A Quick List of Recommended Photo Hosting Sites
Image and photo sharing is great for hosting photos you want to display on websites like hi5, E-bay, and MySpace. The greatest thing about most image and photo sharing sites is that they are absolutely free! Many of them have high or no limits to the amount of images and photos you can store. With most of these sites, you simply upload your image files from your web browser to your album. The sharing site then keeps them online for later retrieval, either through your login or by a special URL you can share with your friends. Lets have a look at some of the popular image hosting sites.
Picture Trail
Picture trail offers more than just a photo repository. It provides gallery layout options so you can customize the look and feel of your gallery. You can even add music! Sending photos from cellphones is also permitted. Picture trail also offers photo copy protection
and album password protection.
Photobucket
Founded in 2003 and later acquired by Fox Interactive Media, Photobucket is one of the earliest image and photo sharing sites. An absolute heavy-hitter, Photobucket has one of the widest variety of features provided by any image and photo sharing provider. Photobucket offers photo sharing by email, IM, and mobile phones. They offer group albums with hundreds of album themes for easy personalization. Every Photobucket account comes with a built-in organizer for fixing/editing photos, and adding frames, stickers, and special effects. Their searching and browsing features are quite powerful as well.
Their daughter company, tinypic.com, offers the fastest image and photo sharing possible, as it requires no registrations or logins. Just submit your files and go.
Image Housing
Image Housing is yet another free image sharing and hosting service for social networks and blog sites. Because many social networking sites don't offer free hosting, they suggest using their service to share your images on sites like orkut.com and fubar.com.
Flickr
Flickr claims to be the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Their two major reasons for existence are to help people make their content available to people who matter to them and enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
They accomplish their first goal by getting images and photos in and out of Flickr in as many ways as they possibly can. They offer web interfaces, mobile device interfaces, and also allow users to manage their content from any kind of home computer they choose. They offer user content through email, outside blogs, email, RRS feeds, and even the Flickr website itself. According to Flickr, it is the WD-40 that makes it easy to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.
Flickr achieves their second goal by allowing uses to organize their media using more than the traditional album organizer. Sure, albums were great back when mom and dad had their first Kodak 110 camera, but with digital media allowing users to own literally thousands of images and photos, the album metaphor starts to lose steam. Flickr allows photo organization to be collaborative. Friends, family, and others can help organize everything.
As a user seeking an image and photo sharing solution, the two major goals Flickr has set out should actually be your two priorities as well. Use them as the standard by which to compare whatever hosting service you end up choosing.
Martin Alan enjoys writing on subjects such as literature, online publishing, digital magazine, publishing software, sharing sites and self publishing. He also enjoys keeping up-to-date with the latest developments and innovations in technology and online marketing.
For more information on online publishing can visit http://www.yudu.com.
