Where to Share: The Top Photo Sharing and Imaging Websites

Online Photo Editing

Where do your photos and videos live? If you’re like most people, the answer is simple: on your computer’s hard drive. But keeping your photos buttoned up on your desktop is no life – photos are meant to be shared. It’s also dangerous. All hard drives eventually fail and if you haven’t been backing up your photos, a hard drive crash could literally erase years of cherished family memories. Here are some of the Internet’s best destinations for your photos and videos.

For Sharing:
Let’s face it: not everyone on your Facebook account needs to see every photo you upload. These photo and video sharing sites give you greater control over who can view your images, in addition to more robust tools for editing and organizing your photos. Plus, when you are ready to post them to Facebook, these sites can link directly to your account to make cross-posting easier.

Flickr (www.flickr.com) One of the pioneers in the online photo world, Flickr offers one of the best environments for enjoying not just your own photos, but those of others. It has some of the better privacy tools available, so you can carefully manage just who gets to view your images. If you’re an aspiring photographer or photojournalist, you can take advantage of Flickr’s growing archive of Creative Commons’ licensed material to put your images into the blogosphere, giving them (and you) greater visibility.

Photobucket (photobucket.com) Photobucket not only serves as an online destination for your images, it’s also a launch pad into other social-networking sites. After your photos are uploaded into Photobucket, you can share them into Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. The site provides some basic image editing tools alongside an image organizer and slideshow creator tools when you’re ready to get creative.

Vimeo (www.vimeo.com) While YouTube has plenty to recommend it, it doesn’t offer the sophisticated feature set that Vimeo provides for the digital camcorder owner. You can pluck banner ads from your videos, fully customize your video player and control how other sites embed your video. You’ll enjoy unlimited HD video uploads, 5GB of upload space per week plus the ability to store your original video files. This last feature is particularly noteworthy because you can also download that original file, giving you a nice off-site back-up option for your digital videos. Of course, to get access to these goodies you’ll have to pay up – $59.95 a year. If you have more basic video sharing needs, a basic Vimeo account gives you 500MB a week in video uploading plus the ability to upload one HD video per week.
For Storing:

If you’re less interested in sharing your images far and wide, and more concerned with making sure they don’t disappear when your hard drive fails (which it will, eventually) you should consider online storage. These sites don’t give you as many of the cool social-networking features as the sharing sites, and they typically require a fee, but they do preserve your high-resolution original files (photos and videos) in a secure location in the event your hard drive fails (did we mention it will?).

SnapHaven (www.snaphaven.com) SnapHaven provides a secure home for your photo files. There are two tiers of membership: a “snapshot” tier for $49 a year lets you upload images that are preserved at 1200 x 1600 resolution (i.e. lower than the original resolution you captured them at, but good enough for a decent 8 x 10-inch photo print). A “premium” membership ($99) is a better choice as it preserves your original image file. In both tiers you’ll get unlimited photo uploads and downloads and a 99 year storage guarantee.

Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) While Carbonite isn’t as photo-friendly as SnapHaven, it’s an all-encompassing backup solution for your digital data. For $54.95 a year you’ll get their downloadable application which monitors and automatically backs up your data. If your hard drive explodes, you can have the contents of your drive restored with just a few clicks. Better yet: there’s no limit to the amount of data you can backup. This is particularly beneficial for digital camcorder owners or avid d-SLR shooters who quickly find themselves drowning in GBs of data.

For Printing
When it comes to making prints from your photos, it’s hard to top the convenience of online providers. From mail order to in-store pickups, these sites provide high quality prints and photo merchandise in a pleasing online environment.

Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com) A one stop shop for every imaginable photo product under the sun (magnets, mugs, blankets and, oh yes, prints) Kodak Gallery also provides customers with high resolution image downloads (provided you maintain a minimum yearly order of between $4.99 and $19.99). This makes the service attractive as an off-site storage option in addition to its various print products. You can have prints mailed to your home or pickup prints at various retail locations such as CVS.

SnapFish (www.snapfish.com) SnapFish has a wide assortment of photo merchandise plus some of the best prices on the Web. If you don’t want to pay for shipping, SnapFish will deliver prints to Wal-Mart and Walgreens, among other locations. SnapFish doesn’t offer as good an archive solution as Kodak Gallery: there are no limits to the number of images you can upload but photos over 9-megapixels can be down-sized and you won’t have access to the high-resolution originals.