Photo Sharing Sites

[ZephyrusX]

Does anyone know a good photo sharing site? I have a brother and sister living on the opposite side of the country that I want to stay in touch with and I was planning on doing so by sharing photos. I know you can upload pictures on Facebook, but to be painfully honest, I find Facebook really confusing. I'll log in from time-to-time and think, 'Wtf is going on?'.

I just want a simple interface where I can upload pictures and may be have people comment on them. May be even have different people upload pictures so that I can look at my brother's and sister's photos too... If that is not asking for too much.

And yes... I'm very out of it when it comes to social media... Be nice.

[elucidate]

Apparently google is a good one for that. There was a thread started today about it on the tech section. I got an invite this morning to join google from a friend, so it's all very in synch.

[Criseyde]

I use Photobucket for straight up image hosting. You can set it up with albums and change the security settings on those albums, so different people can see them (like you can make them viewable to the public, or you can password protect them, or make them totally private).

Flickr is pretty popular as well, and I know those photos can be made available to others -- it actually seems easier than Photobucket for sharing, because it's more social-networky (I think).

AND, one of my friends uses Picasa and I get email updates every time she updates her album.

And then there's Tumblr, which is microblogging with pictures and it seems cool and I would have one if I took a lot of pictures and/or had something to microblog about.

[ZephyrusX]

Can you get email notifications on either Photobucket or Flickr? Is it possible for people to leave comments? It would be nicer if I could have 'mini-conversations' on the same site with my brother and sister using the photos as a point of reference.

The 'google thing' is a social networking site, right? I'm worried that there would be too many 'things' on there that would make the interface too complicated for my purposes. Sort of like Facebook.

[Criseyde]

Originally Posted by ZephyrusX

Can you get email notifications on either Photobucket or Flickr? Is it possible for people to leave comments? It would be nicer if I could have 'mini-conversations' on the same site with my brother and sister using the photos as a point of reference.

The 'google thing' is a social networking site, right? I'm worried that there would be too many 'things' on there that would make the interface too complicated for my purposes. Sort of like Facebook.

You can leave comments in both Photobucket and Flickr and I'm sure there's an email update option. I really think that Flickr is more photo-sharing-friendly, so that's what I would recommend if your primary purpose is to host albums that people look at directly.

[ZephyrusX]

Ok, I'll check out Flickr. Thank you Fairy Queen!

[farmerjaneusa]

I like Flickr as well. Just some words of caution:

1. Flickr ties in with yahoo mail right down to logging your yahoo account out if you log out of Flickr, and I've had a hard time trying to figuring out things that got tied to my yahoo mail that I took as security risk (if you compartmentalize your life you may take offense to their combo crap, I'm just a bit... about what gets shared where.)

2. Flickr has a limit, so you might find having more than one account helpful if you don't want to pay. I think the number limit is 200 or 250. Unless your photos are huge files you'll reach the number limit first.

3. Google likes to connect to more stuff than Flickr and yahoo so make sure you don't connect accts unless you are absolutely sure you want to and be aware of things like signing into Google signs you into your YouTube account, there nothing you can do about this or the Flickr/yahoo thing.

I like Flickr because of the groups and control over them. The nice thing is you can add a photo to your acct, share it public or hide it, and if you hide it you can make it visible to people in a private group etc etc... it's pretty much total control.

Once you poke around it becomes easier to figure things out, much easier than most facebook or yahoo interfaces. The only thing that has been tricky for me is altering descriptions on batches or moving photos around from folder to folder, but I'm getting used to it, just don't do it very often and keep forgetting what to do.

If you use Flickr familiarize yourself with the level of copyright protection you want. For most of my photos I personally don't mind if someone wants to repost them and Flickr has a "cut & paste" box if you have allowed it, this makes the photos share friendly (the html coding includes your name and title,etc and when the photo is clicked on the viewer goes directly to the page that includes your photo (instead of a photo with no friendly interface and an otherwise blank page).

[ZephyrusX]

Thanks for that informative post farmerjane!

[farmerjaneusa]

you're welcome Z