How to store, organize, and share your photos.

photo by Orin Zebest

Just about 12 years ago, digital cameras started to become affordable and since then, they have gotten unbelievably popular, easy to use, technologically amazing, and pretty darn affordable. Remember the day when every trigger of the shutter was sort of an investment? After all, the price of film and development added up fast. Now, folks snap-off  picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, and many people opt out of developing all together. But what do the rise in shutterbugs do with their endless mountain of digital  photos? Answer: PHOTO SHARING. Even if you have no interest in “sharing” your pictures, photo sharing programs are the best way to safely and easily organized all your photo files in one place.  If you do love to share your photos with family and friends, do them a favor and stop emailing bulky files that waste time, (and small, resized images that lose quality.)

photo by Karin Dalzeil

There are so many options on what program to use though! Lucky for you, I have some recommendations based on research and experience and I’ve collected some links to reviews and such to help you decide. Many are free, but if you want to pool thousands of pictures every month, you’ll either have to pay a small fee and/or take the time to build your own website.

1^st Choice: Google’s “Picasa 3”.

It allows users to store and share 1 gigabyte/GB (that is: 1,000 megabytes/MB) of photos for FREE, and that is quite a lot of storage space.

It offers other plans for a price. For instance, you could get 10 GB (that’s 10 times what you would get for free) for $20.00.  It’s easy to use, organize, and search for your pics in this program. It even has facial recognition software to help you sort by people’s faces! It has some basic editing software, geo-tagging software for mapping out you picture’s locations, and some fun collage options – all for free as well. You can title/caption/and post privately if preferred.

2^nd Choice: Yahoo’s “Flickr”.

Free account users are allowed to upload 100 MB/month or 1.2 GB/year.

(It offers two types of accounts: Free or Pro.)  If a free user has more than 200 photos on the site, they will only be able to see the most recent 200 in their photostream. The other photos that were uploaded are still stored on the site and links to these images in blog posts remain active.  Pro accounts allow users to upload an unlimited number of images for about $25.00/year.  Flickr is more of a social networking/online community platform and is a great photo-sharing alternative to MySpace or Friendster because it is designed around exhibiting pictures. It has blogging and mapping capabilities and will even let you pick out your personal icon for your site’s account – how cute!

Other recommendations include  PhotoBucket, which offers 500MB for free and is much interconnected with popular online sites, and has a slideshow and scrapbooking builder.

Also, if you’re willing to pay $40.00/year for a bump in quality, then I recommend SmugMug. Keep in mind; it aims to attract professional photographers.