With so many third party image sharing service for Twitter, it is hard to decide which one to go for. Since there isn’t any comparison articles yet for Twitgoo vs. Img.ly, two of my remaining choices among the four, I decided to take a real look at them and compare all four Twitpic, Twitgoo, yfrog and img.ly.
Login method
Who would want to hand out their Twitter credentials to a third party website when they can simply link their Twitter account with the image sharing website in just two clicks.
At the time of writing, all (Twitgoo, yfrog, img.ly) are using OAuth to link Twitter accounts to their image sharing service, except for Twitpic, which require you to enter your Twitter username and password.
Image upload
Uploading methods and limitations by the service providers themselves.
| Local file browsing | ||||
| Transload | ||||
| Email upload | ||||
| File format |
*Twitgoo accepts pcx/psd/tiff too, but will convert them to JPG.
*yfrog supports video upload too, but since we are only discussing about image upload, I leave it out of the table
Image viewer
Features on the image viewing page and other relevant information.
| Follow button | ||||
| RT button | ||||
| Rotate image | ||||
| Social media buttons | ||||
| “Other photos” thumbnail | ||||
| Image rating | ||||
| Import Twitter style | ||||
| Special effects | ||||
| Mobile version | ||||
| Embed code | ||||
| Tagging Tweeples (FB style) | ||||
| Watermark on embedded image | ||||
| Direct link | ||||
| RSS feed | ||||
| Distracting banner ad |
Banner advertisement on Twitpic:
Banner advertisement on yfrog:
Misc.
| Image URL character | ||||
| Profile URL | =YOURNAME | |||
| Big Daddy |
Which service am I using?
When I first start Tweeting, I use Twitpic because it’s one of the most widely used photo sharing service on Twitter. Then the other day when I was not using my AdBlock Plus equipped Firefox, I discovered that Twitpic has this very ugly banner ad next to all uploaded images. What a deal breaker.
The last few photos I uploaded was on Twitgoo, and now I’m still considering whether to switch to Img.ly, for it has a mobile version of its website. It’s pretty important as many are using mobile to access Twitter, with all the beautiful mobile Twitter clients out there. I for one doesn’t like my mobile browser to load up the entire large website just to view an image, when it’s possible to see the same image on a lighter weight version.
What say you? Did I left out any crucial comparison factor?
*I cannot guarantee that all the information posted above are correct. Human do make mistakes, plus those services are improving themselves all the time. If you notice any mistake, please let me know.
11 Jul 09
10:41 pm
Good sum up! Have you seen that you can tag other twitter users on the photos at img.ly? we often use that at tweetups or barcamps.
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Vincent replied:
July 11th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Updated the post with that. Thanks for letting me know. Pretty cool feature, another reason to use img.ly
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12 Jul 09
3:21 am
I’ve just read your message on twitter. I’m not very sure what you mean with the transload function?
Thanks,
Eray // img.ly
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Vincent replied:
July 12th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Meaning uploading from a URL. Uploading an image that is already on the internet directly to img.ly, without the need of downloading it to our local disk first then upload to img.ly.
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Eray Basar replied:
July 13th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Ah ok, I think we can do that…but I think at the end it’s more a legal issue
Interesting would be a firefox plugin that can grab images of any site…
Eray
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29 Jul 09
4:18 pm
thanks for this! i think ill be using img.ly
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13 Jan 10
12:15 am
Is it possible to hide the number of views counter on twitgoo?
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15 Feb 10
9:21 pm
Great article! Lot’s of usefull bits of info.. but you did leave out a few! Do you know mobypicture? And tweetphoto? Would love to see the article updated with them…
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17 Feb 10
4:18 am
Twitgoo has RSS/Atom feeds on all pages, and a full API of read and write.
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10 Mar 10
10:39 am
After using TwitPic (as well as having an awful experience with the abominable TweetPhoto), I discovered TwitGoo and have used it ever since! Excellent!
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