Image bookmarking: the current situation
When it comes to marking and remembering images from around the web, you have very few options. Traditional image management and sharing sites focus mostly on photos that you have taken and wish to share with the world, but with today’s massive amount of user generated content, there is a need for services that let you manage not only what you yourself have made, but what you like that other people have made.
FFFFound and Vi.sualize.us are the two standout image bookmarking sites, and surprisingly, they work in completely different ways. Not technologically, but rather in how they facilitate sharing and discovering of new images.
Vi.sualize.us is, as you might expect, a Del.icio.us like social image bookmarking site. Users can save images using a bookmarklet or contextual menu (via a Firefox extension) to save, describe, and tag images they come across on the internet. Vi.sualize.us saves the images are saved to your profile/gallery and there are a number of sorting options for your viewing pleasure. In addition, you can browse other people’s saved images or view the most popular overall. It is in fact a Del.icio.us for images.
FFFFound is more of an artistic web project. While it also uses a bookmarklet or extension and allows you to save the images you find, that is where the similarities end. FFFFound is more like StumbleUpon than Del.icio.us in that it takes what you have bookmarked and serves you reccommendations based on those. In addition, it is invitation only at this point. It seems to have been built more as a tool to inspire photographers and artists than as an image bookmarking service.
So if you are looking for del.icio.us like functionality for your images, check out vi.sualize.us and if you are of the artistic persuasion, you might start looking for an invitation to FFFFound. I hope to see more projects popping up into this space in the near future, not just for photos, but for all types of content.