Ovi down for 2.5 hours in the middle of the day

The Ovi page as of 8pm EST on November 19, 2008

You may have read my post about switching my image hosting to Ovi. Well, they're down for maintance and I didn't notice any notifications that they would be down.

The worst part is my recent uploaded photos are inaccessible so my last post about SmartConnect is missing all the screen shots. This really makes me reconsider Ovi for hosting.

Clicking on the "For more information about this outage, please visit our Forum." link brings you to their forum where every thread is locked


The board expect us to:

subscribe to a forum board:

Log in
Go to the forum board to which you want to subscribe
Click "Board Options" at the top of the board
Select "Add This Board To My Subscriptions

Couldn't they have told us this from the Ovi Service page a couple days in advanced? If you look closely at the forum screenshot I took, there aren't any notifications for today so even if you did subscribe you wouldn't know of this down time.

The way Ovi handled this maintenance time was really poorly communicated and having servers hosting content go down too isn't good for people relying on the content.

Comparing the Major Image Hosts to Ovi Share

If you're a regular on my blog then you may have noticed that some of my blog entries like my phone reviews have missing photos or screenshots. I've been finding the best free method to maintain my blog since it's just a hobby with little ads. What has worked for me in a long time has been to use BlogSpot for my blogging with images hosted on imageshack. Unfortunately Imageshack isn't very reliable so I'm considering my options and thought I'd write a short entry on it and why I chose what I did. And surprisingly it's a new service that I'm trying out right now.

So let's start with my experiences on some of the popular image hosting sites I've used after the jump.



URL: http://www.imageshack.us

For the last 3 years I've been using Imageshack.us to host my images. I like it because it's fast to upload, a thumbnail is automatically generated for photos, keeps my original files intact (within a certain file size), the URL to the image is easy to access, and it's unlimited storage. A great addition to the imageshack was the multiple image upload through Flash. Image editing tools offered are 8 different sizes but they only store a thumbnail and the image. One major drawback to the service, that has led me to start looking for alternatives, is my images frequently disappear because one or more of their servers are down.

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URL: http://photobucket.com

I use to use this service a long time ago but the 1GB limit of storage that will automatically delete your oldest images isn't ideal for people like me who needs their images indefinitely to maintain a blog. A positive point to Photobucket are their wealth of integrated photo editing options such as cropping, red-eye, and even auto-fix. There are some more obscure ones such as bulge/pinch and even support for layers! The servers were very slow and their pages are littered with ads. The maximum image size of 1MB and 1024x768 pixels is laughable. This easily forced me off Photobucket.

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URL: http://www.flickr.com

My photo bar at the top right is powered by Flickr. So why don't I just use Flickr for all my photo needs? I don't like the organization tools they have with collections. It's just overly complicated so all my images end up in one big bucket. There's also limited storage if you're not a paid member. Being limited by bandwidth on the images you upload didn't work for me since I upload in bursts like after a vacation I'll have a ton of photos to upload. Only being able to see the last 200 images I uploaded meant I couldn't manage my older images either. Lucky for me, Rogers Highspeed gives me access to the paid functions in Flickr but how do I know if I'll be with Rogers forever.

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URL: http://www.ovi.com

So now enter Ovi, Nokia's push into the crowded services space. Ovi offers unlimited uploads, no stated bandwidth limit, image file size limit of 100MB, support multiple image upload through an Active X plug-in (unfortunate for Mac users out there), free, and fast web site. Ovi store images in 5 different sizes. There isn't a lot of editing options available compared to the other services but most people will find rotate, contrast, and brightness sufficient. I don't like how they don't offer an easy way to get the image's URL for posting.

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I quickly summarized some of the variety of limits and services each of the image hosts I mentioned in the table below:

	Imageshack	Photobucket	Flickr	Ovi
Cost	Free / Pro	Free / Pro	Free / Pro	Free
Image Size Limit	1.53MB/3MB	1MB/5MB	10MB/20MB	100MB
Total Space Limit	Unlimited	1G/10GB	100MB upload per month and last 200 images available/unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth Limit	Unlimited	25GB/month	Unlimited	Unlimited
Multiple Image Upload	Yes (Flash)	Yes (Flash)	Yes (Flash)	Yes (Active X)
FTP	No	Yes	No	No
Mobile Upload	No	Yes (e-mail, Shozu)	Yes (S60, Shozu)	Yes (S60, e-mail)
Keeps original image	Yes	Yes (no direct link)	No/Yes	Yes (no direct link)
Optional Image Resize	Yes (8 sizes)	Yes (7 sizes)	Yes (8 sizes)	No
Sizes Saved	2	2	6	5
Photo sets	unlimited tags	unlimited	3/unlimited	Unlimited
Geo-tagging	No	No	Yes	Yes
Editing Options	Rotate	Resize, Rotate, Crap, Red-eye, auto-fix, etc.	Rotate, Picnik (Auto-fix, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, Sharpen, Red-eye)	Brightness, Contrast, Rotate

Nokia Ovi offers a compelling service compared to other image hosting sites. Ovi easily matches key features offered for a fee by other services. Although it may lack the community in Flickr or the quick upload and shortcuts in Imageshack it is still a young service. I have high hopes for Ovi and will be migrating to Ovi for my image hosting. I'll keep you updated with my experiences with Ovi image hosting on this blog entry.

*07/15 updated with Original Size