Picplz; an online photo journal

An online album like Picasa or Flickr provides a good way for photo takers to publish their work. However, while these are great for sharing pictures, there are now better ways to manage your collection of photos taken with a mobile phone.

Back then it was Phlog for me. After a picture was taken, I had to email the picture as an attachment to the designated website. This process is archaic now. Today, I looked at two whiz-bang online albums for photo journalling and I am really thrilled to say that they are very GOOD.

There may be other good ones out there, but due to limited time I want to spend on this, I picked Picplz and Lightbox to look at in detail. Without signing up for an account, I looked at what a casual visitor to the website might experience. I prefer Picplz to Lightbox, although I must say both are almost equally good in feature-to-feature comparison. Lightbox tries to give you a good selection of lovely images with a "Featured Users" list plus a listing of featured images that seem to be taken by seasoned photographers using expensive gear rather than the new breed of mobile phone shooters. Picplz has a more honest-to-goodness approach. The images are all from the mobile phone and it even tells you what phone was used (done automatically when an image is uploaded). If you like, you can select which city you want to narrow down your viewing to. That's a clever way to show a living documentary of what is happening around the world. Thus I signed up for an account with Picplz.

Once I started using it, Picplz only gets better, showing how much thought has been put into designing the app. Yes, you only need to download the Picplz app into your phone to start using it. When launched, I can use any camera app I like (I have several choices of camera on my phone). Once a picture is taken, I can immediately save it to Picplz, Dropbox, and Facebook, all with one click on the "save" button. Or you can choose to publish only to Picplz.

I can also upload any picture belatedly from my phone. Simply open up the picture and click on Share>Picplz. Or, I can upload it via the Picplz website. Doing it the latter way, one can cheat by using a proper camera to shoot and then publish on Picplz. However, I don't think many people will do that. Besides, it shows up right away if a phone is not identified with the image.

If you own a smartphone, you really must instal Picplz. You will want to take more pictures after this. Take a look at their website and see if you like it too: http://picplz.com/