Jimmy Digital :: Technology Blog

Review of Jux.com

As an amateur photographer I am always up for experimenting with my pictures.  This includes finding creative ways to share them with other people.  Like so many of my peers I use SmugMug, Picasa, Flikr, and many others, and they work great for the most part.  They provide great features, make it easy to upload and share pictures, and provide a really good way to keep everything organized.  Using these sites is a lot like driving a Toyota.  They are reliable, you know exactly what you are going to get out of them, and they just seem like a safe choice because everyone else is using them.  But at some point, as you do with your Toyota, you get tired of “bland” and start craving something cool; something that stands out and makes people notice.

This is exactly what happened to me as I looked for more creative ways to share my pictures with the rest of the world.  First, I considered opening my own WordPress blog and using one of the cool photo-specific templates for it I found somewhere on the internet.  That worked great for a little while, but underneath it all it was still a blogging platform that pretended to be a photo gallery.  It was different, but not different enough.  So I decided to keep looking.  I wanted a dedicated photo sharring solution that was clean, simple, and was super artsy and creative (I didn’t quite know what that would look like, but I knew I wanted it).  After doing a couple of searches on twitter I stumbled on jux.com and I decided to give it a shot.  Now after a few weeks of using it I can officially say that for me this will probably be the find of the year.

Jux.com is a photo blogging service where you blog with full screen images and video.  This is a great idea and it makes you wonder why no one thought of it earlier.  Everything looks so much better on a big screen and feels less cluttered and less confined.  Being a photographer I primarily post large images and I have had a wonderful experience so far.  Despite taking up the full screen everything loads fast and looks crisp.  I can blog with simple pictures or I can create slide shows, block quotes, countdowns, and article posts.  Each image can be annotated and I have a lot of control over how these annotations are displayed on screen.  I can pick fonts and font sizes, styles, colors, and position.  The images themselves can either be uploaded directly or linked to from some other location on the internet.  There are a couple of interesting styles that can be applied to the images prior to posting them.  

The summary view of your posts is also very interesting.  Here you can’t get away without displaying thumbnails, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do gigantic thumbnails.  This is exactly what Jux.com does.  The thumbnails are quire large and are creatively arranged, taking up most of the screen real estate and creating a gallery view.  I like it because again this layout puts the emphasis on my content and reduces the clutter around it.  I can also see how many views each post has so I can see what is popular.

Now so far my review has been overwhelmingly positive (yes when I like something I really like it), but there are some features that Jux.com does not yet have that I think can make it even better.  First, I would like to be able to comment on other people’s posts and I would like them to be able to comment on mine.  I would also like better Twitter and Facebook integration so when I blog via Jux I can get an auto-generated tweet or a Facebook message telling my friends to check it out.  Being able to upload a collection of images (something like a scrap book or a picture album) in a single post would be nice.  Being able to upload a watermark or a branding and automatically apply it to posts would be even better.

Overall I think Jux.com is well on its way to being a success story.  I will definitely keep using it.  Check out my Jux at sirotaphoto.jux.com