Picli has returned 29th March 2009

For the past 3 months we have been been working incredibly hard coding and designing the latest version of Picli. We are proud to announce a brand new release on March 29th, our 2 year anniversary.

We have completely recoded and redesigned everything.

There is so much to talk about, please read on for an insight into our best version yet.

Click here to visit the brand new Picli

Interface

We have scrapped our old layout and rebuilt the design from scratch, keeping usability in mind. We feel the new layout is very intuitive and you should be able to navigate very easily. Things to remember:

But enough about the ergonomics of the design. Let's move onto some of the new and improved functionality.

Uploading photos

We are happy to announce a brand new way of uploading photos on Picli. Now you can upload up to 10 photos at a time and then describe them in step 2. We've redesigned the forms to make them as effective as possible.

Publishing & Privacy

In the past when you uploaded a photo it was automatically entered into our voting system. From now on you can upload as many photos as you like and choose to publish them (enable voting) at whatever time you like. For example, you can take a group of photos at the beach, upload them all at once, then publish one per day if you so wish. Your unpublished photos can be seen using the display options on your photo listing.

You may want to keep your photos private. Well, now you can. And that's not all - you can even make your photos visible only to your friends on Picli.

Sets

As well as our tagging system you can further sort your photos into sets. If you've just taken 5 photos of a brilliant sunrise you can add all 5 into a Hawaii Sunrise set. But aswell as categorizing by location/place you might chose to create a set for all of your black&white photography. It's up to you. Sets combined with our new publishing settings means you can now upload and share all the photos from any particular shoot, yet only publish those which you feel are the best.

Image formats

Picli now supports your fullsize original photos. Previously, all photos were resized to a feeble 580 pixels - this is no longer the case. When using the standard picli free account (more about accounts later) - thanks to the new photo sizes pages you will be able to enjoy photos at their original size and quality (provided they stay below 5mb per image).

Furthermore we have increased our image format support to include both PNG and GIF files.

Cameras

When uploading your photos to Picli you can now associate each photo with the camera used to take the picture. We have compiled a comprehensive default list of cameras to choose from, however, should yours not be listed you can add it to the directory. This data is then displayed in the 'Statistics' area on each photo page.

This is a basic feature for now, however, once we have enough data we plan to expand this functionality. Each camera will become a link that will bring up all pictures taken with that specific camera (just like browsing tags).

We are also planning to include areas where which users can discuss the pros, cons, tips and tricks etc of each camera.

Licenses

We're happy to say that all picli users can now license their images under a variety of Creative Commons licenses, or the default all rights reserved license. More about this here.

Voting & Favorites

Something we had never considered was the ability to actually see what you had voted for. This obvious feature was requested by a number of users and has finally been implemented.

You'll see a nice new heart icon for your favorite photos. We changed this because we intend to use the old silver & gold star icons for picli club and pro accounts. More about this later...

Prodem

Prodem (promotion/demotion), the name given to our promotion algorithm has undergone some changes. Various protocols such as our 'Lockdown' functionality are now in effect to catch people attempting to game the promotion system. Read more about this here.

Notifications

We asked ourselves "what do users want to see when they login?". The answer was pretty easy. They want to see what's been happening to their photos while they've been away.

Now you are given a clean list of who has voted on your photos, who has added your photos to their favorites, which photos have been promoted and various other interesting alerts. If you don't want to see all of these, you can easily customize which notifications appear, or have them sent to your email inbox instead. Please click here for more information.

Profiles

We've rebuilt user profiles and actually made them useful. Previouly, they weren't really doing much.

Now when you visit a user's profile you can see their photos, favorites, sets, friends etc. You can also leave them a comment if you've added that person (and they've accepted you) as a friend.

Friends

We want our users to start talking to each other and to do this we've built friendships into Picli. This version acts as the base of our coming social functionality - we have a lot more to implement in future versions that will really help photographers and photography enthusiasts connect and interact with the people who inspire them.

We hope these features will allow our users to share their work and build new relationships.

With friends comes friend requests. The is now an area where incoming requests can be found. More about friends here and more about requests here.

Themes

One our old site we let you choose from 2 themes, a simple default green and the same thing in blue. All that is about to change.

We now support 12 default backgrounds, designed by us and if you hate them all then you can now upload your own background which will show on all of your pages.

We're really excited to be able to see some of your creative design talent aswell as your photography skills.

Languages

We used to support French as a language on Picli. Unfortunately due to our new release being brand new - a lot of our old translations have become redundant and do not apply. We are currently working on a 'french - basic' version that translates all of the most important text - navigation which we will implement as soon as possible, however, a full translation is still a while away.

As noted before this entire site has been thought up, designed, coded, written and dreamt about by just the two of us - Sam Street and Sean Miller. We don't have an office and have created this site entirely from our homes. Translation is a big job for two guys that only really speak English and very basic French so we're having to turn this feature over to our community - if you're willing to help translate the site into your native language (any language at all) we would really appreciate it. Please click here to express your interest.

Picli Accounts

We are announcing paid accounts today - but they will not be released for a few months while we finalize the details.

We really want to stress that the current free account has way more features than ever before - we would never charge our users for something that was once free.

However, if we want the site to grow into something potentially incredible we're going to have to monetize certain areas in order to pay for our server costs.

We want to offer users a way to upgrade and unlock extra functionality on Picli. In the spirit of openness we are going to announce exactly what our current price plan will be (see below). However, none of this is final. This is a work in progress and we will be taking your feedback into consideration.

Releasing a paid service without asking our users to help would be stupid and against the principles that we've built this site upon.

Below are our initial pricing plans. They are subject to change, based on the feedback you send us.

Click here to visit the new Picli