propositions (recipes and street fashion respectively) simply laid out in a highly visual style.
Looking at these sites I thought it’d be a great format for saving images from the web for a kind of image bookmarking tool. Ever lost track of great images you found online? In 2 seconds of Googling and I found 2 services to let you bookmark & tag images, as well as browse your saved images as thumbnails - http://weheartit.com and http://vi.sualize.us
After trying them both out for the past couple of weeks, here’s a non-extensive list of the features and functionality for a basic comparison of the two:
Visualize: http://vi.sualize.us
Visualize Features:
• Firefox plugin which allows you to right click to save any image on the web
• When you right click to save, a popup opens, which is faster & doesn’t take you off the page
• Tagging is in same format at del.icio.us (which I’m already very used to), with ‘suggested tags’ & ‘your popular tags’ displayed
• Can save images from within (html) webpages or just any online image (so you can save an image with a URL ending in .jpg for example)
• Tag list is displayed with tag words sized according to popularity (cloud style)
• Overall it’s quicker, easier, clearer to see what’s going on and it’s less intrusive
• A bit too much text on the ‘Your favourite pictures’ page – I’d rather have larger thumbnails as the images speak for themselves.
We Heart It: http://weheartit.com
We Heart It Features:
• Firefox browser button ‘I heart IT’ allows you to click to save any image within a webpage (html)
• When you click to save an image, ‘add to my hearts’ thick pink border appears over every image in the page, you can’t remove this after you’re done unless you refresh the page.
• Selecting image to save opens a new page where you can tag the image; this can be a little slow and disorientating (in terms of navigation…)
• Lack of feedback after you’ve added tags – it’s not clear your image has been successfully saved until you go to your ‘my heart’ page and check.
• Layout of ‘my heart’ page is nice and clear with large thumbnails and little text between the images
Overall, my favourite is Visualize , as it’s a bit quicker, more like del.icio.us in it’s tagging functionality and you can save images alone or on webpages. I do prefer the visual design of We Heart It however, and this is pretty important for an image saving tool.
More on Image bookmarking sites on NY Times: Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing