Emerging photo sites

As far as photo hosting goes, everyone’s heard of Yahoo/Flickr, Google, Photobucket, MSN and MySpace, but have you heard of these smaller niche sites yet?

Geograph (UK)

People submit photographs and text for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland. So far an impressive 58{a9f0d31f6175b3e4775e11a66c07db268fb74408d6095f6b46eeec420c0e9f62} of all the grid squares (each 1km2) in Great Britain have been filled with photos and 7{a9f0d31f6175b3e4775e11a66c07db268fb74408d6095f6b46eeec420c0e9f62} in Ireland. It’s easy to use – if you have a postcode a search box will translate it into a grid reference. The result is a growing photographic record of the British Isles and a good instance of one of the ongoing delights of the web: returning to places that don’t get much publicity when they are launched but just go on getting better. If the exercise could be repeated every five years we would have an enduring record of the changing face of Britain.

Woophy (WOrld Of PHotographY)

Similar, but on a worldwide scale, encouraging amateurs anywhere to upload high-quality images to fulfill its modest ambition “to ultimately cover every inch of our world map with images that represent the world’s beauty”. Woophy presents you with a map of the world studded with photos from enthusiasts everywhere.

Zooomr.com

A fascinating American startup with big ambitions, now run by the photographer Thomas Hawk. It has fewer than 100,000 photos so far but does have interesting features including an easy way to fix an exact location (geotag) to your pictures, an option to view others nearby, plus the ability to see pictures through light boxes, not to mention trackbacks so you can find out why a photo of yours gets a lot of views. You upload an image and click on a button to the right marked “Geotag it now”. You then zoom in from a map of the world to the exact place you want to locate your photo.

From the Guardian article:
Snapshot of the true content generators via Pieter.