Framed art www.imagekind.com Review

Overall Rating

It's a real breakthrough in online printing. Most vendors crop (chop?) images to fit the selected size. If a prospective buyer chooses an image of 2:3 aspect ratio (standard for 35mm film and DSLR's) but wants an 8"x10" print, a big chunk of the picture gets lopped off - sometimes user-controlled, sometimes purely arbitrary. Imagekind prints the WHOLE IMAGE in whatever size the user chooses. Instead, it limits the choices to those that fit the aspect ratio. Thus, if my panorama's proportion = pi (1:3.14), the finished print's porportion = pi. Amazing. Even better, if the user buys mat and frame, they are cut to fit the proportion of the print. Good-bye having to make the print fit the desired size. Other online photo labs, take heed; this is the future.

The site lacks basic tools most online print shops have, from Flickr on up.

1. There's no way to group galleries into larger categories (Flickr calls them collections); every gallery sits at the same level in your account. I organize my galleries by theme - but not here. I can't. I think Imagekind conceives its target market as all one category: Fine Art.

2. Each image can get a title, but it has to do double duty as a filename in the URL. Thus they advise to write it without spaces or special characters. (Imagine newspaper headlines written without spaces or apostrophes.) This makes no sense. Titles are for people to read, filenames are for computers. Separate them functionally. (Flicker assigns arbitrary numbers as filenames.)

3. We're to upload the highest quality TIFF image files, which can be huge, by FTP if we have more than a few, which can take HOURS. Flickr and Printroom supply proprietary software that uploads in a fraction of the time. Flickr requires JPGs, which admittedly compromises quality (although Bay Photo gets spectacular results from JPGs); Printroom requires JPGs for thumbnails, then requests the source file after receiving a print order for that image.

4. All FTP'd image files land in the same server and folder as everyone else's (whose listings all uploaders can see). Then we have to email the company that we uploaded, and manually list addition is because they don't sequester them automatically. This puts yet another burden on the filenames; they need to be clear and easy to find in this list of thousands. It's another instance of omitting an essential organizational hierarchy and missing the difference between humans reading filenames and computers reading them.

Clearly the founders saw a long-standing need - maintaining the crop of images from exposure or processing through framing - and solved it brilliantly by having computers adapt the package to the picture rather than the other way around. Since cropping can be a crucial element in perfecting fine art digitally, they're taking print production in a 21st Century direction.

On the other hand, they are so focused on the final result that they've cut critical corners on the GUI. Make organizing and uploading the images more practical, and I'll have thousand to market as only Imagekind can. For my part, after a week of seeking workarounds, I have reluctantly cancelled my Imagekind account and renewed my Printroom account to upload 200+ images in four galleries in my sixth group.

Members' Comments ondamead's Review

• bluerabbit47 on 5th Aug 2008

  I meant to comment on this review, and mistakenly wrote a review of my own. Oh well. I agree with almost everything here. I have been with the site for a couple of years and have not sold a single thing. I have not paid for the service, but I simply did not receive enough views to warrant the investment. I have sold through Absolutearts.com, Zazzle, and Redbubble. Absolutearts has paid for itself and more in sales every year. Zazzle and Redbubble are free to the artist. Imagekind is okay, but the others are better.