There are already tons of sites that let you share photos, with Facebook, arguably, the default way for friends, colleagues and family to share those captured moments. Yet Yogile, a bootstrapped startup and one-man shop founded by Netherlands-based Maurice Sikkink, thinks it has spotted a gap in the market: dead simple photo sharing with an emphasis on multi-authored albums without the need for everybody who contributes to sign-up first.
The latter functionality nicely skirts around network effects as it doesn’t require the user to get their social graph to commit to using the same photo sharing service if they just want others to contribute ad hoc, uploading and sharing photos around a certain event, for example. In fact, the service is pitched perfectly for this purpose.
The way it works is that each account/photo album that you create is given a secret URL/email address and, optionally, a password if you want to make photos private. You can then hand out these details to multiple contributors and, bingo, they can begin uploading their pics via email, MMS or a web browser. Think conferences, weddings and other social gatherings where it can be a bit of a kludge to collate photos taken in an orderly manner or, more specifically, in a single dedicated album for said event.
Yogile is built on Ruby-On-Rails, utilises Amazon’s S3 and is almost entirely the work of Sikkink with a little bit of additional help from a few freelance developers. Sikkink’s day job is at a small independent software development company called Nyana, according to the site.
Obviously, Yogile is operating in a very crowded space – Facebook photo sharing, Flickr or services like Dropbox spring to mind – although, as noted, its emphasis is on the simple creation of collaborative photo albums, and like Flickr in the early days, has a bare bones elegance about it that aesthetically is quite pleasing. It’s well worth a look.
The service is free for 100mb of upload space, after which an ad-free premium offering is available at $24.95 per year that gives unlimited photo uploads, albums and storage.