Free Online Digital Photo Albums

Online photo sharing has become all the rage among Internet users. From students enjoying their first year of college to families sharing pictures states away, photo sharing has never been more popular. There are many free online digital photo album web sites that allow you to upload, organize and store pictures to share with anyone. These services allow you to determine who can see your pictures, allow others to download them and even let you purchase physical prints to deliver to your doorstep or allow others to purchase prints they are interested in.

Photo sharing web sites started popping up in the late 1990s as more people began using digital cameras to take pictures. Digital cameras allow users to upload photos to their computer and in turn share them with the world around them. While you can also take most memory cards to photo publishers nowadays, the advantage of being able to upload them onto your computer allows you to share them instantly with other people. By having a place online to host these photos, you can share them with even more people instead of sending a large e-mail out to your entire family with photos from that fourth of July barbecue.

Most online photo albums offer different services. Free services, such as Flickr or Photobucket, also offer paid services that give you access to more features. Photos, videos and sideshows can be hosted for free on these sites. Each has a monthly bandwidth as well as storage limit that can be increased by purchasing a paid account on a yearly basis. For the average photo sharer, the free restrictions are enough to share photos. MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites are also beginning to offer photo sharing services. Even blogging web sites, like LiveJournal, allow you to create galleries and give you an allotment of space to host up to 2 GB of pictures when you become a paid member. You can choose who views your photos, who can copy them or download them, or you can choose to not share any at all with your friends. MySpace and Facebook offer similar features to protect the privacy of your photos.

Many desktop photo programs allow you to organize, tag and then upload photos to free online sites via FTP. This makes sharing multiple photos much easier than waiting for a web browser to upload each one manually to a web site. This cuts down the time it takes to upload and share photos as well as making it easier to organize pictures into groups and categories as you see fit. Many services, such as Photobucket, now let you upload pictures from your cell phone to galleries since many phone users take advantage of their mobile phones to capture the world around them. Each service offers different features to users, and it is important to find a site that works for you. Depending on your needs, investing in a subscription-based service might be the best way to share your photos, too.

What is photo finishing?

Photo finishing has become a new trend online in addition to photo sharing. This allows you to upload photos online to sites like Kodak or Shutterfly and order physical prints by mail. In order to help share these photos, different sites will allow you to host photos there as long as you are purchasing prints in order to let family members choose the ones they would like to order. Since you can not download prints, it encourages those visiting to make purchases, and this is how they can afford to host photos without charging you to upload them like other photo sharing web sites.

Other sites use advertisements or other forms of subscription to pay for you to host photos and videos online. Webshots and Fotki are two such types of subscription-based photo sharing web sites. They offer different services for subscription holders, such as more hosting space and eliminate advertising on pages. Subscription-based services are also more reliable places to keep photos, because there is more of a guarantee that they will not be deleted or lost if a server crashes. Free services do not offer such guarantees, because the cost of doing so would out way the benefits of keeping the site free.

Online photo sharing has become the easiest way to share photos with family, friends and neighbors. By simply creating your own web site, you can host photos and people around the world can see them by just a click of their mouse. This makes sharing memories easier than dropping them off at the store, waiting a day or two to pick them up, only to find out that you forgot to use your flash or you had your thumb over the lens. You can upload photos instantly, pick and choose the ones you want to share, and then share with whoever you want. You can order prints of the ones you want, you are not wasting film trying to take the perfect shot to share, and at the end of the day, you can preserve the memories a lot longer than you ever thought possible.