There are a number of ways to share digital photo albums online. Flickr does it well. Photobucket, too. But they’re very straight-laced, so to speak. Either they list photos in columns and rows, or they form slideshows. What if you’d like to take a more casual approach and publish photos for people to play with? The Bragosphere is built to serve such a purpose.
Once you get past the unusual name - and ensure that you and your friends install Microsoft’s Silverlight browser plugin - The Bragosphere, created by a duo of developers, Swami Venkataramani and Stephen Commisso, and currently in beta form, shows to be a relatively attractive service. Almost scrapbook-like in the way it functions.
Instead of organizing photos into grid form, The Bragosphere, home to “Brag Pages,” photos can be tossed inside a template of a fairly large dimension, and they can be moved around by a viewer and resized at will. Grab a photo at or near its center and pull it around the window. hover your cursor over a photo’s edge, and expand, contract or turn the photograph if you like. Double click a photo, regardless of its foreground/background position, and you’ll see it expand to fill a large portion of the viewing area.
Though the surrounding layout of The Bragosphere is not the most pleasant I’ve seen for a self-described photo album display service, the core utility is certainly enjoyable. Collections of images are easy to flip through, and with options to share pages with folks on Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Facebook, and elsewhere, it’s easy to bring a social dimension into the fold. Downloads of files are also possible if friends and family would prefer to have albums to browse at a more local level if/when disconnected from the cloud.