Whats your favorite online photo sharing site (free or pay) ?

I'm not totally sold on Flickr, but when I was hunting around a few years ago it seemed to be the best of what was out there. However it doesn't seem to be changing much, so perhaps others have added features that make them superior now - I'll have to look around when my membership ends (which is sometime in 2009, I think - "old skool" paying members got a deal where they added two free years - out of the blue - on top of whatever you payed for. Of course that was before Yahoo swooped in...).

I've always had very good experience with my Flickr Pro account, and I love that the bandwidth on the photos is unlimited.

I like Picasa, for the simplicity of exporting iPhoto albums directly to it (plug-in page).

I love my SmugMug site! Depending on what site level you get, you can customize your site quite a bit, and you can even use your own domain. There are plug-ins available for iPhoto and Aperture, as well as a stand alone app for uploads.

techmonkey said:

Im doing research to see what the best deal for an online photo sharing account is. Ive been using a free account for Flickr, and Ive been very impressed with the UI and ease of use uploading and editing. I have my own domain name, but Ive been very disappointed with whats available (Gallery1/2 and Coppermine Gallery).

What do you use for online photo sharing? Anyone know a good site that does both photo and video?

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You can't beat Phanfare if you want own domain name, videos, photos and Amazon S3 backup. You get what you pay for.

Lately I've been using the .mac web gallery features and I really love them. I think Apple needs to add more user control to the equation, but the rest of the features have really impressed me.

As for free sites, photobucket is the best IMO.

I'm currently debating which service to use myself.

For me, being a cheapskate, I'm looking mostly at either Flickr or Picasa. Also, I find both of their interfaces and layouts to be much cleaner and smoother than any other option. In the end, I think I'll use Picasaweb for sharing pics with family and friends, and use Flickr for hobby photos and joining photo pools with random people.

+ for Picasa over Flickr:
*Can upload videos
*Very easy to order prints from either Shutterfly or Photoworks, both good print shops in my experience
*Visitors can download full size originals, or whole albums in one fell swoop.

+ for Flickr over Picasa:
*Much cheaper to get unlimited storage than Google
*Beautiful presentation of the photos, both in slideshow, individual, and album views
*Organization

Fortunately, it is very easy to upload to both with either iPhoto or Aperture.
Hope this helps.

0DCBass

I tried a number of photo hosting sites and narrowed my choices down to Smugmug and Zenfolio. Ultimately, I went with Zenfolio because I liked the cleaner interface.

I believe most of these sites have free trials. I think the best way to decide which site to go with would just be to try them out and see which one you like most.

Smugmug, Zenfolio and PBase.

Flickr by a long shot. It's almost addicting sometimes.

I used imagemagician for a loooooong time. And then it died. So then I moved to photobucket and I've just never looked anywhere else. Flickr is too much like Facebook Lite for me. I just want a place to host pics and vids and such and not worry about all the other stuff. I have LJ and Facebook and MySpace and Ravelry and a host of other places for my networking needs. ^_^

Smugmug the last couple of years. Never a problem.

SmugMug!

For two reasons: great customer service and unlim storage/bandwith.

Their customer service usually respond in MINUTES.

In addition, a month ago it was late (10pm CST) Thursday and I needed photos for a grieving family by Saturday morning. Smugmug not only pushed my order to the top of the pile at their printing facility, but upgraded the shipping to overnight/sat. AM free of charge. I got the photos 6pm Friday and was able to hand deliver them Saturday morning.

Who else would have done this, let alone free of charge? They're truly compassionate and devoted people.

SmugMug is great for a paid site. The best free site is Flickr, hands down.

Picasa

hey.. i've just started using Picasa and think it's pretty good for a free site - i have a gmail account so it was the easy choice. I really don't see much difference between flickr and picasa though (i haven't used flickr but have looked through the sites introduction)... i think the photo comments section on flickr is a bit ugly.

I have set up a Picasa site, since I already have a GMail account which I use for a couple of other things... and that was an extremely user friendly experience, so I guess Picasa is my favourite, even if I haven't really tried the others...

But since I have my own domain I don't really need it... if I want to share photos I'll just post them there...

I pay for the Flickr account, very much worth it. I use it a LOT

Their features and services are awesome.

cutsman said:

I tried a number of photo hosting sites and narrowed my choices down to Smugmug and Zenfolio. Ultimately, I went with Zenfolio because I liked the cleaner interface.

I believe most of these sites have free trials. I think the best way to decide which site to go with would just be to try them out and see which one you like most.

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I use Zenfolio pretty much for the same reason. However, what truly sold me was I e-mailed both Smugmug and Zenfolio, asked a rather lame but important question. Zenfolio responded in one day. I've yet to hear from Smugmug.

Clix Pix said:

Smugmug, Zenfolio and PBase.

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Pbase is another good one but not as clean as I'd like to see a photo sharing site.

techmonkey said:

You use Picasa on your own domain? How do you do that? I also have my own domain, but im not happy with the free solutions like Gallery1/2 and Coppermine Gallery.

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Ah... sorry, no... what I meant was that I can upload whatever images I want to my own domain, so I don't really need any photo sharing site...

I just tested picasa out of curiosity, and to get a feel for how it was.

The nicest gallery for your own site I've found, so far, is SimpleViewer, which even has it's own iPhoto export tool (and there's also an Aperture plug-in available). Nice and easy.

deviantART FTW!

My favorite is still Lightroom web galleries on your choice of Web server, but Facebook is quite handy.