23, a new online service still in Beta, simplifies organizing and sharing your digital photos through the web while offering a unique facility that allows the creation of effective presentations, slide shows and visual stories, by adding text captions to your images. 23 provides all this as a free service while guaranteeing the fundamental ability to safely store and backup your digital images on 23's servers.
The free account has no limitations in terms of functionality. However, the free account upload quota is 20 MB (bandwidth) per month. A paid account is available for those who want unlimited uploads. When you sign up for either account, you will only need to fill in a rather short registration form.
23 further allows you to send your digital photos by email in a way that allows the recipient(s) to view your digital images right within the email. This gets around the issue of having to invite users to a specific online web page to view your photo album. One negative point is that 23 requires your contacts that you want to share images with to sign-up for a (free) account too.
Unique to 23 is the Stories feature, which lets you create a presentation with images and adding text captions to each one. The text captions can be placed anywhere around your images. You can also resize the images to small, medium or large as well as rearrange the order of the slides with one click.
In Stories, you can add or delete images and edit or delete stories in one step. If all of the photos in the story are public, then a viewer can view the story without registering for a 23 account. Presenters might find this option attractive especially when their audience is located in different time zones. Additionally, presenters who rely on PowerPoint for their presentations don't have to worry whether or not viewers have PowerPoint. Furthermore, no one has to download anything to use or view images in 23.
If you have PowerPoint presentations you'd like to add to 23, save the slides in popular Web graphic file formats including JPG, GIF or PNG. You can upload 20 MB worth of images per month. However, while in beta, 23 allows users with free accounts to upload 1 GB worth of photos per month, but the site doesn't indicate when the beta ends. 1 GB of images equals roughly 700 digital photos or 3000 camera phone images. Also, 23 comes with the capability to download photos as a .zip file for compressing the files to make them smaller and faster to download.
You can upload photos online through 23's Web page or by email from your camera phone using a secret email address. Remember when you send email through the camera phone that your wireless provider may charge extra, so check your wireless plan.
23 includes a Badge configurator for copying and pasting JavaScript on your Web site to display your photos. While you can customize how the badge looks, you can only add photos to the badge, no stories. Another Web site option available is Blog This Photo that lets you easily send an image from 23 to your blog in as few steps as possible.
Save time by subscribing to other users' photo sets and adding contact information for people. Whenever you update photos in your account, use your contact list rather than repeatedly entering email addresses. 23 also comes with a search tool and tag search.
Requirements:
Web browser
Additional Information/Help:
The Help page has Frequently Asked Questions.
You can also look for answers, ask questions and post suggestions in the 23 Forums.
Capacity:
Free account: 20 MB worth of uploaded images per month (23 lets users to upload 1 GB of photos per month while in beta).
Paid account: Unlimited uploads
Price:
Free
Unlimited upload quota: EUR 29 (equivalent of USD $37.16) for one year
Sign up for a free account here.
