Picuous Adds One-Click Sharing to Photos On Your Website

By Martin Pannier on picuous

Unlike most videos you find on the web, images aren’t very easy for the average person to share. Rather than hotlink photos from their original source, as is done for videos, most “sharing” involves downloading the photos, uploading them somewhere else, and then publishing that new version of the image. Picuous, a new service that launched today, aims to change that by bringing one-click Vimeo-style sharing to online photographs.

Getting started with the service involves pasting a snippet of Javascript code into the header of your website:

The code then finds all the photographs on your page, adding a small “share” button in the upper right hand corner. Here’s a sample Tumblr photoblog showing the code in action.

Clicking the button brings up a number of options for sharing the photograph, including social media services and some embed code:

Photographs shared in this way are automatically attributed to you and linked back to your website. You can also track how your images are being shared by logging into the Picuous website.

One of the main downsides to embedding an image or video is that if the source disappears, then all the embedded versions around the web stop working as well. This has been an issue with a number of different videos we’ve shared here at PetaPixel, and is a reason we always host images ourselves.

However, for ordinary Internet users and people looking to promote their photography, Picuous could be a good solution for avoiding copyright infringement and for keeping track of how your images are being used.

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