Photo Sharing Websites, Part III: Reviews of the Top Photo Websites
Trent Blizzard | 12 July 2006 |
In this last of our three part series, we want to share the results of our research. Our goal was to find the few best photosharing sites for your hotel or travel destination website that are worth the time, and eliminate those that are less advantageous. Our six winners were: Flickr, Picturetrail, Buzznet, Dotphoto, Fotki and Faces. As we discover new photosharing sites, we will upate this page. If you have one to recommend, please comment.
Our six winners each met our photosharing goals and had the following characteristics:
- Easy to use to upload images and organize into albums
- Ability to Create titles and Descriptions for Images
- Ability to link our photos to websites for more information
- Ability to place the images onto our blog or website
- A community which would be able to view our images, providing some PR advantages
- Offered a free account, with no need to upgrade/pay unless we chose to in order to unleash more storage space and bandwidth.
How We Tested: We created an account in each of the websites and uploaded about eight photos from vacations that I have taken during 2006. We organized the photos into a vacation album and tried to add title, descriptions and links to the photos.
The Winners Circle, in no particular order:
Flickr was extensively reviewed in Part II Tips for Creating and Optimizing Your Flickr Account. It is still our favorite provide, and we have two additional tips based upon using the Flickr Account extensively:
- Download the Flickr Uploadr if you are going to upload a lot of photos.
- get the professional version if you want to upload a lot of photos regularly
- Consider using flickr to backup and archive a lot of photos.
Buzznet is a major winner in our book. It has all the features we were looking for in a photo sharing program. Additionally:
- It has a nice “blog” feature in addition to photo uploading. It calls this feature a “journal.”, so you can use it to share your photos, but also create a community around them with your own blog posts… if you so desire.
- Buzznet will also lets you upload video.
- See the photos we setup in our Vacation Album at Buzznet
Picturetrail is a major site like Flickr. It has a whole community that can look at your photos, and comment.
- You can provide descriptive text and link out the photo to other sites.
- PictureTrail has a hundreds of groups in hundreds of categories you can join and share your photos.
- It has at least 20 cool and unique ways to share your photos.
- A free uploader to improve upload experience.
- For $20 a year, you can upload up to 500MB (or 50 photos)
- See our sample vacation album pages with a “cube” slideshow
Dotphoto.com is an easy to use photo-sharing program.
- It doesn’t create great slideshows you can embed into your website
- It does let you create your own homepage to showcase our galleries
- It has a really nice upload tool and makes it easy to surround you photos with content.
- See our homepage… it will look better after we add more galleries.
- It doesn’t use tagging, or have a community like Flickr, Buzznet or Picturetrail.
Fotki has a nice community which encourages commenting.
- It lets you create badges for your website, but they are small.
- It is easy to to upload albums and add descriptions with links.
- Fotki uses tagging and has a “links” page where you can share your link.
- Fotki will let you upload video
- Fotki has a built-in geo-mapping feature to connect your photos to Google Earth map.
Faces is a blog type photo-sharing site
- It has user profiles, bookmarks, lists, posts and a real sense of community.
- Good privacy controls.
- Several good options for uploading larger amounts of photos.
- Photos are best shared by incorporating into a blog post.
- See our sample vacation gallery
Our ten losers had one or all of the following characteristics (but some had other strengths we weren’t measuring):
- Too many ads
- Difficult or slow
- No community to share photos with
- No ability to link our images to websites for more information
Photobucket is an extremely popular site with MySpace Bloggers and won the contest for the most obnoxious ads. It is a more utilitarian tool meant for uploading photos for people who want to embed them in blogs. There aren’t opportunities to link to your website and it doesn’t have the community aspect like Flickr or PictureTrail.
Slide created some of our favorite slideshows that are easy to embed in your website. No community, tagging or website linking opportunity.
OneTrueMedia.com probably created the most compelling slideshows, but not a community website. Its slideshow making (with text and musice blended) focus is worth further investigation.
Webshots is easy to use and browse throuth photos, but won’t let you embed links to your website in the descriptions
Yahoo! Photo requires that you download their photo upload tool, which does make it easy to upload and share photos. It seems designed to share photos through email or a link, not embed them in your blog.
Kodak Gallery is made to share photos with family and friends. They have a lot of tools to print gift items.
Ringo has good community aspects, but no linking to your website
SnapFish is a popular site, but doesn’t have the sharing, community and tagging opportunities the winners offer.
Smugmug is more for professional photographers, who may want to sell their photos. Worth checking out (as is Istockphoto) if you are looking to purchase stock photography
MyPhotoAlbum presented errors when we tried to use, it seemed a bit clunky overall and we didn’t like the ads in its slideshows.
