Fotopedia, the Online Encyclopedia for Photos, Finally Launched

Fotopedia, the online photo sharing and organizing service, has been in private beta for a couple of months and was revealed as a read-only preview last week with a “coming in a few days” promise. Now the promise has been honored and the service is finally available to the public. The brainchild of Jean-Marie Hullot, the site aims to be an archive of “images for humanity.”

The site isn't intended to compete with Flickr or Picasa, being instead focused more on the social aspect of photo sharing while also trying to be a useful resource, a Wikipedia for photos. What sets it apart from either Picasa or Flickr is that albums on Fotopedia are more than just a collection of images as they also feature the Wikipedia entry on the related subject or region as well as Google Maps information where applicable.

You can upload your own albums with the Fotonauts desktop client but the wiki aspect of the site comes from the fact that you can also collaborate on albums, adding photos from multiple users on Fotopedia or from other sources as long as these come under a Creative Commons license. In fact, pictures can even be added from external sources like Flickr or Picasa, which will be kept in sync, updating the tags or images as necessary.

Fotopedia also has a social aspect as users have their own profiles and will be able to follow other users or individual pages or albums. They can also vote for the photos they like to be added to a specific album and photos that get more than five positive votes will be added to the 'top' tap of the encyclopedia page. Albums from Fotopedia can also be made into widgets so they can be embedded into other sites or blogs.