Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Online photo storage web sites

Where to you store your photos? Picasa, Flickr, Webshots, Smugmug...

I am shopping to find a good place to share my photos.

Any beta would be nice.

Have fun.

There are two main categories, paid and free.

In the paid category, I really like Smugmug. I've used it since 2004, and they charge $39.95 per year. (If you sign up, use my stevec@sfsu.edu email to get $5 off.) You can check my site here..

Beware of free sites. Bob R used Clubphoto, and they shut down without warning a couple of years ago. He now uses Flickr.

MooseTracks uses Flickr, part of Yahoo, and they have both free and paid. Not sure which mode Laura uses. Her site is here.


Webshots.com appears to have both a free and a paid mode. Markjwpcp uses it (free mode I think). I tried to link to one of his pictures, and it was tough. They pretty much force links to include the ads. See an album of his here.

I hope others will add more info here.

I use Flickr because of the ease to upload photos to the site. I can upload form my computer and iPhone. I also like it's capability to place photos in multiple sets, and sets in multiple collections. For example, hiking photos can be in a Whitney set *and* a Family Vacation set if I wanted.

The free version of Flickr is kind of a brain dead version - limited photo storage and limited upload bandwidth/capacity. If you take a lot of photos, then it's worth paying the $40 a year for the full version.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/glennsphotos2007

I use FlickR also, I haven't tried anything else but I like it, simple layout and images can be saved in full sizes, I also enjoy all the groups where you can post your images.

Unless I got a discount FlickR is 25 dollars a year, I just renewed mine a week ago.

And Laura uses the paid version, you can tell because of the "Pro" to the right of your name.

The only things I dislike about FlickR is there is a 20MB image size limit which I commonly exceed with 21MP images and also the movie size limit is 500MB and even worse 1 minute and 30 second duration limit, it's why I have been forced to cut most videos into parts.

After I used SmugMug for 2-3 years, I switched to Flickr, which I have used ever since. My wife, a photographer, also uses both Flickr and www.photo.net (a more professional oriented photography site).
Nothing wrong with SmugMug (and their customer service has always been incredibly fast and personal), but whenever I would try to view a photo album, either mine or someone else's, on SmugMug, there always seemed to be a significant lag in loading almost every picture, which made viewing an album on that photo site an unduly lengthy experience. If you view the same photo album using the same computer, etc., but on Flickr, it can be viewed much more quickly, and without the loading time lag between pictures.

I think there were some virus issues in the past using Webshots that, in the case of my office, caused them to block Webshots, but not SmugMug or Flickr, which I have no problem viewing at my office.

I have no experience using Picasa for my own pictures, but my experience viewing someone else's photo albums on Picasa has always been very positive, with fast viewing times and an eye-pleasing, and user-friendly interface.

With any of these, it's worth it to get the basic paid membership. In the case of online photo albums, the old saying that "you don't get something for nothing" is especially true!
And as mentioned above, if you want to post videos, Flickr really isn't suited for that. Laura uses Vimeo, and of course, there is always YouTube.

CaT