Recommend me a photo hosting site?

[sholio]

I've been talking to my family about sharing more photos with them, so I'm thinking about signing up for one of the free photo sharing services to make things easy on myself rather than attaching them to emails or doing it all by hand on my web host.

Flickr is pretty popular - is it good? What else is out there? What do you use? At this point I'm not sure what I'll be needing exactly, though I'm thinking that a) the ability to either make photos publicly visible or limit access to certain people, b) to group into albums, and c) some sort of cropping/resizing tools are probably going to be necessary. (But I expect most photo hosting sites can do that.) And I don't want to pay for it.

It's really funny ... I've been doing the Internet the same way for ages; the last big change in how I use it was when I signed up for LJ in 2005. But this summer I started using Wordpress to organize my personal website (rather than writing HTML by hand) and signed up for Tumblr, and all of a sudden I'm looking at ALL the ways I do things online (most of which date back to the late '90s) and going, what the hell, self, it's 2012! The Internet has come a long way and you haven't!

Comments

[jjhunter]

I'm pretty happy with Photobucket.

[sholio]

Thank you! :)

[ratcreature]

Photobucket may degrade your pictures though. They compress even already compressed pictures, at least they did a few years ago. This entry by gnatkip describes the effect as she experienced it with examples of degraded pictures:
http://gnatkip.dreamwidth.org/7380.html

[sholio]

Thank you, I'll go read it! :D

[iadorespike]

I use snapfish. Plus, it's a great place to order prints from - they're always running sales and different promotions. But I only buy very sporadically, and it's handy to keep and share files. :)

http://www2.snapfish.com/hp/welcome

[sholio]

Ooh, I hadn't heard of that one. *goes to check it out*

[siria]

I use Flickr for my RL photos. (I use Photobucket to host stuff that I'm just going to link to from DW/LJ, but I find their interface clumsy and they often mess with image size/resolution.) Flickr's pro account is only about $25 and for that you get unlimited uploads and storage, and various ways of organising/tagging your images. It's also got a pretty active community of (semi)professional photographers and other artists, and their work is easy to explore given the way the site it set up.

[sholio]

I just discovered I can log into Flickr with my Yahoo email, so I think I'm going to try that one first. :D I have never liked Photobucket's interface -- when I click through to a picture from someone's LJ, Photobucket is one of my least favorite places to find myself -- but I wasn't sure if it was easier/more pleasant as a user than as a viewer. Anyway, I like Flickr's simple interface, so I think I will try them first; I'll see how things work out with their 300Mb monthly upload cap (it's hard to believe that won't be enough, but then, there was a time when I couldn't see why a 20 Gb hard drive wouldn't last me forever).

[siria]

I mostly don't hit Flickr's monthly cap, but if I go places then I can burn through it very quickly indeed. I think I uploaded more than 600 images from my time in France alone, and that's nowhere close to all the pictures I took :D

[sholio]

After reading their rules, the biggest problem I can see is that you can only see the most recent 200 pictures with a free account. This is probably not going to be a problem in the beginning, since mostly it's just pictures of the "hey, this is what I did with the living room last week!" variety, but I can see it leading to frustration if I wanted to share an older photo set.

[siria]

Yes, that's true! That part is frustrating for sure. Though at least those photos don't go away, you just can't see them, and they all come back (with set/collection structure intact) if you upgrade to a pro account.

[ratcreature]

I have a photobucket account but their interface stopped working on my computer when I used an older laptop (a ton of obnoxious flash, no graceful downgrading), plus there is their compression problem and that they run out of bandwidth on free accounts relatively fast. So I stopped using them. I mostly still use LJ and my own webspace. LJ's scrapbook update recently actually made something better for once. I mean, I wish they had upgraded before it ate several of by images by permanently corrupting them, but they say that is fixed now, and the interface has gotten better, IMO. Still not exactly awesome, but better.

[sholio]

Yeah, I've always done the "upload to my own web host" thing, but I'm starting to think that I'm making more work for myself than I really have to, with all these different free tools out there that do it all for you.

I knew that lots of people had problems during LJ's transition to their new scrapbook (losing files and whatnot), so I was reluctant to use that one.

[ratcreature]

Actually the corruption of the files happened before the migration, the migration only alerted to you to the fact because it noticed that the files were broken. I had spoken to support about Scrapbook loosing images well before the transition. And when I talked to them again after the migration when it alerted me to more problems, but the stupid tool didn't even give me the titles of the pictures when I had entered some, just the then cryptic LJ assigned filename, when before you could at least see which picture was gone, so I had hoped to find out at least which of my entries were now broken by talking to support. Anyway, they confirmed that the files were already gone before the move, and admitted that I was right in pointing out that the migration tool would have been better had it given you more information, but that now that the migration was complete they couldn't retrieve even the meta information of the lost ones. So that wasn't exactly stellar.

[sholio]

Hmm. Well, that's good to know.

I think my problem right now is TOO MANY OPTIONS! Same as when I was trying to figure out how to handle the interface with my comics -- there are just so many places to go now, and they all have pluses and minuses.

[monanotlisa]

I use Google because Picasa is such a handy program me; if FlickR were easy like that I would prefer that, though -- spreading out my info across the providers of the internet with all their individual power...

[sholio]

Wow, I can't believe I completely forgot about Picasa! I'll look into that one, too.