Editing your photos with a web-based application is
convenient; you can do your editing from any computer, no software
installation necessary. Even more convenient is the ability to share
your photos with others through the cloud, via web-based photo-sharing
communities.
On the surface, all of
these photo-sharing sites look and feel quite similar. You choose your
photos to upload, organize them in albums or folders, and select whether
they’re private or public. Some sites let your friends download your
photos; others only allow online viewing. Some sites even let you or
your friends make prints of your photos—for a fee, of course. And the
most robust sites include topic-oriented groups and communities that let
you share photos with like-minded photographers.
Note
Most of these sites
offer some sort of free membership, which sometimes has limited
functionality. Some sites offer paid memberships with more advanced
features. Other sites make their money by offering photo-printing
services.
Apple MobileMe Gallery
One interesting part of Apple’s new MobileMe suite of web-based applications is the MobileMe Gallery (www.me.com).
You can upload photos from your computer or iPhone to the MobileMe
Gallery, which can then be viewed by anyone you invite. It’s a great way
to get photos on and off your iPhone, and view photos when you’re on
the go.
Figure 1
shows how MobileMe Gallery organizes your photos into easy-to-view
photo albums. The entire MobileMe suite is priced at $99 per year, and
includes 20GB of total storage.
dotPhoto
The dotPhoto site (www.dotphoto.com)
is free for personal users, but there’s a heavy push to order photo
prints. Professional photographers can use dotPhoto to house photos
displayed on their own websites—and collect a cut when users order
prints.
DPHOTO
DPHOTO (www.dphoto.com)
offers two levels of membership. The Lite version lets you store up to
1,000 photos for $3/month; the Pro version offers unlimited photo
storage for $7/month. Like many of these sites, DPHOTO assigns you your own personal web address for your photos, in the form of yourname.dphoto.com.
Flickr
Of all the photo-sharing sites today, far and away the most popular among hobbyist and professional photographers is Flickr (www.flickr.com), part of the Yahoo! empire. As you can see in Figure 2,
Flickr creates a home page for each photographer. From here, viewers
can click a photo to view it full screen, or choose to view all photos
as an onscreen slideshow.
Uploading photos to Flickr
is as easy as clicking a few links (after you’ve opened your free
account, of course). Just go to Flickr’s home page and click the Upload
Photos link. You’re then prompted to choose the files to upload and add
tags and descriptions to each photo. The photos you upload are then
added to your personal page for anyone (or selected users, if you made
the photos private) to view.
Flickr’s
free accounts let you upload 100MB of photos each month. If you need to
upload more photos, or want more control over how your photos are
displayed, consider paying for a Pro account. For $24.95/year, you get
unlimited uploads and storage, as well as the ability to organize your
photos into sets and collections.
One of the best things
about Flickr is the site’s community, expressed via comments on
particular photos and a large number of topic-specific photo groups. The
groups not only display photos from group members but also include
discussion forums where members can talk about the topic at hand. If
you’re at all interested in photography as a hobby or profession, Flickr
is the site to use.
Note
Learn more about Flickr and digital photography in general in my companion book, Photopedia: The Ultimate Digital Photography Reference. You can view many of the photos from that book on Flickr, at www.flickr.com/photos/12150723@N06/.
Fotki
Fotki (www.fotki.com),
like Flickr, offers both free and paid accounts. A free account gives
you 50MB of storage space, and the $30/year premium account has
unlimited storage and a variety of other features, including the ability
to sell your photos from the Fotki site.
MyPhotoAlbum
MyPhotoAlbum (www.myphotoalbum.com),
as the site’s name implies, focuses on displaying your digital photos
in online photo albums. You get a unique web address for your album,
which makes it easy to share your album with friends and family. You can
even personalize your album with custom themes and layouts. And, best
of all, it’s all free.
Photobucket
Photobucket (www.photobucket.com)
is another free photo-sharing site. You can create photo albums for
viewing on the Photobucket site or embed your Photobucket photos into
your blog or Facebook or MySpace page.
Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums (picasaweb.google.com)
is Google’s entrée into the photo-sharing market. As you might suspect,
Picasa Web Albums is closely integrated with Google’s Picasa
photo-editing software, although it’s open for anyone to use—and it’s
free. There’s also a neat mapping option that lets you map where you
took each photo, using Google Maps.
Pixagogo
Pixagogo (www.pixagogo.com)
costs $5/month to use. For that, you can upload and store an unlimited
number of photos. You also get your own personal photo gallery. For what
it’s worth, the site also pushes hard on ordering prints, so keep that
in mind when you’re doing your evaluating.
PictureTrail
PictureTrail (www.picturetrail.com)
offers photo sharing, fancy online slideshows, and a photo editor that
lets you add “bling,” in the form of fancy graphics, to your photos.
Membership is free.
SmugMug
SmugMug (www.smugmug.com)
is a photo-sharing community that aims to compete directly with Flickr.
As such, SmugMug offers a slightly better-looking interface and
unlimited storage, for $39.95/year. And, remembering the advantages of
cloud storage, SmugMug keeps three copies of your photos on servers
housed in four different states, for more secure photo storage.
WebShots
WebShots (www.webshots.com)
is an established photo-sharing community with many Flickr-like
features. The free account lets you upload 1,000 photos (plus 100 more
for each month of membership); the premium account lets you share 5,000
photos (plus 500 more for each month of membership) for $2.49/month.
Zenfolio
Zenfolio (www.zenfolio.com)
is designed as a place for professional photographers to store, show,
and sell their work. The site offers three different hosting plans:
Basic (1GB storage for $25/year), Unlimited (unlimited storage for
$40/year), and Premium (unlimited storage and larger file sizes for
$100/year).
Zoto
Our final photo-sharing site is Zoto (www.zoto.com),
which offers unlimited storage for $19.95/year. Zoto lets users store
and share photos on the Zoto site, in a variety of photo albums. You can
also publish your Zoto photos to your blog or Flickr account.
The photo-sharing sites
we’ve discussed so far in this article are independent sites with a
focus on storage and sharing. Even though some of them offer photo
prints as a service, their main purpose is to store your photos on their
own cloud servers.
There is another class
of photo-storage/sharing sites, however. While these sites do store your
photos, they exist to make money—by selling photo prints to you and
your friends. These photo-print sites, such as Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) and Hewlett-Packard’s Snapfish (www.snapfish.com),
offer many of the same sharing features as Flickr and WebShots, but
typically without the community features. Storage is often unlimited and
free, with the hope that you’ll be ordering lots of prints.
Of course, you can
also order prints online from companies such as Wal-Mart, Walgreens, CVS
Pharmacy, Costco, and the like. These sites let you order prints via
mail or pick them up at your local store. For that matter, Shutterfly,
in addition to its prints-by-mail service, lets you pick up
certain-sized prints at your local Target store. It’s all in the service
of selling prints, of course; the online storage and sharing is just a
convenient by-product.
