Tutorial: Online Photo Sharing Services

Your mom, dad and brother live in Dallas, but you and the family are now in Seattle. How are you going to show off all those great photos you shot with your shiny new digital camera (or scanned from your slides and negatives)? It might feel like sharing your photos will be complicated and painful, but in fact, it is really pretty easy.

There are many websites that give you ways to share your photos with friends and family at little or no cost. We'll try to give you a rundown of some possibilities to explore - and issues to watch out for. We will give you pointers to three services that we have explored. These are many more, as a Google search for "photo sharing" will show. Pixmonix is not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this article. You should review their terms of use and privacy policies for yourself before signing up or giving them any personal information.

At first glance, these services all look pretty similar and have similar sales pitches. However, there are some features you definitely want to consider as you look at these services:

• Privacy and Security. You may want to make your childhood pictures available to your siblings, but not to everybody on the Internet. You must be able to password protect albums that you make available for viewing. Thankfully, all the services that we have examined allow you to do this.
• Image Size. Being limited to sharing and viewing small images is probably not what you want. You would like your visitors to be able to see images as large as their monitors. (You may also want to let them download the full-resolution images, see below.)
• Storage and Bandwidth. You may not be a professional photographer, but you still may have quite a lot of images to share. And you might want to make very large or high-resolution images available to your friends and family (see the next item). Hence, you need to make sure that the service you select provides sufficient storage space for your needs. Bandwidth is a measure of how much data your family and friends download in the process of viewing your images. Unless you are a professional, it is unlikely that you will exceed the bandwidth allowances of the companies we cite below.
• Print ordering and image download. Looking at the images on the screen is great. But if your family or friends want to get prints of the images, it sure is nice if the sharing service provides this capability. Most do (because this is another way for them to make money). Additionally, it is very convenient to allow your family and friends to download the full-sized images from the sharing service (if you have allowed this to occur). If this service is available you may be able to avoid shipping CDs or DVDs to all those people. Watch out for bandwidth limitations, however - and note that uploading those large image files can take a long time unless you have a (very) high-speed Internet connection - at a business, for example.
• Ads. Having the screen cluttered with ads while you view images is annoying. You may have to pay for a service that allows ad-free viewing of images. Luckily, this isn't hard to find, nor do you need to pay a great deal for it.
• Cost. Free is good. But by paying a little bit each month for a service like the ones we suggest below has some great benefits - like unlimited storage and ad-free image viewing.

http://www.smugmug.com For about $30 per year you get unlimited storage and some really nice options for what you display and how it is displayed. They offer printing in a wide variety of formats for reasonable prices. This service has every desirable feature for very little money. They do not offer a free service beyond a 1 week trial period (making the service cheaper because you aren't subsidizing many other free users). Definitely worth exploring.

http://www.flickr.com Flickr has taken the lead as the "in" place to do photo sharing. Depending on your goals and tolerance for technology, it may be the place for you. The site focuses on collaborative sharing and tagging of images, but you don't need to use these features - and you don't need to make your photos available for the whole world to see. Inviting your friends and family to view your images is a bit convoluted, and it doesn't let some friends see some albums but not others (meaning that grandma will be able to look at the albums of your college fraternity parties if you want her to see the photos of the grandkids). They offer a free service with limited upload privileges. For $25 per year you can upload 2 GB of photos per month with storage of an unlimited number of photos and sizes. (Yahoo! now owns Flickr.)

http://www.fotki.com For $50 per year you get unlimited ad-free storage and viewing. Interfaces are less slick than smugmug. Free service includes ads and no ability to customize the way that visitors can view your photos.

Many online photo printing services like Ofoto and dotPhoto will let you share your photos with friends and families. They don't charge for this service, but the sharing mechanisms can leave a lot to be desired. Generally, the images you can share are small and the screen is cluttered with opportunities to buy prints and other products that the companies sell. This is not meant to demean the products or services they offer -- they do a fantastic job at providing prints and other stuff with your photos on them. But if sharing images is your primary goal, you are better off going with a dedicated sharing service and paying a few dollars a year for the service. (And you don't have to avoid very many printing and shipping charges to those distant friends and family to make up the $30 yearly cost.)

Comments or questions? Please let us know what you think.