TP: Photo Sharing/Hosting Services

Please share your experiences with photo sharing and hosting services here. There are various photo sharing sites on the internet with different policies like free/paid accounts, free hotlinking, galleries, editing the layout of your account and so on. Any type of sharing service is welcome here. Tell your ideas about the services you have used.. how easy is the user interface, how configurable is your gallery, are you satisfied with the service, what kind of features they provide and etc. I'd be glad to see opinions for both free and paid services, and is it worth to upgrade. Finally, don't forget to add a link to your favourite photo sharing/hosting site. thanks in advance for your participation.

Those who are interested in custom made web pages, I recommend http://www.5gbfree.com hosting - 5GB free, ftp access, PHP, ... Together with JAlbum (for instance) quite handy. The web server works fine so far.

Edited by brettania - 13 June 2008 at 14:24

Seems to work OK.

i've started using 5gbfree too, its very very useful.

My previous gallery is in flickr which is while very easy to use, also a bit frustrating with its free accounts. It will show only your lastest 200 photo and will not let you open more than 3 sets.

I've just started using Picasa Web Albums. It integrates nicely with Picasa (duh) which makes uploading (and resizing if you want) pictures very quick and easy. They give you 1GB of storage and unlimited number of albums for free.

The interface is simple, clean, and displays your images to fill the available space in the browser window. It also can generate a static link to your image, so you can embed it in a webpage (or post it on dyxum.com), but you're limited to these image sizes: 144, 288, 400, or 800 pixels. Usually for dyxum I resize to 800, but this example is sized for a thumbnail (144px):


I'm no pro; I don't need a fancy website or tons of storage. All I need to do is share photos with friends, family, and post to dyxum. So picasaweb can double as my online photosharing service and image hosting. If convenience is a deciding factor for you, check it out.

I haven't loaded much yet but if you want to get a taste of the interface you can look at this album from a recent trip.

gvknight: i used flickr, extremely reliable and functional. It has hotlinking for free (so you can post on dyxum or other forums) but it has some other limitations on the free accounts, one is you get only 3 photo sets (those are like galleries) but you can still sort your photos with infinite tags. other limitation is your account will always display the lastest 200 photo. The older ones should come back when you upgrade to paid account.

i instead gave up and started setting up my own site. I'll still use flickr for hotlinking though.

cheers, for the info

I'm using SmugMug, works simply great. It's a paid service. $39,95 per year but it pays off.