It’s a complete coincidence that I told you about the way we handle pictures at Answer Guy Central just a few days ago. This morning, I heard for the first time about PhotoDropper.
And I’d like to point out that I’ve linked to Photodropper.com both in the image at the top of this story, and in the link you see above.
Big deal? You bet it’s a big deal.
I linked to PhotoDropper because I want to be clear about who made this very cool little plug-in for WordPress sites that you host yourself (and we’ve been clear that self-hosting is the correct choice, right?), and I point out that I’ve linked to Photodropper in the image above because that image, clearly by the folks at PhotoDropper, isn’t from PhotoDropper. It’s from the PhotoDropper page at WordPress.org.
Having disclaimed the controversial elements of this story sufficiently, allow me to point out that I believe I’m doing right by PhotoDropper and that they deserve that. And of course, WordPress doesn’t need my help (WordPress Traffic, anyone?). But I’ve done today what I described here, as much for the reasons I explain in that post as because I needed the correct image size and orientation image to back up this description of PhotoDropper and neither PhotoDropper nor WordPress had them available.
We aren’t using PhotoDropper. We don’t plan to start. But if you’re willing to forgo a rather major slice of Influency*, and find yourself needing incredibly easy access to stock images, grab PhotoDropper, right now. It’s that good.
Now I’ll tell you why that’s a bad idea. As I explained a bit in this story, pictures make for some of the best optimization you can create on your web site. But merely having pictures doesn’t lead to amazing search engine optimization; great SEO comes both from having pictures, and formatting them the right way.
Optimization is part of the Influency equation, and not one you should leave to chance. By using PhotoDropper to auto-magically drop pictures into your web site, you give up too much control over how the images get optimized. Period. PhotoDropper is a great tool, and you still shouldn’t use it unless speed and ease are more important to you than impact. And they aren’t.
But what do we know? Some people think you can build a web site in one hour.
Want to talk about this stuff, and why ease and Influency aren’t always a great match? Me too.
