YouRep.com has released a “Beta Than Eva” service that offers 2GB of picture storage for free. Florian Cervenka, the website’s founder is offering a healthy alternative to Flickr by building a similar community-style around the picture hosting site.

As of right now the website is for free, but Florian announced that there will be future storage space ad-ons along with potentially future increases in the 2GB free accounts. Florian also revealed that he is working on built-in photo editors where you can adjust picture brightness, contrast, cropping, and color overlay.

The homepage of YouRep is sporting a Top 12 Photos section based on the number of “Thumbs up” hits the picture receives and a Random Photos section. You can also search the Top Users who have uploaded the most pictures and different groups that exist on the site such as the group tailored towards the entomologists out there called “Insects - the small ones on this world.” Another unique feature on YouRep is its connection with Google Maps: YouRep has markers placed on areas that the users are based and when you click on these markers you can see thumbnails of the user’s pictures and their homepage. Surprisingly, by looking at the map as of today, I haven’t seen any markers for anyone in China, Japan, or Korea, but I had seen one on Greenland.

As far as security goes, you can make the photos private for yourself, public to only specific fellow YouRep users, or completely public to any guests/users of the website. If you make your photos completely public, they will be visible on the homepage also under the “Spy on Actions” page which is a similar feature to Facebook’s Mini- and News-Feed where it reports how many pictures you have recently uploaded and links to them.

YouRep is definetely growing at a rapid pace since its inception in late March 2006, but its marketing scheme could always use some improvement. I’m not a graphic connoisseur, but I do think that the logo is a bit bland. Also, the name YouRep itself sounds like it could confuse some users since it sounds like a YouTube child company.