major improvements needed to interface!

[lewinp]

I think the creative quality of the P-Base community is far superior to other "general public" photo sharing websites, but it is hard to justify the annual expense when many of these free sites offer easier to use interfaces. For example,

Having to enter numeric HTML sort order tags to arrange the images is very outdated, especially when sites like Facebook offer image dragging to visually arrange photo albums.

The requirement to use winzip to upload multiple images is extra steps and often slow, it is not as efficient as many sites which have java-script based batch uploads.

If you are going to collect usage fees you should be re-investing some of that money in technology - I can't recall the Pbase interface changing in a significant way for years. Having an up to date tool and good community of photographers is worth an annual fee for me, but it is hard to continue justifying this expense when other free websites offer an easier to use tool.

[flemmingbo]

Hello!

It may not be flashy but it works. Personally I prefer the old-skool simple admin interface of Pbase but that's just my opinion.

Anyway, I think that long before any major work is done on the interface etc. the first thing first priority for Pbase.com is a new stable and fast server, storage and network platform. We sooooo need that long before we think about interface improvements

Best regards,

Flemming Bo

[lewinp]

I absolutley agree - speed is a major issue which needs to be addressed. The price of popularity I guess!

[guillaume]

Hi,

well I agree server is the priority, slowness and interruptions of service are really a problem.

Interface could be better... I'm satisfied with current one, zip are convenient, and even with java-script based batch uploads I use zip to be sure that all the files arrive on a server.
Even without flash and java we still have a lot of liberty to personnalize our pages as we want, so PBase is still interesting.

What about increasing available space too ?

Best regards

[cits_4_pets]

Ditto: "well I agree server is the priority, slowness and interruptions of service are really a problem." For a paid image hosting site, this should not be a frequent problem.

I also like that pages are able to be personalized. I even copied my biz webpage onto Pbase...

I also notice that the pbase front page...is outdated, Show & Tell Competition 105 has ended, the pbase mag is almost a year old...
would like to see that kept up to date as well as the service improve as mentioned above.

[lucidity]

the lights are on but no one is home it seems

[sheila]

Little if anything at all has changed over the past three or four years so don't hold your breath for any substantial changes.

Sheila

[broe]

This is one of the things that has me considering leaving for another service. It seems like PBase is in the stone age compared to other hosting sites.

[photopropaganda]

I like the simplicity of the 'administration' part. It gives me the possibility to load up images for clients in a rather easy way from a EeePC or laptop anywhere in the world.

[ac]

Slug-gish site, yes

[dexmadden]

I think the creative quality of the P-Base community is far superior to other "general public" photo sharing websites, but it is hard to justify the annual expense when many of these free sites offer easier to use interfaces. For example,

Having to enter numeric HTML sort order tags to arrange the images is very outdated, especially when sites like Facebook offer image dragging to visually arrange photo albums.

The requirement to use winzip to upload multiple images is extra steps and often slow, it is not as efficient as many sites which have java-script based batch uploads.

If you are going to collect usage fees you should be re-investing some of that money in technology - I can't recall the Pbase interface changing in a significant way for years. Having an up to date tool and good community of photographers is worth an annual fee for me, but it is hard to continue justifying this expense when other free websites offer an easier to use tool.

Agreed on all points, affirms our thinking on pbase's value and utility proposition for web management of photos. We are 1 month away from running out of pbase credit, having been paid up for LONG TIME. So, in addition to not having paid for some time to get pbase's mediocre UI, admin, and performance, the exponential changes in web interfaces and paradigms since then have obviated the design issues you mention above, notwithstanding the commonplace rich features way above and beyond pbase-assic era.

The bulk of the serverside pbase codebase I believe is still mainly Perl driven. Somebody correct me otherwise. Perl has its merits, great for text parsing and regular expressions, and general command line admin utility scripts. Perl came along for the ride during proliferation of HTTP browsers in early 90s, used along with CGI as one of the first ways to create dynamic HTML.

