There are many ways to share your photos with friends and family
today, including social networking sites, photo communities and sites
that sell prints and photo crafts. The key is finding a site that suits
your photo sharing needs and sticking with it.
If you're only looking to share your images with others online, you
should go where your friends are, which often means social networking
sites like Facebook. But if you want to archive your photos, make prints
or create photo crafts and slideshows, you'll need a different type of
photo sharing site. There are a bunch of them out there, so check out
our picks to find the one that delivers what you need.
Photo Sharing Communities
If your focus is on sharing your photos with friends and strangers
around the world, a community-centric sharing site will be a good place
for you. These sites let you contribute your pictures to themed
communities or create a space to collaborate with others. They can also
function as a central clearinghouse for your photos, offering many
different ways to get photos into or out of the site. Don’t get too
carried away, though. Expect total storage and file-size limitations on
free memberships–as little as 1MB per file for some, which means you'll
have to resize images before you upload them.
Flickr
Flickr has some of the best online tools for organizing your photos, and
has partnerships with Getty Images (if you want to sell your photos)
and various printing services for getting your images on anything from
business cards to coffee mugs. With a free Flickr account, you can
upload 300MB of photos and two videos per month (90 seconds and 150MB
for each video), but only the most recent 200 images will appear in your
list of photos and you only have access to low-resolution versions of
your files. With a Pro account ($24.95 per year), you can upload an
unlimited number of photos (up to 20MB each) and HD videos (90 seconds
and up to 500MB in size), access all of your files and download
full-resolution copies (even ones you uploaded with your free account).
Google Picasa Web Albums
Picasa offers a large database of public images and video that can be
searched not only by topic, but by location, whether there are people in
the photo, even the camera model used. Add to this public database or
share just with family and friends through Picasa Web Albums or Google+ .
Free downloadable Picasa software provides editing tools and a great
image organizer let you tag photo manually or using face recognition or
automatic tagging. Picasa offers full-screen slide shows and HD video
support. Free accounts get 1GB of storage and paid accounts start at $5
per year for 20GB (more pricing information here).
Photobucket
With unlimited photo storage, the ability to add fun special effects and
competitions, Photobucket is a great place to discover and share
photos. Upload from iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices and choose to
share with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Windows Messenger. With a pro
account ($24.95 per year), you can save high-resolution images and
enjoy ad-free albums, among other benefits.
Print and Photo Craft Sites
The big print and photo craft sites are designed to sell you prints,
albums, greeting cards, and other merchandise with your images printed
on them. You'll see lots of ads to entice you to buy photo crafts and
buttons to order prints. Ordering is easy online and you can pick up at a
local retail chain, or have photos mailed to you.
These sites also do a good job of letting you store and share your
photos with friends and family. You can even get a customized look and
feel on some sites (though you'll still see ads). Your photos here are
private, only viewed by those you invite. So if you occasionally want
something printed, but also want free online sharing of photos, albums
and slideshows, these sites are the way to go.
Shutterfly
If showcasing your photos and videos is important, Shutterfly is the
site for you. Its Share section lets you create a custom photo sharing
site (with its own Web address) where you can upload photos and videos,
share photo crafts you've made on the site, share journal entries and
family calendar information and create polls, among other features. You
can also allow others to add photos and comments, which makes it great
for group collaboration and events. Shutterfly also has one of the best
and easiest photo book creation tools. There is no minimum annual
purchase required for Shutterfly to continue storing your photos and
there's unlimited storage.
Kodak Gallery
If you're looking for online photo backup, Kodak Gallery delivers. You
can download individual photos at full resolution for free, upload
photos from your iPhone, iPhoto or Adobe Photoshop Elements, and order a
DVD of your entire account or individual photos (starts at $9.99 for
250 photos). Kodak Gallery also provides a fairly robust photo editing
and organizing program for Windows and Macs called
Kodak Easyshare.
Free storage is limited to 2GB and you must spend $4.99 per year. For
accounts over 2GB, the fee is $19.99 to maintain your account.
Snapfish
The breadth of options for making prints makes this site stand
out. In addition to the photos you upload, you can print from your and
your friends' Facebook albums with the Snapfish Facebook app and even
send in physical film rolls for digital development. The site also lets
you create great custom slideshows set to music, called Snapshows, and
establish group albums called Group Rooms. Free photo storage is
unlimited, but to maintain your account you must make one purchase per
year, which can be as low as $0.09 (for one print). You can also upload
unlimited videos for $24.99 per year.
