Creating Online Photo Galleries of Favorite Pictures is at the Heart of Online Photo Sharing

More than email and text messaging, we think that photos are the fastest way to stay up-to-date with the people you care about.

Photos are an instant fix and online photo sharing makes it easy to get! Remember emails get deleted or eaten by spam filters, shared photos don't.

Like the name implies, photo sharing is a way for you to let others view and share photos from anywhere.

Grandparents stay in touch with grandkids. Friends stay in touch with friends.

If you want to show everyone the pics from your trip to Thailand, just upload them to your online album, then invite people to go to your personalized web album address to view the pictures.

Full Service Sharing, Photo Printing and Everything Else

Any one of these free all-round services will give you adequate storage PLUS the ability to turn your photos into prints, photo books, or gifts instantly.

• Kodak Gallery
• Shutterfly
• Snapfish

Free Online Photo Sharing

These folks just focus on the photo sharing aspect.

• Flickr - BIG grandpappy photo sharing...over 1 million new photos uploaded per day...whew
• AOL Pictures - integrated with other AOL services so you can add photos to text and email messages with the click of a button
• Photobucket - store photos and videos in one place but add them to your favorite sites for free, like MySpace, Facebook, Live Journal, Blogger and Friendster

Specialized Photo Sharing and Storage

For amateur and professional photographers and photo bloggers there are these emerging services

• SmugMug - Ad-free photo storage
• SnapJot - Photo storytelling, kind of like photo blogging
• Webshots - For photo enthusiasts who want a community of like minds
• Scrapblog - Very cool, specializes in multimedia online scrapbooks that can be shared.

Tips

Number of photos

Most digital photo sharing vendors have some quantity of photos that can be uploaded for free. There may be a a limit on the amount of storage space, a time limit. If FREE is really important to you, consider Flickr - the biggest of 'em all.

Cost

Monthly or annual membership plans can cost anywhere from $25 to $150 per year. give you benefits such as more than one unique album urls with password protection, picture protection, unlimited prints and discounted prices, unlimited uploads.

Ads

Some services are driven by advertising so expect to see ads on your album photos in return for  unlimited uploads. Photobucket is a good example.

Linking to Facebook or MySpace

If you are hyper connected to all things online, chances are you have accounts at all the popular social bookmarking and networking sites. Services like Photobucket allow you to  post your pictures in Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.

Ordering prints and photo products

We think the full service photo printing shops are the best for this service. If you think that you'll be ordering prints photo gifts and photo books, then go with a vendor like Shutterfly who can do it all.

Archiving photos

If long term storage is your primary concern, have a look at services that specialize in photo storage and backup. Smugmug and Sharpcast have both free and membership plans for various levels of service.

Sharing and storing video

This is a good question to ask. Video will only become more and more accessible on the Net. Snapfish, Photobucket, and Smugmug support video clips. Scrapblog is another interesting service that combines images, video, audio, and text to create multimedia online scrapbooks.