Picuous’ HTML5 photo player goes public with a social sharing revamp

It wasn’t long ago that we told you about Picuous, which is essentially an incredibly easy way to embed photos onto a website while still retaining copyright. Essentially Picuous fills the gap that YouTube and Scribd have managed to do for video and documents respectively, but it does so for photographs.

While the service has been hugely successful in its private beta, acquiring over 10,000 photos and 100,000 views, the Picuous team (lead by CEO Martin Pannier) have been getting a hefty amount of user feedback that told them that their focus was wrong.

Until now we were really focused on copyright and protection for pictures. But, well, our users’ feedback points us in other direction. We’re now hell bent on making pictures on a website social.

Fortunately, the move isn’t so much a pivot (can we kill that word yet, along with disrupt?) as it is just a logical way to encompass what Picuous was already doing. So now you have an improved share box over what was previously available, and Picuous is open to the public.

The ability to retain copyright information for a photograph still remains, but the one-click menu simplifies the social sharing features that were really what helped to make Picuous a hit with its beta users.

In the example Tumblr that Pannier uses, you can see a good use of how Picuous can add even more to an already-social service. Instead of just uploading photos, using the Picuous embed allows you to do continue to be reblogged, but it will keep the sharing services for other sites (and even email) intact.

As far as enabling Picuous? It’s dead simple, according to Pannier:

“Just paste a one-liner in your site header, a la Google Analytics, and you’re done. On top of that it’s a “setup once and forget” kind of thing: pictures you add after that to your website will be automatically tracked too.”

It could be argued that we’ve had solutions for social photo sharing for ages, but simply embedding a photo and linking it to the original isn’t quite enough. Until now, that’s been about the extent of what has been offered. As inherently social as photos are, it’s a wonder that nobody has done something like Picuous in the past.

Fortunately for the team, the space appears to be wide open, and Picuous has made a huge splash into a quiet pool. With a dead-simple setup, powerful analytics and now being available to everyone since leaving private beta, Picuous is set on the path of success. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on the service as time moves on.

Ready to step to the next level? TNW’s Nancy Messieh has a beginners guide to selling your photos online.