do you know good photo collection hosting site

[delwoode]

At the moment I am using FlickR, just because I heard about them 1st, but anyone had better experience of other sites where you upload your holiday snaps so that family and friends can easily view them.  Should be free and easy to use. 

[Jibz]

I am using Flickr as well, mainly because I like their permission system and felt it gave the amount of control over who could see my pictures I wanted.

But I would love to hear about experiences with other services; I looked at picasa for instance, but the free offering of 1GB storage was too small for me.

Also, the picasa TOS has one of those "anything you upload we, and our affiliates, can use for anything we like" clauses, which I am not a fan of .. Flickr might have one as well, I just didn't find it yet .

[sri]

Try http://www.zooomr.com/

[JavaJones]

To this day I don't understand how anyone can stand to use or view photos on Flickr. To me it is the most terribly designed UI of any photo sharing site. Its popularity amazes me. Even Facebook, etc. seem better. That being said I probably don't know how to use it right, but it sure aint intuitive.

Anyway, for free options, I personally think Picasa is the best. Not as full-featured as Flickr I'll grant, but photo viewing is a lot smoother and nicer (IMHO), it has nifty face recognition, links nicely with Picasa, and it has a reasonable (though simple) permissions system. If space is an issue upgrades on space are *very* cheap (Google just lowered the prices):
# 20 GB - $5/yr
# 80 GB - $20/yr
# 200 GB - $50/yr
# 400 GB - $100/yr

Not too bad at all.

If you're willing to pay and want something more fully featured with probably the nicest gallery presentation around, check out SmugMug. Its categorization system is a little wonky, though it does include arbitrary tagging capability. Beyond that I'm very happy with it. Non-profits get a free "Pro" account, which is very nice. I only hesitate to ever recommend it because it's not free and there are many other free options. But the features are pretty nice IMO...

- Oshyan

[app103]

There is also Webshots, Snapfish, Fotki, and Photo.net.

And don't forget about Dropbox. It does have a built in gallery for photos that is as easy to use as copying your pics to a certain folder on your hard drive. (use my referral link to get extra space for free)

[iphigenie]

Some I have found with various interesting takes

http://www.expono.com/ Interesting features are the facetagging, geotagging, organization and relationship options, editing of meta information and it claims sophisticated groups and permissions

http://www.ipernity.com/ they dont describe the features much but just looking at the resulting image blogs it might be quite interesting to organise. It's more like a bloggier flickr, and multi lingual. Possibly copies flickr too much.

http://www.dropshots.com/ Simpler looking but seems quite good at organizing.

ourdoings: Self organising site, recommended by one of his authors: "Just use a few hundred images taken with phones or digital cameras and try out OurDoings. They're organized as soon as you upload them. All you do is click calendar icons then "Edit" to add a story to go with a group of pictures. (They're initially grouped by the day they were taken.) You can know in 20 minutes if it's for you: http://ourdoings.com/" (they even have an "upload via dropbox" option, neat idea)

[J-Mac]

Really depends on your needs. What are you looking for? If pure sharing is your goal, Flickr is definitely the most ubiquitous site for this. Everyone has heard of it and Flickr has the most users of that ilk.

However if privacy is a concern, just forget Flickr. Your photos can be found and grabbed by anyone on the internet regardless of your privacy settings. Smugmug is the best with privacy I have found. However SmugMug is also considerably more expensive. Photobucket is another possibility. Easy to use, very easy to link to images from there for a blog, etc. And Photobucket, like Flickr, has nice pricing.

Hope this helps!

Jim

[Jibz]

However if privacy is a concern, just forget Flickr. Your photos can be found and grabbed by anyone on the internet regardless of your privacy settings.

That's interesting, I didn't find anything about such problems back when I was first looking at Flickr .. do you have a link to any information about it?

[J-Mac]

However if privacy is a concern, just forget Flickr. Your photos can be found and grabbed by anyone on the internet regardless of your privacy settings.

