Easy image sharing galleries with Picsurge

Picsurge is a new free service for easy image sharing

As photographers, you surely found yourselves with the need to quickly share pictures online. But sometimes the hassle of using an image hosting service like Flickr or SmugSmug is too much. There are also simple services like Imgur where you just upload the pictures, with no accounts needed and no hassles except for those which are intended for single pictures. How about the cases when you want to share an entire gallery of images, quick and easy? Picsurge is a brand new free service helping you with that!

Picsurge is a new service offering easy image sharing for your galleries.

Photographer creates software for himself and it turns it into a service for the world

Picsurge was created by a wedding photographer from Australia, Mark Tolson, who found itself in the need to share photo albums online. This is how many pieces of great software applications are born: a developer has “an itch to scratch” and while doing it from himself, the result turns useful for many.

After he got the service up and running, Mark announced his new toy on Reddit, where it proved very popular, receiving positive feedback from a lot of fellow photographers. Based on the feedback received, Picsurge already gained significant improvements with many other improvements planned and on their way to implementation.

Picsurge can be described with a single word: easy

While it is relatively easy to share a lot of images in galleries using a service like Flickr or SmugSmug, there are downsides: you need an account, will lose anonymity, and there are quotas pushing you toward paid accounts. Also image albums sharing via social networks like Facebook or Google Plus has its flaws: beside the above-mentioned ones, social networks act like “walled gardens”, often limiting what and how you share. Picsurge is the opposite of this, you are not asked for anything, just provide the pictures and then pass the link to those who need to view them. There is one single limitation at the moment: each uploaded file can’t be large than 10 MB, which is plenty for online view.

Of course, such an easy going service has its dangers, as it happened with Imgur before. There is a high potential to be abused by users uploading inappropriate images and ignoring copyright. The Picsurge developer is aware of it and he is thinking of ways to prevent that.

In 3 steps your pictures are online

But how does Picsurge works? As said above, Picsurge is all about easiness: you only need to pass 3 steps. The first one is to select a gallery layout from the three provided (tiles, column and grid). The second step is to drag and drop some image files from your computer into the browser window. The last step is to press the “Upload and create” button. Simple!

Actually, there is a fourth step, but this is optional: you can provide a title for the gallery, a name and homepage URL for yourself and even some keywords for categorization.

As a new thing, Picsurge is definitely interesting but only time will tell if it will be able to survive. Hosting images is not an easy business, images can eat a lot of bandwidth and surge costs for the service provider.