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Fotki is a web portal. It was founded by Dmitri Don and Katrin Lilleoks as a digital photo sharing website in 1998. At present, it is a web service suite providing sharing of digital images, photo printing and online selling of photos, as well as spam-free e-mail, weblogs and full-scale co-branding. Fotki Premium accounts have neither ads nor banners.
The website offers unlimited storage space for digital images combined with numerous tools including co-branding feature – a means to either create, customize and maintain own website with Fotki or seamlessly integrate any of the user’s pages into another site of his own. Fotki has passed through thorough testing to have been adjusted to Apple Macintosh.
Etymology
In Slavic languages, such as Russian, Polish, etc., fotki (pronounced with an unstressed i ) is short and to some degree endearing for '‘photos’'. It is easy to follow a word-chain: ‘Photography’ – ‘Photos’ – ‘Fotos’ – ‘Fotki’.
Specialty
Basically, Fotki is oriented to two main groups of users:
- Photo professionals use it as a well-equipped e-commerce territory. A professional photographer can create there a separate site of his own with a personal domain name and fully customize it to sell prints of digital images at custom prices online.
- Photo enthusiasts who have a community on the site along the lines Flickr. Not only do they create public and private digital photo albums and weblogs (similar to LiveJournals or blogger), and order photo prints, but they also communicate with each other via comments to photos and blogs, as well as via guest-books, e-mail and photo contests.
Compatibility and reliability
Fotki’s offers compatibility with all mainstream operating systems, including Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. Its servers are situated in a data center with 24/7 monitoring, fiber optic cables, an emergency power generator, and advanced enterprise-level hardware protection. These are standard for Enterprise level soluton and possed by all other photo sharing services, many to a larger extent then Fotki.
Development and tools
The business objectives of the company is to puruse the online photo space by suggesting to both photo amateurs and photo professionals new options:
- Various upload tools, among them those for bulk uploading of thumbnail lists with preliminary resizing of large files, for fetching digital images from another internet site without preliminary downloading to local computer and for sending images from mobile phone.
- Sale high-quality prints, first implemented for photo owners and other Fotki members and later for online visitors. Prints are available in many formats and can be delivered by post in more than a hundred countries around the world.
- A shopping-cart system making Fotki a e-commerce system for online photos.
- A multi-level system of security and privacy settings to control access to albums, guest books and journals or to put them on display to the whole community. Fotki allows to monitor how many hits a separate album and the entire photo collection received during last two months.
- Support of Exif and IPTC standards.
- A cslide show feature allowing viewing photos one by one with no clicking on each individual photo.
- Personal Fotki Server (PFS) tool, an in-house P2P software product. In 2003, Fotki was first to offer at the photo market an application that turns a local computer into a personal server thus simplifying the sharing process and allowing slide shows and both-direction real-time streaming media. PFS was found to be efficient by the users and continues to grow in popularity.
- Appearance tool making it possible to apply either ready-to-use or customized color schemes to users’ accounts to picturesquely change their look and feel.
- Co-branding tool allowing one to create a subdomain with Fotki by getting a direct URL address like username.fotki.com. Due to co-branding, it is possible to apply user’s own design to personal Fotki account to change its look and feel or to seamlessly integrate any of user’s pages with other website(s) of his own. The simplest level of co-branding requires neither programming skills nor HTML knowledge.
- Professional selling tool turning Fotki into professional business area: a completely integrated online service managed through the web browser provides photo professionals with the possibility to set about selling photo prints on the internet with neither special technical skills, nor additional computer software or equipment. Their customers have an option to resize and crop images to their taste. This feature make Fotki different from many sites which are primarily for photo sharing, and gives the site a more e-commerce feeling.
- External linking for using photos at auctions, forums and chat rooms.
See also
External links
Social networking | Web portals | Digital photography | e-commerce | Web 2.0
"Fotki"