Twitpic vs. Twitgoo vs. yfrog vs. img.ly

Last updated: January 18th, 2011

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.

Twitpic, Twitgoo, yfrog & img.ly logo

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 (Twitpic, 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.

Twitpic
Twitgoo
yfrog
img.ly
Local file browsing
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Transload
No
Yes
Yes
No
Email upload
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
File format
GIF, JPG, PNG
GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP
GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP
GIF, JPG, PNG

*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.

Twitpic
Twitgoo
yfrog
img.ly
Follow button
No
Yes
No
No
RT button
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Rotate image
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Social media buttons
Yes, including email
Yes, including email
Yes, including email
Yes
“Other photos” thumbnail
3
2
2
3, scrollable
Image rating
No
No
Yes
No
Import Twitter style
No
Yes
Yes
No
Special effects
No
Lightbox
No
No
Mobile optimized site
No
No
Yes
Yes
Embed code
HTML – 150×150 thumbnail
No
HTML, BBCode – full original size/thumbnail (optional)
Javascript – max width 550px, min 100px
Tagging Tweeples (FB style)
No
No
No
Yes
Watermark on embedded image
No
n/a
No
Yes
Direct link
No
Yes
Yes
No
RSS feed
No
No
Yes
Yes
Distracting banner ad
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
View count
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

Banner advertisement on Twitpic:
Twitpic banner ad

Banner advertisement on yfrog:
yfrog banner ad

Misc.

Twitpic
Twitgoo
yfrog
img.ly
Image URL character
24
24
24
17
Profile URL
/photos/YOURNAME
/u/YOURNAME
/froggy.php?username
=YOURNAME
/images/YOURNAME
Big Daddy
n/a
Photobucket, Tinypic
ImageShack
n/a

*This comparison is updated from time to time. If you found any outdated information, please let us know in the comments below.

#image hosting#image sharing#img.ly#Twitgoo#Twitpic#Twitter#yfrog

Comments

  1. Sebastian Deutsch - July 11, 2009 @ 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.

    • Vincent - July 11, 2009 @ 11:46 pm

      Updated the post with that. Thanks for letting me know. Pretty cool feature, another reason to use img.ly πŸ˜€

  2. Eray Basar - July 12, 2009 @ 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

    • Vincent - July 12, 2009 @ 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.

      • Eray Basar - July 13, 2009 @ 8:27 pm

        Ah ok, I think we can do that…but I think at the end it’s more a legal issue πŸ˜‰ Interesting would be a firefox plugin that can grab images of any site…

        Eray

  3. babolschua - July 29, 2009 @ 4:18 pm

    thanks for this! i think ill be using img.ly

  4. Sara - January 13, 2010 @ 12:15 am

    Is it possible to hide the number of views counter on twitgoo?

  5. Jillis ter Hove - February 15, 2010 @ 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…

  6. OnyxRaven - February 17, 2010 @ 4:18 am

    Twitgoo has RSS/Atom feeds on all pages, and a full API of read and write.

  7. Jay - March 10, 2010 @ 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!

  8. tnk_msy - July 20, 2010 @ 12:32 am

    Twitgoo has RSS.
    try it!

    feed://twitgoo.com/u/tnk_msy/?format=rss

    • Vincent - January 18, 2011 @ 10:02 pm

      @tnk_msy, is there any button that point to such link in the photo page? Where did you find the link?

  9. Kate - September 13, 2010 @ 6:44 am

    I love love love twitgoo I just wish my default image host on TweetDeck was twitgoo or that accessing twitgoo thru my mobile was simpler.

  10. David Riecks - March 17, 2011 @ 2:38 am

    Thanks for the comparison. There does appear, however, to be one metric you have overlooked, and that is whether or not each of these services does preserve any embedded photometadata that exists in the image (such as Exif, IPTC and XMP).

    For those who wish to retain control of their intellectual property, this is critical, and many social media and photo sharing services overlook this vital issue. If they “strip” your contact information from the image, then others will have no idea where a given image may have come from when they download an image to their local machine.

    A couple of the services mentioned in this article have been included in the survey being conducted at http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/socialmedia just click on the link for preliminary results to see the spreadsheet of what is or is not retained.

    I’ve not heard of IMG.LY before, so will be sure to take a look, and see how it stacks up. Currently I’m using Twitpic as they do preserve my photo metadata.

    David

  11. tobmehsa - May 7, 2011 @ 2:05 am

    I will choose twitgoo πŸ™‚

  12. dmf - May 30, 2011 @ 6:46 pm

    i think it’s time to update the functionality chart again. for one, i see that twitpic now does “tweeple tagging”, as you put it.

  13. pete - May 31, 2011 @ 1:47 pm

    Yfrog RSS feeds no longer working πŸ™

  14. Shilo~Michelle - July 24, 2011 @ 2:03 pm

    I’ve got to say, I prefer yfrog. The layout is smooth, and you forget you aren’t actually ON twitter. I wish I could upload directly from my cell though.

  15. chy - June 21, 2012 @ 1:29 pm

    considering these components there are numerous men and women striving their amount advisable to in fact wait for particular period of time by saving some amount of money so that they are able to acquire the mandatory point even though waiting for particular time period.? There to stay is the one other substitute method where you could get hold of the mandatory Louis Vuitton USA where it is possible to identify a fantastic decline in the cost with the passage of time.?

  16. Hermes Birkin - September 11, 2012 @ 2:51 pm

    Good job. Thanks for sharing. Impressive writing. http://www.adelebags.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published / Required fields are marked *