Yogile: Easy Group Photo Sharing

These days we’re all photographers, whether via cell phone, point & shoot, a more serious DSLR or some other gadget with photo snapping capabilities. We’re a digitally social and sharing society these days, yet it’s still surprisingly difficult to share group photos outside social networks like Facebook.

Yogile brings a simple and very usable solution to the table for easy photo sharing for groups. Read on for our look at Yogile’s interface, pricing and usability.

Overview

For as many photo storage and sharing sites as there are these days, it’s surprising that so many of them lack easy group sharing features. Many people use Facebook to tag each other in their uploaded albums and many still email photos back and fourth! So where’s the really simple solution?

Yogile is one, that’s for sure. It’s simple enough for your not-so-tech-savvy friends or family to upload photos to, yet offers enough features to actually be a usable photo gallery.

The idea behind Yogile is simple; someone signs up and creates an album then sends out the link for everyone else at which point others can easily upload their photos without being required to sign up. Know someone that likes sending photos via email? Give them your custom @yogile email address and they can upload photos by simply emailing them.

Pricing

Yogile is Free. However, you’re limited to 100 MB on free accounts. For $24.95 you can upgrade to unlimited storage which also includes unlimited photo uploads, unlimited albums and ad-free sharing and browsing. That’s not a bad deal and quite comparable to competing services.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find information on the limitations placed on free accounts but in testing Yogile with photos I’d be sharing, I didn’t have a bit of trouble.

Although free accounts are supposedly ad-supported, I didn’t see a single ad, even when sharing photos with non-Yogile users.

Interface Design and Usability

Although Yogile’s interface design isn’t anything super snazzy, it is very clean and minimalistic. As a designer and someone that sees tons of websites every day, I love it when sites like Yogile offer some sexy eye candy. That being said though, I definitely appreciate the simplicity and minimalism they’ve gone with. It’s a design that wouldn’t scare my grandmother away but appealing enough for my friends or siblings.

Yogile is very usable. It’s incredibly responsive and makes fantastic use of JavaScript enhancements. The JavaScript enhancements that’ve been implemented really help create a much more seamless, snappy and pleasant experience.

An example of this is quickly editing album and photo titles, album descriptions and other information inline, simply by clicking them.

Uploading and Sharing

Uploading and sharing your photos is incredibly easy. If you’ve already signed up you’ll simply click the Add Photo Album button, name your album and optionally enter a password and/or customize its link and hit Save.

Next you’ll select and upload your photos. The upload process is very responsive and seemed to work flawlessly with bundles of photos, including the upload progress, remaining files and remaining upload data size.

Once your photos are uploaded you can easily share the whole album or individual photos with others by sending the unique Yogile URL or clicking the share button to quickly send the link via email.

Yogile even includes Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail contacts integration to easily look up your contact’s addresses.

Let Others Upload Photos

Others are able to easily add more photos to your album as long as they have the album’s URL (and password if you’ve set one). They’ll be prompted to sign up but can optionally upload their photos anonymously.

Even if they do decide to sign up, it takes but only a second. Although, it is nice that sign up isn’t required as many of my friends and family don’t care to add yet another account to their website collection.

Final Thoughts

Yogile is about as clean and simple as it gets to accomplish group photo sharing, and it works. The site has other great features as well such as the ability to download full albums as .zip archives, view photos via slideshow, order photos in several different ways and view photos in several different thumbnail sizes (or single full view).

The ability to upload photos via email or MMS is nice for those on the go but also for those who prefer to share their photos via email. The integration of JavaScript enhancements and fantastic site responsiveness makes Yogile fantastic to use.

The downsides? Well, a little more space for free accounts would be nice considering so many other photo galleries online offer 1GB or more for free. Yogile is also holding back a significant amount of information I’d like to know before really making it a permanent solution in my photo sharing toolbox. Details on free and upgraded ($24.95/yr) accounts should be standard and easily accessible.

Overall Yogile definitely deserves an outstanding 8/10 with potential to move up.