Fast fwd to 2009: Google has taken over the world(ww) and they did it one async (XMLHTTPRequest) request at a time. The javascript that does the dirty work is just as ugly as any hairball Perl code can get, but it allows websites rich interactivity (flickr, google maps). The key is innovation and funding, repeat and rinse.
Flash is attempting a (second?) renaissance (flex,mxml,blaseDS) to coax more website market share than just rock band and advertising company splash-page animations. Once again, innovation and funding.

So, pbase is on the losing end of the proposition at least 3 times over and probably more. No reason to throw good opportunity cost at renovating the legacy Perl serverside code, good odds there will always be wonky performance/scaling issues as well as Perl being an archaic way to stream/render HTTP/HTML. Slug's kernel of a photo sharing idea was innovative THEN, BUT currently the prima facie requirement to do a total redesign and w/o a full staff, innovation will be limited at best, more likely zilch. Started as a free no-advertisement website to share photos, pbase started charging I think in '04. $ has gone to server/bandwidth upgrades, but these are band-aids at best.

SO, is today the the day I migrate 1800 (358MB) photos to another photo site? Eh, I don't think so. 6 cents a day can stall that decision another year, so I will re-up. I don't use pbase for commercial purposes, just sharing photos with friends/relatives, as per my original use, as per pbase's original purpose.

Ok, let me qualify that, I'm going to do a spot check right now, I will re-up if I don't see any major performance issues (apart from the annoying profile page takes forever coz its building stats on the fly issue) OR missing links in any of the galleries!

[dexmadden]

...
SO, is today the the day I migrate 1800 (358MB) photos to another photo site? Eh, I don't think so. 6 cents a day can stall that decision another year, so I will re-up. I don't use pbase for commercial purposes, just sharing photos with friends/relatives, as per my original use, as per pbase's original purpose.

Ok, let me qualify that, I'm going to do a spot check right now, I will re-up if I don't see any major performance issues (apart from the annoying profile page takes forever coz its building stats on the fly issue) OR missing links in any of the galleries!

Signed up for another year (500MB). Spot check found no missing links.

Had a chance to put facebook's image upload and management tools to the test. It would be nice to have some of those rich features on pbase, esp. the upload manager and the 'drag and drop' gallery editor. Will revisit this in April 2010 and see how (ir)relevant pbase interface is by then.

[michaelmudd]

Have to agree that I find the uploading process very slow and cumbersome. Also strongly believe there should be click-and-drag capability to manage the display of images. And equally needed is a far more effective search engine. The current one is all but useless. Just to test it, I will sometimes use as search terms the names of photographers, galleries or images I know are on PBase. Yet when I execute the search the results more often than not come back empty. There needs to be some capital invested in the infrastructure -- urgently!

[larrytucaz]

Personally, I find the "simple" interface great.

Granted, I am 40, and started using the Internet in 1997, so maybe I'm an "old fashioned Internet user" (if there is such a thing), but in fact I just posted in the SmugMug forum asking questions about the features of their site, and made a point to mention that one thing I like about PBase is how you can, for instance, "batch upload" images without having to mess around with complicated Java or a fancy Flash web-browser plug-in to do it. You ZIP the file, click browse, you can even copy-paste the path to the ZIP file right there, then you're done. It makes it much simpler and less "system hungry" on the computer.

I like it that the options for image size & other things are simple links below the image, as opposed to "hover-over/drop-down" options like is required for SmugMug. Believe me, I like features and a friendly interface, but it seems so many sites, photo-hosting or otherwise, want to make things more complicated than they need to be, seemingly simply for the reason of wanting to show-off. Who needs that? I don't care for it personally.

I also like it that PBase lets you specify more than the default 12 images per page, and also lets the user click "view all." Call me crazy, but I think more websites need a "view all" option, or at least the option to show more than 10 items per page. Take news stories with posted comments, for instance. There will be, say, 2500 comments, and let's say that you've commented and you're looking for yours, to see what has followed since. If you could, say, load every last comment posted, you could then perform a CTRL-F search for your username, and jump straight to it, and then quickly see everything that has followed. Instead, since those sites typically stubbornly restrict you to viewing 10 posts at once, you have to keep clicking "next, next, next, next, next, next, next, next" over and over. So freaking annoying.