Here at T&S, we love tools that let us update multiple social networking and social media websites in one fell swoop. We’re big fans of ping.fm, a website that updates your statuses across multiple sites. So when we heard about Pikchur, a website that would allow you to update multiple websites with your pictures at once, we were eager to try it out. I was the willing volunteer.
Pikchur currently supports Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, Facebook, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Plurk, Brightkite, Totspot Rejaw, Koornk and Flickr. I was immediately disappointed that it didn’t have MySpace in the list. I’m not a huge MySpace fan, but I try to keep my pictures there as up to date as my Facebook page.
I went ahead and signed up for Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Flickr, and started uploading pictures. The first major drawback I found was that I could only upload one image file at a time. What a pain! I had 15 pictures to upload, and if I was a more casual social networking user, I probably would have bailed at that point.
The upload process did let me put in the location, although it turns out it didn’t share that information with the other websites. By default, Pikchur stores your pictures themselves, with a gallery and pages you can view them on. So here’s how it interacted with each of the social networks:
Pikchur posted a tweet for every single picture I uploaded, with a link back to Pikchur’s website to view. A batch upload option with just one tweet would have been nice here. I’m sure this was annoying for those following me on Twitter.
Here, Pikchur created its own Pikchur album. I did not put a description in when I uploaded the pictures, so Pikchur posted some annoying message for other people to visit Pikchur and use them. I had to go in, delete all the descriptions for each picture, then rename the album.
FriendFeed
FriendFeed got the same treatment Twitter did, with a status update with a link for every single picture. Annoying.
Flickr
Flickr had the same results as Facebook, down to the annoying “Send pics 2 Flickr from your mobile device, and view full size @ pikchur.com/wp7″ for the description. I had to delete the descriptions and put the pictures in a set.
So there’s two gripes I have with Pikchur right now. First, they need to not automatically put their plug in where my description goes. Second, and more importantly, they need to allow for multiple files to be uploaded at once. This would create a set on Pikchur, Facebook, Flickr and similar sites. On FriendFeed, Twitter and other related sites, it would result in only one link sent out, not one per picture.
Until they at least add multi-file upload support, I won’t be using Pikchur any more.
