Pix.ie is often compared to Yahoo’s Flickr and understandably so, but it offers a far more impressive and friendly user interface. Once they launch their public API, they should be unstoppable.

There are a LOT of photo sharing sites out there. It’s an area I haven’t dug too deeply into over the years as my needs are quite simple. I want somewhere that allows me to easily upload cameraphone pics and screenshots, set the privacy so that my family doesn’t need an account to view them and allows me to display some of those pics in a variety of sizes on my blogs.

Up until recently, Flickr fit the bill perfectly but I’ve always found its user interface to be unintuitive. Drop-down menus in 2008! However it won on speed, price and tools. The various Flickr uploaders really are very good. I’ve also been a fan of Shozu on my mobile phone for sending pics directly to Flickr. Most recently I found that the maps showing geo-located pics taken with GPS in my N95 was an absolute killer feature.

In the past few months I’ve been using Twango/Ovi more. There are a couple of reasons for this - better N95 integration and decent video upload. Downsides were less flexible photo sizing, poor mapping and an annoying Java Applet based uploader.

Pix.ie doesn’t openly address this ultra-early-adopter market but it easily competes with Flickr on mainstream user features whilst doing it in a much slicker way and the site is infinitely more usable than the horror that is Photobox.

Having played with it a lot today, I really don’t know why I didn’t move to it sooner for a lot of the stuff I do. Rest assured that all Web2Ireland.org pics will reside there from now on. Marcus Mac Innes has promised us a Wordpress plug-in too which will provide a sidebar gallery feature like the FlickrRSS one we currently use.

What would I like to see? Well I know the API is coming so that’s great. The RSS feeds are excellent but maybe one per album too? I was just about to suggest a “secret” email address but that’s there too so I’ve added it to Shozu and I’m now uploading pictures directly from my N95-8GB. So in fact “location” is really the only thing missing at all!

Whilst Pix.ie gets quite a bit of notice in the press generally, I’m not sure people realise just how powerful it is. It can compete with the best sites globally, is a damn sight prettier than most of them and is the easiest photo-sharing site to use that I’ve found so far.