I Love The Beach

Freetour offers: What a great tour. There's a few pages and I recommend you check them all out. On the second page of the tour you'll find some video samples. There's an embedded flash video, which is pretty good. But just below it you'll find a link to a high definition trailer which I would suggest you check out. On the third page, you'll find 8 low resolution sample photos. But at the bottom of that page you'll find a section with the heading “updates at least 5 times a week”. Click on the screenshot below that heading and you'll be taken to a page with some of the most recent updates including links to some high resolution samples from within the member's area.

General impression: The problem I've always had with websites like these is that they're usually full of poor quality pictures and videos. I Love The Beach is different; the quality of the content is consistent. The updates are frequent and regular. And an already large archive of content continues to grow at a rapid pace. It's all exclusive, too. So what's not to like about I Love The Beach?

Bravo's opinion:  The design of the member's area is extremely simple, but members will appreciate how easy it is to navigate your way around the website. The content is separated into 8 different sections: Euro Beach, South of France Topless Beauties, Miami Beach, Eastern Europe, Euro Guru, Spirit of the Balearics, Caribbean and contributions (where members submit their own photos).

On the main page of the member's area is an introduction which explains the site's navigation, video resolutions and such. To the right of this is the updates list. This site updates at least 5 times per week. And the content is usually exclusive to just I Love The Beach.

Some of the sections have pictures, some have movies and others have both. The breakdown of content is as follows. In the Euro Beach section, there are 11,224 picture galleries and 1,393 videos. For eastern Europe, there are 83 galleries. Euro Guru has 25 galleries. The Caribbean section has just 6 galleries. The southern topless beaches of France section has a total of 887 videos. 173 of these are in 720p High Definition. There are 111 Miami Beach videos and 28 videos from Balearics. 20 of those videos are in 720p.

The high definition videos are impressive for a lot more than their resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Technically, that's the only requirement for a video to be considered HD. But a high resolution doesn't mean high quality. The bit rate can be low. I've seen HD videos with bit rates of just 1 Mbps. That's not the case with I Love The Beach, however. Their HD videos are encoded at a whopping 6.15 Mbps (6297 kbps). I can only think of a handful of websites with higher quality video. The HD videos are also available in a lower resolution of just 640 x 360 pixels.

The regular resolution videos are in two different resolutions. The low resolution videos are in Windows Media Video (WMV) format in a resolution of 384 x 286 encoded at 887 kbps. The high resolution videos, which are 640 x 480 pixels, are available in both WMV and DivX (AVI) format.

Photo resolutions vary across the site, but they are surprisingly consistent considering how many different sources there must be for the content. There are “scans” galleries and digital galleries. The scans galleries tend to be low resolution (less than 1000 pixels on the longest edge of the photo). The digital photos are generally at least 1000 pixels on the longest edge. They tend to range between 1100 and 1500 pixels on the longest edge. There are almost always 24 pictures per gallery. Every gallery can be downloaded as a ZIP file for convenient offline browsing.