Normally I would never link to my own blog from OSNews, however, a few people have asked me to share this particular post, so I decided to make an exception. After playing with popular online photo sharing services Flickr and Picasa Web Albums, I wrote a review of these photo sharing sites. Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments.
Review of Popular Photo Sharing Services
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]
Shall I post my review for shower curtain rings here? Seems like the right website!
Edited 2006-08-09 14:14
I am using Zoto. I like its (clean) interface better than the rest of the pic services online. They offer 2 GB of space for free, plus 100 MBs for each friend you refer to them. You can check it out here: http://eugenia.zoto.com/
I’ve been Flickr Pro about a year and I am very impressed. Individual pics can be up to 10 meg; thus Flickr is useful for me as off-site back-up for my film (via scanner) and digital photo collections. It is a way to organize shots, being “set” and “tag” based. It is easy to use, on both Mac and PC (works fine in Safari). You can link pics to your blogger blog trivially, if desired.
Relatives can download FULL SIZED family pics and send them to (eg) CVS for printing– or they can use Flickr’s printing service. I didn’t join Flickr to join the Flickr community, but I find I enjoy posting shots to special interest groups. And I enjoy commenting on others’ photos. There is a “free” level (limted per month bandwidth); thus, I can unequivocally recommend the service to EVERYONE, just like there’s no reason for everybody NOT to have a free Yahoo or GMail account.
Thanks for the great insight on both services. Sadly I didn’t know Picasa had a photo sharing site. I must be slipping on technology. I never quite understood all the buzz around Flickr. I just signed up for Picasa web albums and will try using that for photo sharing.
I was about request they have photo uploading from the web browser then I read this from the FAQ:
I don’t have Picasa. Are there any other ways to upload photos into my Picasa Web Albums?
Although this feature is designed and optimized for easy web upload via Picasa, you can also upload photos into a web album using your browser. Just follow these steps:
1. Visit picasaweb.google.com and click “New Album” or select the album you want to upload photos. You will need to logged in.
2. Click “Upload Photos” on the left side of the page. If you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer, this will open an HTML upload control that lets you upload multiple photos at once. The first time you use this feature, you’ll need to install the Active X plug-in when prompted. If you’re not using IE, you will still be able to upload photos individually.
3. Click “Add Photos…”
4. Select the photos you want to upload and click “Upload.”
When the upload is complete, you’ll be directed to your album.
I have been searching for a good photo sharing place for quite a while now. Yesterday I finally signed up with http://www.smugmug.com. They let you try their service free for one week and decide later.
For 30$/year I get unlimited space and 6 GBytes/month download traffic.
I wrote up a small clip on http://www.fotki.com which is who I use for total offsite picture backup. They have a free setup as well, but it’s unlimited for $30/yr. I’ve currently got over 9,000 photos uploaded there.
The problem with most of the sites is that you can’t get the original, high res photo back once it’s uploaded. See my writeup for a few other Fotki pluses.
Here’s my writeup
http://journals.fotki.com/airjrdn/The_Nets_Best_Secrets/entry/wdbtd…
“The problem with most of the sites is that you can’t get the original, high res photo back once it’s uploaded”
That does not appear to be the case with Flickr. It IS a key thing people should keep in mind!
How you get them back matters as well. With Fotki, you can FTP in and download many at once, so you aren’t relegated to downloading each one individually (which would take a while w/over 9k photos).
“With Fotki, you can FTP in and download many at once”
That’s a cool feature.
I had to find a way of sharing a screenshot online.Some googling did give me some options.I wish this fine article was posted a bit earlier 🙂
I use http://photobloggers.net/ It has a Flickr-like interface, is completely free and has unlimited storage! A great site, highly recommended.
I use Picasaweb. I detest Flickr’s interface, and it is so damn slow.
http://picasaweb.google.com/ThomHolwerda
Nice pictures. I already created mine.
…but what I’d like to see is a program with a nice drag and drop interface like Picasa that can, instead of uploading to Google, upload to your personal website (creating the necessary code along the way). It should keep track of what’s already up there (or resync before sending) so that if you add 1 new picture to a particular album, you don’t have to re-upload your entire gallery. Ideally it would create an auto-resized copy to upload, and you could load your photos directly from the camera into it as well.
All of this stuff exists separately, but I couldn’t find anything good with the drag/drop interface that would publish to personal webspace. Creating albums by filename when your images are IMG001.JPG IMG002.JPG IMG003.JPG is nightmarish.
The ability to drag photos from multiple folders (say: 2006-08-06 and 2006-08-07) into an album (“Pet Photos”) without moving the originals (so you could also drag the same photo into album “Dog Photos” etc) would be nice, too.
> Normally I would never link to my own blog from OSNews
Why?
I use SUSE Linux and when I came across F-Spot I thought it was a great open source solution for simplified management of images. Issue I didn’t like is that it opts for exporting to Flickr.com for posting images online. Flickr requires an active Yahoo account and since I use Gmail I couldn’t use the service. It’s nice to see Google offer not only Picasa for free as a cross platform solution but also offer their online photo management “Picasa Web” for free too.
A nice site I found recently is called tabblo http://www.tabblo.com I belive it is unlimited upload and you can get the high-res image back. They have a number of ways to upload. And best of all a very cool layout tool to create your “tabblo’s”