That's interesting, I didn't find anything about such problems back when I was first looking at Flickr .. do you have a link to any information about it?

Link? No - I'm sure a simple Google search will give you that. I had problems myself. I have a lot of photos of my grandkids there, supposedly set as "private", meaning only people I designate as Friends and Family can see them. Yet I was going through them one day and found a setting where you can see if people have marked any of your photos as their "Favorites". Several of mine had been so marked, but I noticed that all of them were photos where the kids were in their underwear. So I found my way to the user's site and here it was a "restricted" site, meaning it has pictures that, well, let's just say that kids shouldn't see. I had to change my own settings just to view their pics and I found that their albums were made up entirely of sex photos - what you would call soft porn - mixed with pictures of children who are either naked or in underwear. Young kids, like age 2 to 5. I complained to Flickr - nothing. Upon investigating I found that my "private" photos were not really protected but were simply not listed in the "Explore" and similar pages. It was enough that I made sure to remove all pics of my grandchildren unless they are really very fully dressed. And I opened a SmugMug account!

Jim

[Jibz]

Thanks for the explanation, that certainly sounds scary .. I'm glad I've never uploaded any pictures of our son at the beach or anything then.

They have a lot of privacy options about who can see your stuff, who can share it etc., I changed them all to nobody but family before I uploaded my first image.

[OldElmerFudd]

Really depends on your needs. What are you looking for? If pure sharing is your goal, Flickr is definitely the most ubiquitous site for this. Everyone has heard of it and Flickr has the most users of that ilk.

However if privacy is a concern, just forget Flickr. Your photos can be found and grabbed by anyone on the internet regardless of your privacy settings. Smugmug is the best with privacy I have found. However SmugMug is also considerably more expensive. Photobucket is another possibility. Easy to use, very easy to link to images from there for a blog, etc. And Photobucket, like Flickr, has nice pricing.

Hope this helps!

Jim

Thanks for this and your other explanatory post about Flickr. I don't use it myself, but I've occasionally mentioned it along with other photo sharing sites to friends. Privacy seems like more and more of an illusion these days, but if a site allows a user to set "permissions", they should honor the intent.

[J-Mac]

Like, say, Facebook? 

Look, the more money they find in Social/Sharing behavior, the more they will push users into publicizing their content rather than keeping it private. I had it happen on LiveJournal. I had a journal set to private, they changed their settings pages and all of mine were automagically set to Public. It'll probably only get worse.

Just know what you are getting into, and that anything you ever post online is ultimately public. No getting around it, really.

Jim

[Jibz]

http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2009/12/10/facebook-rolls-out-privacy-settings-intended-to-make-us-all-go-public/

Saw that in action yesterday .. the way that facebook popup describes it is just wrong.

After you've done the popup and changed everything from "visible to everybody" to "use my old settings", go into privacy settings, under Applications and Websites->What your friends can share about you, and you can remove the default of every app being able to share all your information despite of the other settings *grumble*.

[JavaJones]

Like, say, Facebook? 

Look, the more money they find in Social/Sharing behavior, the more they will push users into publicizing their content rather than keeping it private. I had it happen on LiveJournal. I had a journal set to private, they changed their settings pages and all of mine were automagically set to Public. It'll probably only get worse.

Just know what you are getting into, and that anything you ever post online is ultimately public. No getting around it, really.

Jim

Ahhhh, unless you post it on your *own* site! Perhaps the solution then - if privacy is a concern - would be to use a system you can host yourself on your own server, e.g. Gallery2, Coppermine, etc.

- Oshyan

[app103]

Privacy in dropbox photo albums seems to be pretty good. Nobody can see the images unless you personally invite them, have a dropbox account, and are logged in. And you can easily revoke permissions. And I believe they can be set, per album. (don't confuse this with sticking them in your public folder where anyone can see them if they know the url)

[tomos]

Quick Comparision of Flickr/ipernity/PicassaWeb

I liked PicassaWeb the best but there were some 'dealbreakers' so I'm stiking with Flickr for the moment