Is there really a major difference between users of different photo sites? Probably not, but Flickr’s preponderance in the northern California area where I seem to talk to people about photo sites belies statistics that seem to indicate that Photobucket is more popular in the country, just as Myspace is more popular than Facebook still.

Webshots.com, the photo sharing website owned by CNET [personal disclosure: it’s well known that I’m very close to someone who works there], has introduced a few new features that round out their offering and make it more competitive in the hotly contested online photo site market.

Both sites allow users to give titles and descriptions to the photos they upload, but how they handle them has been different otherwise. Flickr puts all new photos into the user’s “photo stream” and uses (optional) tags to describe photos. Webshots, which has been in the photo sharing business since the late 1990s, has always organized photos into albums. So users could select categories and give keywords for each entire album, but not tag individual photos.

This has now changed and Webshots is allowing users to put tags on each photo. This is a major evolution–they had to take the previous categories, for example, and make them work in the new system. So far it looks like it has worked well and it opens up a lot of new possibilities for user navigation.

Flickr also caught on with the web 2.0 crowd partly because it allows easy access to its API which allows users to build tools and mashups from its photos. Now that it has tags, more interest might be turned toward the API at Webshots, which currently requires special permission to access.

Another feature that really could benefit Webshots is their installation of a system called Gigya that allows users to post an individual photo to a handful of social networking sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, Myspace and Xanga. This kind of feature is essential both for allowing visitors to quickly share interesting photographs and for making the site an multi-faceted part the user’s online experience. Call it web2.0 lock-in or whatever.

While Flickr has recently confirmed that they will have video sometime soon, Webshots already managed to add video capability back in 2006.

One of the interesting facets of Flickr, and something that seems to keep many people coming back, is the popularity of the site as a social networking destination. That is to say, even with rather basic social features, Flickr still offers enough community and content to make a compelling offering to the web 2.0 crowd in the social networking space. It merits saying that Flickr is Yahoo’s most successful entry in the social networking space (sorry GeoCities and Yahoo 360).

Webshots also has some solid social networking features, and it has plenty of comments on popular photos just as Flickr does, but the user base is not as nearly concentrated in the techie demographic, so for example I would say anecdotally that I’ve seen a lot of Flickr accounts that are used as blog photo storage where I’ve only noticed that a handful of times browsing Webshots. But with the Gigya feature, more people may start using Webshots to store their blog pictures. It’s also worth noting that Flickr users are often also using Twitter, last.fm, their WordPress blog, Facebook and other cool sites–so speculatively speaking Webshots may have a bit more of the attention of its users for longer periods at a time.

The same way that many people in the web 2.0 bubble have made Flickr the site of international cool photography for the Internet crowd, many people who are digital photography fans from all the way back in the web 1.0 era continue to visit Webshots and upload their photos. Webshots has more lurkers per uploader on its site than Flickr [that part is just speculation too, by the way]–meaning more viewers per photographer. The layout of the sites is different–Webshots offers a front page with featured photos and then a handful of sections with content specific to each of them: photos selected by editors, with short descriptions and links to the albums, while Flickr offers a front page that displays four new photos by the user, four new photos by that user’s contacts, and four seemingly random photos by others on Flickr, with links to the photos but no descriptions of them by any editors.

So for people who are using a site to upload photos or keep tabs on friends, Webshots or Flickr can both work, depending on the user and what site his or her friends are on already. For the geek crowd, for example those who want to use the site’s photos to build apps, Flickr has established an early lead and has even inspired copycat sites in its own new sub-genre, like Zoomr. But for people dropping by a site looking for some entertaining photos that they can read about, download the full size of, and share easily through email or on social networks, Webshots works well and the tags should make it easier to find stuff.