How do you find it - pros/cons?
I haven't really done very much with it, and I don't think I'm their ideal customer, as I'm not looking for somewhere to interact with other members. I just want somewhere quick and easy to dump some photographs where I can send people to look at them.
Glass.photo has a Capture One plugin (which works well), and this was the draw for me.
The photographs are displayed well, and you can create series (this is new, and just seems to be what I would call albums) along with photographs appearing chronologically.
There are a lot of very good photographers on it, and unlike Flikr where a lot of people obviously just dump their snapshots (as well as high quality photographs) the feelings I get from Glass, is that people are only showing their best work. This makes it a great place to browse, but a bit intimidating for what I wanted to use it for.
It's still a relatively new platform, and the three people who run it (its based in the Netherlands) have made the decision to not make use of any external funding, which means development is a bit slow.
it's perfectly workable, but I also feel it's a bit rough around the edges. For example, expanding an image to full size makes it flush with the edge of the screen with no border, which looks odd to me. On my test uploads, I ended up going to the hassle of adding a white border to images before uploading.
I have also found it a little confusing, for example, I thought I had marked all my trial uploads as private (because they were just random images I happened to upload, and not images meant to be shared) but I suddenly got other members commenting on them !!
I now think, but not sure, that you can only make photographs private to non-members. And now when I delete my trial images, I assume I am also going to delete the comments (including the "welcome to Glass" ones) which feels a bit rude.
The help also seems a bit rudimentary, and some things tricky to work out.
And although this is a bit petty, they have a controlled vocabulary for keywords, which makes sense, but it doesn't allow you to use Autumn as a key word, only "Fall"
Obviously, I am still learning, and I haven't spent that much time on it, but in spite of what I've said, I think that overall it looks pretty good, and they seem to be actively working at improving things.
I think you can sign up as a "viewer" and get a good idea of how it works, and how others will see your photographs should you decide to become a paid member. There are two tiers of membership, one that seems reasonable in cost, and one that seems a lot of money to me, for very little extra, except knowing you are possibly funding a quicker development timetable, and an opportunity to get more directly involved in discussing the future of the platform.
