Nontrivial Exercises

I am a very amateur but very enthusiastic and passionate photographer. After discovering Flickr over a year ago I feel like I’ve found the ultimate photo sharing and management web app available, and it just keeps getting better. The story of flickr is cool, the people on Flickr are by and large genuinely helpful, enthusiastic and open. The photography on Flickr is fantastic.

In fact, what makes Flickr so great is the community that exists around it. You can find all kinds of amazing photography, some incredibly creative people sharing their work and some average work from aspiring photographers like myself, and interact freely with them in groups or one-on-one. Flickr is unique, Flickr is the biggest, Flickr is the best.

However, I’ve just started to work with a couple of other services that offer a few variations on Flickr functionality. Today I’m going to cover the Tabblo service in this post and talk about how it aims to create easy and beautiful ways to tell stories with your photos.

One of the things many people want to do with great photographs is to present them in a great way. Flickr has a slideshow viewer, but that’s about it - everything is just on the standard white background with the photo info. That’s not bad, and certainly simple is best, but there are times when you want to arrange your pictures in a certain way and create specific types of backgrounds to display them.

Tabblo aims to do just that, and more. Tabloo let’s you arrange your pictures into tabblos - poster-like views of pictures with customizable layouts, colors, backgrounds, and text. You can choose from a variety of pre-defined formats and themes, or start with an existing theme and then customize each specific detail to your liking.

For example, here is a tabblo I created of pictures from my MacBook out of box experience:

The interesting thing about Tabblo is that they do not intend to compete with Flickr. Rather, they see themselves as an extension of Flickr - allowing you to automatically import all your Flickr photos into your Tabblo account, and to send images of your tabblos back to Flickr. Tabblo then offers print services for the tabblos you create - namely posters and prints. Tabblo also offers most of the community features found on Flickr, minus the specific groups.

A very nice extra in Tabblo is the privacy and access control. They offer the expected public setting for pictures and tabblos, and also a setting for your circle only - your circle being your list of contacts in Tabblo. They then have a private setting, which means only you can view the photos or tabblos. This is all just like Flickr and many other sites, and is all useful and good.

However, there are times when I want to share some photographs with some specific people that do not have existing Flickr accounts and who I know do not want to sign up for an account just to view my photos. Tabblo offers a privacy setting called Invitation Only, in which you can send a unique link to a specific person via an email so that they can access your tabblo without having to setup an account. You can choose, actually, whether the link is unique to that person (presumably via the use of cookies on that person’s computer) or if the link will work for others.

All Tabblo accounts are free, at least at present. Tabblo aims to make money from the printing services. Regardless of how good your photos are, you most likely have some you would like to group together and present - either online or on paper - in a visually pleasing and customizable way.

I’ve created only a couple of tabblos so far, but I know I’m going to do more soon. Tabblo offers an innovative, useful and highly aesthetic service that integrates into Flickr and allows you to create wonderfully designed presentations of your photos. I highly recommend you check it out.