Searching for pictures on ImageShack and Yahoo! Photos

I've been looking at the search services offered by the top photo and image sharing services on the internet. So far I've looked at Photobucket and Slide, and today I want to look at two services that very much focus on the hosting of images rather than providing a sharing service.

ImageShack was ranked as the fifth most popular image hosting site in June 2006, with just a shade over 6% of the market. The site allows you to host images in a variety of formats providing they are under 1.5Mb in size, and also transforms and compresses the image for users. Files can be uploaded either directly from a computer's hard drive, or via a URL, and there a range of uploading tools available from the service.

Users don't provide a title or a description for a photograph, but are given the option to add tags, and the system builds a profile page for registered users, which allows them to share their photos with friends from ImageShack itself.

Once an image is uploaded, there are a plethora of different option for sharing the picture, via URLs and some quick post integration with MySpace.

However, the only search functionality on ImageShack is a text search through their FAQ. There doesn't appear to be any way to search through other people's photographs, tags or member names.

Yahoo! Photos is another big player in the image hosting market - and with 18% market share is three times as popular as the Flickr service that they bought. Again, like ImageShack, this service is mostly focused on hosting images rather than sharing them.

Users can create an 'album', and then populate that album with pictures, again with a variety of uploading tools available. Users can 'share' that album by giving access to their photos to other Yahoo! members, but, as with ImageShack, there is no public search facility across the photographs stored.