SeeHere
Photo crafters should look no further than SeeHere. Like other
sites, there are templates you can choose to create your craft, but
SeeHere then gives you the flexibility and tools to change literally
every element of the templates so you can create truly one-of-a-kind
crafts. Photo storage is unlimited, but to maintain your account you
must make one purchase per year, which can be as low as $0.12 (for one
print).
Sites for Photo Enthusiasts
If you’re a photo enthusiast, you’ll want to head over to a paid
service that will give you the most control over sharing and storing
your photos. There you can create beautiful custom albums with no
advertising and a custom Web address. The services have smartphone apps
for managing your photos, as well as editing and uploading mobile photos
on the fly.
You can use paid sites to reliably back up full resolution versions
of your photos. Plus they enable you to allow friends to download the
full-resolution version of your images. And if you’re a pro, you can
easily create a shop to sell your photos.
SmugMug
With searchable photo galleries, photo contests and communities, SmugMug
is geared toward photo enthusiasts who want to showcase their work.
Choose from 50 free, templates or step up from a standard membership
($40 per year) to a power membership ($60 per year) for a completely
custom look without SmugMug logos and HD video sharing. Beyond the
unlimited storage of JPG, GIF and PNG files that are free with your
subscription, you can back up any type of file for $0.14 per GB per
month.
Phanfare
We love Phanfare’s full-screen slideshows that you can create with your
own music from iTunes, the ability to create a drop box for friends to
upload photos to add to your albums and the service’s easy integration
with FrameChannel, for syncing with digital photo frames, and Eye-Fi,
for automatic wireless image transfer. Phanfare provides image editing
tools for rotating, cropping and correcting exposure and color
issues—and the ability to rollback your changes or even undelete photos.
$99 per year for unlimited storage.
Sumatra PDF is an ultra-lightweight and open-source portable
application. The emphasis with Sumatra PDF is not on the number of
features and the wide-ranging abilities of the application, but instead
on speed. It loads almost instantly, renders pages extremely quickly,
and thanks to a huge number of keyboard shortcuts, you can zip through
nearly any document with ease. Sumatra PDF, thanks to a lack of frills
and extraneous features, is a great candidate for a portable drive or
for in-browser use for someone who wants quick-loading PDF files without
the lag caused by features they won't ever use.
Preview
is Apple's free PDF viewer, built into OS X. It's no mystery many Mac
users have no need to step beyond the built-in tool. Preview has quite a
few features often only found in commercial PDF software, like the
ability to drag and drop pages between documents, page extraction,
encryption, and text annotation. In addition to viewing PDF files,
Preview can display over two dozen other file formats, making it quite a
versatile little viewer.
Foxit is a polished Acrobat-alternative that, on top of cleanly
displaying PDF files with a minimal interface, also has a host of handy
features—all packed into a lightweight 6MB package. Foxit loads
immediately, without any splash page or lag from plug-ins loading.
Reading PDFs is just as snappy, and in-text pictures and charts render
quickly. When filling out PDF forms, you can save your progress in the
form and return later to finish filling it out. While both the free and
the Pro version allow you to annotate text, insert graphics and
drawings, and insert links, the free version adds a Foxit stamp on each
page you annotate; the pro version removes the marking. Foxit is
available as a portable application.
Adobe
Reader is Adobe's default offering for viewing PDFs. Acrobat enjoys
widespread popularity as a result of being offered by the company that
created the PDF. For light PDF users, it's a more than adequate tool,
although frequent users may seek to try a lighter alternative to get rid
of the long load times and the lag that can occur when Acrobat loads
within a web browser pane. You can attach sticky notes to pages and
highlight text for your own review. More advanced features, like PDF
creation, saving PDFs in other formats, and the ability to merge PDF
files, are only available with an upgrade to Acrobat Standard for $299.
PDF-XChange
is another Adobe-alternative in today's Hive that boasts snappy load
times and basic functionality that outpaces the basic functionality of
Adobe Reader. With PDF-XChange you can open and browse PDF documents,
perform simple page annotations with drawings and text, and type outside
of preset form boxes by using the PDF-XChange typewriter tool to place
text wherever you want. Advanced features like reorganizing pages and
text extraction are only available with the Pro upgrade. PDF-Xchange is
available as a portable application.
