Fotki
Fotki is a web portal. It was founded by Dmitri Don and Katrin Lilleoks as a digital photo sharing website in 1998. At present, it is a web service suite providing sharing of digital images, photo printing and online selling of photos, as well as e-mail, weblogs and co-branding. Fotki has neither ads nor banners.
The website is famous among users due to unlimited storage space for digital images combined with numerous tools including co-branding feature a means to either create, customize and maintain own website with Fotki or seamlessly integrate any of the users pages into another site of his own. Fotki has a simple and user-friendly interface. Fotki is Mac-friendly since all of its tools and features passed through thorough testing to have been adjusted to Apple Macintosh.
Table of contents |
Etymology
In Slavic languages, such as Russian, Polish, etc., fotki (pronounced with an unstressed [ i ] ) is short and to some degree endearing for 'photos'. It is easy to follow a word-chain: Photography Photos Fotos Fotki.
History
Fotki was created by its owners as a means for sharing digital photos with friends and relatives in other countries. A user-friendly system soon became very popular among their circle of acquaintances. Friends of friends asked for permission to use the site, and the number of members around the world was steadily increasing. Soon an official version of the website was introduced to public.
Within a few years, Fotki became a business and the company began to offer its services online for a small yearly fee. Having started with just eighty visitors a day, it now counts more then a million visitors a month who view hundreds millions photos on www.fotki.com. Currently, dozens of millions pictures are stored there, and daily averages of visitors viewing pages and images scanned come to many tens and hundreds thousands, respectively.
Specialty
Basically, Fotki is oriented to two main groups of users:
- Photo professionals use it as a well-equipped e-commerce territory. A professional photographer can create a separate site there of his own with a personal domain name and fully customize it to sell prints of digital images at custom prices online.
- Photo enthusiasts, whove gone digital, have been forming at Fotki a self-contained community. Not only do they create public and private digital photo albums and weblogs (similar to LiveJournals), and order high-quality photo prints, but they also communicate with each other via comments to photos and blogs, as well as via guest-books, e-mail and photo contests.
Compatibility and reliability
Fotkis popularity is based on its compatibility with all mainstream operating systems, including UNIX, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows and Apple Macintosh. Its servers are situated in a world-class data center with 24/7 monitoring, fiber optic cables, an emergency power generator, and advanced enterprise-level hardware protection.
Development and tools
The aim of the company is to constantly master the online photo space by suggesting to both photo amateurs and photo professionals new options:
- Various upload tools, among them those for bulk uploading of thumbnail lists with preliminary resizing of large files, as well as for fetching digital images from another internet site without preliminary downloading to local computer.
- Opportunity to order high-quality prints, first implemented for photo owners and other Fotki members and later for online visitors. Prints are available in 22 formats and can be delivered by post in more than a hundred countries around the world.
- A shopping-cart system, with a payment processor accepting all major credit and debit cards, for easy and secure ordering.
- A multi-level system of security and privacy settings to control access to albums, guest books and journals or to put them on display to the whole community. It is even possible to monitor how many hits a separate album and the entire photo collection received during last two months.
- Support of Exif and IPTC standards.
- A convenient slide show feature allowing viewing photos one by one with no clicking on each individual photo.
- Fotki photo contests naming the winners twice a month.
- Personal Fotki Server (PFS) tool, an in-house P2P software product. In 2003, Fotki was first to offer at the photo market an application that turns a local computer into a personal server thus simplifying the sharing process and allowing slide shows and both-direction real-time streaming media. PFS was found to be efficient by the users and continues to grow in popularity.
- Appearance tool making it possible to apply either ready-to-use or customized color schemes to users accounts to picturesquely change their look and feel.
- Co-branding tool allowing one to create a subdomain with Fotki by getting a direct URL address like username.fotki.com. Due to co-branding, it is possible to apply users own design to personal Fotki account to change its look and feel or to seamlessly integrate any of users pages with other website(s) of his own. The simplest level of co-branding requires neither programming skills nor HTML knowledge.
- Professional selling tool turning Fotki into professional business area: a completely integrated online service managed through the web browser provides photo professionals with the possibility to set about selling photo prints on the internet with neither special technical skills, nor additional computer software or equipment. Their customers have an option to resize and crop images to their taste.
- External linking for using photos at auctions, forums and chat rooms.
See also
External links
Categories: Social networking | Websites | Digital photography