Webpages with More Information
- Online Photo Sharing Services: A Review This blog has some good links to other reviews of photosharing sites, especially how well they do at printing your photos.
- Picturetrail Press Release
- Online Photo Sharing Services: A Review
- Riya Photo Search
- Blog Talk: Blogging Resource List
- More on Picaboo
- More Online Photo and Video Sharing and Hosting
- Photobucket Distributing Custom Flock Browser
- Photobucket
- Flickr Way Behind in Photo-sharing Site Photobucket Rules
- Social Share Part 2: Share of Participation
- Photobucket and MySpace Photos Slide Shows Creator at Slide.com Photo Sharing Site
Part I of this series is focused on explaining photo sharing and defining the market size.
Part II of this series is focused on providing tips for signing up and using Flickr.
Trent Blizzard - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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August 1st, 2006 at 6:35 am
Please have a look at photobloggers.net too and give it a review :D
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:02 am
strange, albumconnect is not in the list
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:57 am
Please have a look at memoryrewinds.com called the VOPVA and give your valuable review comments.
Thanks
VOPVA Administrator
April 8th, 2007 at 6:09 am
I have tried five or six photo sharing websites. Why do the pictures as displayed in albums or shared with friends have such poor quality, compared to the actual pictures uploaded?
December 12th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Hello,
I also recommend to have a look at ComBoost http://www.comboost.com
That’s a new website (didn’t exist when the article was published).
It’s perfect for photo sharing, but also for slideshows. ComBoost offers different customizable slideshows that can be embedded inside blogs or websites.
One of the models for blog columns can even put link on photos, so that it becomes a great and useful menu for the blog.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:16 pm
We use pbase.com and find it really flexible and easy to use. It doesnt have any ads which I love. You can also put a password on your website. Its easy to organise it and it has different options for backgrounds and fonts.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Your hyperlink for OneTrueMedia.com goes to http://www.OnTrueMedia.com...
February 15th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the heads up - I’ve changed the link.
Carrie Hill
Editor, Blizzard Newsletter
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
We Recently received this in an e-mail:
The answer is that other sites may have this functionality but Flickr allows you to do this fairly easily. Just go to Flickr’s search page at http://flickr.com/search/people/ and enter the username or email address you are looking for. It should pull up that user and let you view their photos, as long as the users privacy settings will allow it.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Hi!
You can use my photos for free at http://freeartisticphotos.com - all of them are taken by me and made Public Domain
Cheers, Husac
August 31st, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I want to put up 100-150 photos of estate property that I acquired and need to sell. I need a site that allows that. I also need to add a description and ID# to each photo and have the viewer be able to contact me through my email. They will not need to access the photos or send me photos. This is a one-time situation and do not want to engage in setting up a web site and having it hosted. What photo sharing site will allow me to do this. Thanks alot!
September 1st, 2008 at 8:58 am
Hi Larry,
I would suggest using Flickr. You can start a “set” for each property w/ a name or ID# - using an easy hack, you can put a slideshow of each set, or a group (all of the sets) into your website. You can do multiple versions of this flash slideshow also.
http://www.tech-recipes.com/internet_tips1115.html
this link shows one way to do it, but there are a few - just search “flickr slideshow into website” or some derivitave.
Hope this helps
~Carrie Hill
Editor
Blizzard Internet Marketing Newsletter
September 5th, 2008 at 3:32 am
Hi - I have never (yet) used a photo sharing website but I have recently obtained a large number (at a guess 1,500) of old (1890 to 1960) family photos through my mother. As we have no idea who are in the majority of the photos my idea is to scan them and put them all on a photo sharing website where all family members, who are scattered around the world, can (a) see all the photos (b) make proposals as to who the people in the photos are, and (c) see the remarks made by others and can then challenge, or add, to the information provided. I could imagine a discussion chain developing on some of the photos.
Having looked at sites and reviews I find it difficult to see which web ite would lend itself to this ? Any advice?
December 15th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
To Grant Scroggie–
Check out LifeSnapz.com (www.lifesnapz.com) to solve your problem. LifeSnapz is a free service to capture, share and explore your life events with friends and family. Timelines and maps provide fun way to explore events and create an ongoing life record. You can collectively comment and provide information on each photo.
Also, you might want to check out ScanCafe.com for a cost effective way to digitize your photos.
Good luck!
December 24th, 2008 at 7:39 am
Smugmug is the best option I’ve tried hands down. Beautiful galleries that take no effort to setup, no advertising, total security for your photos (no one can simply steal them like on Flickr) and excellent customer service.
March 26th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I have tried a few of these sites and I have my favorite. Thanks for providing such a nice list of places to choose from.
May 15th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
The list is nice indeed but I would mention also the new service http://www.bluemelon.com which I have found to be a service definitely worth trying.