Photo Sharing Sites - A Valuable Resource

For those of you who have yet to discover photo sharing sites I am here to sing their praises. New photo-sharing sites are springing up almost everyday, many with exciting new options. Some of the most well-known are Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket. These sites provide a way to store and share photos with varying degrees of customization and privacy levels. The better sites offer tools to catalogue, edit and share pictures, as well as the ability to put pictures into albums and to create slide shows that can also be shared.

The sites are free to use, they provide an ideal secondary back up system for storing your photos, and they are relatively easy to use. Almost all sites provide a tutorial or video to walk you through setting up your account and help get you started storing and sharing photos. Most now offer a way to integrate your photos on Facebook and Twitter (load on one site, disperse to many).

I was introduced to Picasa while on a hiking trip in Peru. Our group of 16 discussed ways to share our photos when we got home and Picasa was recommended by a few photo savvy people in our group. Once we got home and edited our pictures we posted them on Picasa and everyone in our group then had access to each others pictures. This was so much easier and faster than individual e-mailings where mailboxes get quickly overloaded with large files. It was so simple and easy that I became an immediate fan. E-mailing from a shared photo site is another great benefit. Load your pictures onto the site, select which photos to e-mail to friends and use the site to do the e-mailing. Files are automatically made smaller for sending, goodbye to overloaded mailboxes. Since that trip to Peru I have recommended Picasa to other tour groups that I have been a part of and it has been a hit with everyone.

More and more people use their camera phone to take pictures and many shared photo sites now offer mobile uploads. Currently on Flickr the most used “camera” is now the iPhone and their mobile app for the iPhone has been downloaded over 5 million times.

For those of you that are familiar with my website you will know that I am a fan of the products offered by Shutterfly. A wonderful feature is a free Personal Photo Share site. A Personal Photo Share site is a secure, personal web page that you create and customize for family and friends. You can post your photos online similar to Flickr or Picasa but you actually have your own site instead of having a profile on someone else’s. The template to create your site is quick and easy to use (it took me 45 minutes to set mine up, complete with pictures). Shutterfly has two types of Share Sites: Personal and Group Sites which are ideal for sports teams, school groups, book clubs, photography clubs etc. The Group site has a scheduling calendar to help plan group events.

Features offered include:

• Choice of privacy levels
• Customized layouts and styles
• Picture galleries
• Auto Notification for new content
• Comments
• Favorite links

I have my own Personal Share site created for family use where everyone in my extended family posts pictures to share, as well as adding updates on events and family news. Once photos are posted I can use any photo by any member of my family to order prints and in my case to make photo books, calendars and notecards. I no longer have to beg for photos for projects at Christmas, I have a ready supply of current pictures at full resolution that I am able to edit for my own use. Once I finish a photo book I can post it on the website so that other family members can see the finished project (and order their own copy if they wish). My advise on Shared Photos Sites - try it, you’ll like it!

Jillian Paulson is the owner of Out of the Shoebox http://www.outoftheshoebox.ca, a site devoted to creating photobooks to preserve family memories. Jillian is passionate about the need to get photographs out of storage boxes or off of computer hard drives and putting them into archival quality photo books that can be enjoyed for years to come.