Photobucket ~ Now powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight.

Photobucket has gained enormous popularity as an image-hosting and slideshow-creation site since it was launched in 2003. Today it hosts close to 8 billion photos, with dozens more pouring in by the second.Browsing through those photos, however, was a challenge. But now Photobucket’s new Visual Search feature gets site users to the photos they’re looking for – fast.
Developed in collaboration with the Denver-based user experience agency EffectiveUI, Photobucket Visual Search is a new Silverlight and Windows Live Services application that makes browsing through all those pictures a breezy experience.

“After five seconds in it, it feels different,” says Will Tschumy, a member of Microsoft’s User Experience Evangelist Group who has been working closely with Photobucket on the project. “It removes a lot of the text and reloading time that users have had to wade through. Presenting results as images and then using a given image as the next query to find another set of images is really just a different way of interacting with the content.”

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