While trying to keep up with all the photoblogs I’d like to visit every day I subscribed to each one that offered a feed in my Bloglines account thinking that I’ll read these blogs like I read the rest of my favourite sites.
After importing them into Bloglines (not a difficult task, but it takes a while), I clicked around and quickly discovered that many photoblogs will only show a thumbnail or none at all in their feed!
I was particularly disheartened that Joes NYC stripped all post content and No Words, Iced Coffee and Headphoneland only showed thumbnails.
Thankfully, some of my favourite WP powered blogs, Just Photo and Simply Lotus display full size images in their feeds, and even one of the heavy hitters, Daily Dose of Imagery does too.
Blogger users can rest easy, Bloglines couldn’t auto find the feed on Shutterbug Exposed but Firefox did and I copied that into my Bloglines account. You get what you post on that site. Happy! Happy!
I noticed that many blogs powered by photoblog specific software only display thumbnails. Maybe it’s the default setting of these programs or they try to save bandwidth for their hosting companies but it doesn’t strike me as being very friendly to the visitor. As an example, the Pixelpost powered Glassey Alley displays thumbnails yet Ryan’s WordPress powered text/photoblog Rymus.net displays full size images.
Sure it’s nice, no, it’s important that you display your work with the surrounding colours and whitespace customised but in this age of information overload, RSS aggregators are a huge help to those of us swamped by too few hours in the day.
