I remember my first few articles here. They were in English, and they were about ipernity in comparison to flickr. Ipernity left "beta" now, and so it's time for just another one of those comparison articles. For historical reasons I'll try it in English. Back to the roots.

For me, the adventure began in November, 3rd, 2008. And ended four years later. My ipernity blog moved to Wordpress in January 2012, my photo stream followed in November 2012 when it moved back to flickr. In other words: I stopped using ipernity. I am PRO since January 2009 (now called "member of CLUB ipernity"), and it might end on June 1, 2014, when it expires.

One reason why I stopped using ipernity was that I was expecting a major change for the worse. When ipernity went "beta 2" it became clear to me that the final ipernity would be very different. The final ipernity has now arrived, and it isn't different. I was wrong. It arrived too late, though, because I am already gone. And so is almost everybody else in my network.

The other reason why I left ipernity was the unbearably ancient design and the unattended usability. Stagnation is regression ("Stillstand ist Rückschritt"), and it was a huge regression compared to other platforms. Ipernity fell back too far, so users moved on... and away. Ipernity was dead before it was final. It was in fact killed twice: Once by the shockingly bad "beta 2", and once by the final version arriving much too late.

The third and most important reason why I left ipernity was because of the way it dealt with Pinterest. I blogged about this in the month I left (November 2012) here: http://wolkenstich.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/pinterest-zum-zweiten/ (in German). My far too much generalized conclusion back then actually was: You shouldn't have data on European sites. Europeans just don't get what it is for to put data into the internet. (If you were interested in what I mean, I'm afraid you'd have to read that blog entry of mine.)

So ipernity is final now, and it's time to reevaluate my reasons to leave. I'm not happy with me being back on flickr, because flickr is unusably slow and even more dead than ipernity. Even more of its users have left or became inactive. When it comes to photos, everybody has seen it all. Photo sharing happens somewhere else, if it still happens at all, and I don't know where. I also want a better way to present albums, because I've recently changed from having a photo stream to actually more focussing on photo sets.

So where should I go? Back to ipernity? ipernity had a few killer features (that flickr doesn't have) like

- comments of comments (currently gone in final ipernity, but reportedly coming back)
- images in descriptions and notes
- usable free accounts (1000 images, download of your own originals)

The first isn't really useful since beta 2 (you can't comment your own comments anymore), the second is rarely used, and the third is now gone.

ipernity also had some nice features (that flickr has, too) like

- permalinks for comments (also currently gone in final ipernity, but also reportedly coming back)
- "View on Black" (and larger) on and off with a click
- Share to Pinterest (see above)
- visitors can see a photo's upload date in the stream (I consider that much more interesting than its creation date)
- working HTML links in album descriptions (very important to me)

These features are all gone now, and I am really missing them. I still have them on flickr as well as many more things (that ipernity doesn't have) like

- camera info without clicking on exif data
- much nicer contact's "Recent Photos" view
- better mobile browsing
- and much more (including rarely used but cool things like guest passes)

So my first impression about final ipernity is:

- a greatly improved design and usability
- much better album presentation (thanks to home page customization and the new album view default)
- a stable concept (almost every feature is still there, but better to find)
- some very important features are missing, though (and not likely to come back)
- nothing new of any relevance

So I appreciate the new look and feel very much, but it comes with a price too high to pay: 1. Too many important features are gone. 2. Free accounts became unusable. It doesn't help that other new features have been -- again -- stolen from flickr like

- new resolutions 640, 800, 1600 and 2048
- a "Liquid Photo Page Layout" (with a very bad algorithm on ipernity)

So I'm sorry, but I'm not coming back.

You may take a look at my ipernity profile to see where you can find me.

I have a list of recent photo albums here: http://wolkenstich.wordpress.com/fotos/

Hope to see you somewhere!

York

P.S.: Sorry for not using bullet lists. But they don't work anymore. (Another broken thing on final ipernity.)