Reviews of Online Photo Storage: The Best Online Photo Storage Sites
Introduction
With digital cameras and social media becoming ever popular today, it makes sense that online photo storage websites are booming. They make it easy for you to store tons of photos while interacting and sharing with your friends. Today we will look at our picks for the top 5 reviews of online photo storage and sharing websites to help find the right one for you!
Clicking on the product names will direct you to our reviews of the online photo storage site or provide additional information.
Flickr (Free and Paid) - www.flickr.com
Flickr is one of the largest online photo storage and sharing sites and is a favorite among photographers and bloggers, amateur and professional alike. Why is it a favorite among photographers? The community and users of Flickr make it so fun and easy to use. With your photos, you can organize them into sets (folders), post and receive comments, add tags to gain more views from searches, submit them to groups for sharing, post them to your blog, and so much more. While the free account does have some limitations (like storing a maximum of 200 photos at a time), it offers you a chance to get your feet wet and share your photos.
- Flickr is perfect for anyone looking to improve your photography with comments from others and a fun simple way to store/upload your photos online.
Photobucket (Free and Paid) - www.photobucket.com
Photobucket is another large and very popular online photo storage website. Like Flickr, it has both a free and paid service with free accounts limited to 500MB and 10GB of bandwidth per month (Flickr has no bandwidth limits). The user interface is not as clean and simple to use as Flickr, but it offers most of the same features for uploading, organizing, and sharing with friends on and off Photobucket. What is lacking on Photobucket is a solid community of users with which you can interact.
- Photobucket is mainly useful for uploading a limited number of pictures and sharing them online (provided you are under the bandwidth cap).
SmugMug (Paid) - www.smugmug.com
SmugMug is a more advanced photo storage and sharing website which offers many features for power users. There are different levels of accounts, but all paid accounts receive unlimited photo storage. There is not much of a community at SmugMug since the site is geared towards photographers looking to build a portfolio and sell their images. The advantages of SmugMug is that it allows you to really customize your gallery and embed it within your own website.
- It is perfect for more advanced photographers looking for an outlet to display, organize, and sell photos in their portfolio.
Picasa Web Albums (Free and Paid) - www.picasaweb.com
Powered by Google, Picasa Web Albums is an offshoot of the Picasa photo editing software. Picasa Web Albums allows you to store about 7.5GB worth of photos. The amount of storage available to you depends on how much your Google account has remaining. Other Google services which use this community storage are Gmail and Google Docs. Unlike Flickr’s free account, it allows you to fully use their storage and upload original-sized pictures which can be perfect for archiving photos on your hard drive. Since it is integrated with Google accounts, it is pretty simply to upload, share, and leave comments on friend’s albums. However, there is not much of any community on the site to share pictures with. Picasa Web Albums integrates nicely with Blogger. In fact, if you have a Blogger account, any images you upload to your blog are automatically sent to Picasa.
- Picasa is perfect for archiving a large number of photos and integrating them with your Blogger account.
Facebook (Free) - www.facebook.com
Facebook is not a traditional photo storage/sharing website like the ones listed previously. Facebook is primarily a social networking site. In fact, you probably already have a Facebook account to chat with friends and share photos from your last party. Facebook allows you to upload an unlimited number of pictures (and videos). The downside is that the largest dimension is limited to 720 pixels as of earlier this year. The image quality of pictures and videos are also reduced to save space making Facebook not the ideal choice for prominently displaying or storing your portfolio.
- What Facebook is perfect for and excels at is sharing photos with all your friends, allowing you and them to tag people, and leave comments.
