By Leslie Walker
Thursday, July 6, 2006; D01
Digital photos have been frozen in a picture-book metaphor on the Web for so long that it's refreshing to see a new crop of sites developing the picture further.
OurStory and Tabblo, both launched in May, are among the many new sites trying to help us do more with our growing collection of digital images than just plop them into online albums.
The Web's early photo pioneers, such as Shutterfly and Snapfish, helped millions of people put their digital snapshots in online albums, e-mails and paper calendars and on coffee mugs and T-shirts. But now that digital photography has gone mainstream, people have more images -- yet still aren't sure what to do with them.
Some of the established photo sites also are experimenting with new tools and features. Newer photo sites such as Tabblo ( http://www.tabblo.com/ ) and OurStory ( http://www.ourstory.com/ ) are going further by exploring unique ways to let people tell stories with their personal pictures.
While Tabblo's storytelling is more visual, OurStory offers a lot of text options. Both employ novel presentation formats and add socializing features similar to those used by networking sites such as MySpace.
Tabblo presents photos in highly artistic collages, like what you'd expect a professional artist to create if you handed over your pictures and asked for a design to hang on your living room wall or prop up on a table. Tabblo creates the collages automatically from images you upload and lets you tweak them by choosing from various layout and style templates.
OurStory arranges your images in visual timelines designed to tell the life of a person or organization. It starts by inviting you to post photos and write captions about them, then automatically arranges them into chronological displays. To jump-start the timeline, OurStory asks questions about milestones or life's odd moments.
I tried both and found these Web programs, despite a few glitches, to be more fun ways to share pictures than the traditional album format used at established sites such as Snapfish, where I have stored many photos over the years. In fact, when Snapfish recently notified me that if I didn't buy something with those images by June 13, it would deactivate my account and delete all my online pictures, I let the account go. Other than getting inexpensive prints online, I never made much use of my pictures stored on the Web.
I was intrigued as OurStory founder Andrew Halliday described how people should use the Web to create elaborate personal archives of their lives -- and the lives of others.
Halliday and his sister, Nancy Halliday, who live in different cities, used OurStory to jointly create a visual timeline about the life of their late father, for example. Others might create an OurStory timeline to chronicle the history of a company or an event such as Hurricane Katrina.
OurStory timelines differ from blogs, Halliday said, in that they are designed to help people create permanent archives for future reference, rather than being focused, as blogs are, on "current dissemination" of their thoughts. "The truth is, most blogs that are started don't carry on," he said. "In part that is because maintaining a publishing voice is a burden."
OurStory's free accounts let users create a single timeline, including unlimited images. A premium account, at $40 annually, allows unlimited timelines. The site eventually plans to show ads on the free timelines and expand its offerings of products beyond the prints and posters it currently sells.
Unlike OurStory, Tabblo does not plan to show ads on its free Web photo displays.
"We are making a big and bold bet that personal content is not about eyeballs that can be sold in quite the same way news and stock quotes are," said founder and chief executive Antonio Rodriguez.
Rodriguez thinks Tabblo's artistic collages (called "tabblos") will appeal to the blogging generation because people crave design tools to make their blogs and personal Web sites look better. Any collage you create on Tabblo, for example, can be displayed on a blog published elsewhere. People can also mix and match others' photos into collages, depending on the privacy level set on images.
As Rodriguez sees it, people will pay to obtain versions of their collages that they can preserve offline on CDs or on paper for public display. Tabblo also aims to make money by charging to print its photo collages on such products as coffee mugs, puzzles, calendars and cards.
Tabblo and OurStory are hardly alone. Many other new sites are vying to become your personal Web photo archivist. SnapJot ( http://www.snapjot.com/ ), for instance, recently revamped itself to help people tell personal stories using photos and videos through a collaborative online process it describes as "scrapbooking." And last month, Pickle ( http://www.pickle.com/ ), an Arlington-based start-up, launched a service for sharing photos and videos online using a special e-mail format it calls PickleMails and an album format it calls PickleBoxes.
One site that drew a ton of traffic almost overnight was Riya ( http://www.riya.com/ ). After launching in March as a Web photo storage service using special face-recognition technology to automatically identify and tag pictures of the same person, Riya drew 7 million photos in its first seven weeks on the Web. People were eagerly uploading their personal photo collections and using Riya to search them.
But as founder Munjal Shah closely watched how people were using the site, he realized that they were spending even more time searching photos of other users. Now he's revamping Riya to be a visual search engine for the entire Web.
The online photo business is growing too competitive, he said. "My big issue is that everybody is doing the same thing" by letting people store, display and print their images.
It's anyone's guess which -- if any -- of these new sites will survive. But I do believe Tabblo and OurStory are doing a fine job of experimenting with new visual storytelling tools and novel ways to communicate using our digital snapshots.
Leslie Walker's e-mail address isleslie@lesliewalker.com.