There are hundreds of photo sharing sites on the internet, and a few dozen popping up every week. So we thought of posting about the best ones and saving your time. Last month, we reviewed about 50 major image sharing websites and carefully selected the best 5 of them. So here is the list -
1. Flickr
Flickr definitely tops every list when it comes to image hosting and sharing. Backed by the mighty Yahoo! this service truly deserves this position. If you have a yahoo login, you can login and work seamlessly with Flickr. For a free account, you get a monthly upload limit of 100MB with 10MB per photo limit. You can always upgrade to a pro account to get rid of this limitation. You can easily create albums and photos are resized to max. 1024 or 1280 automatically. With over 26,000,000 users, it has a global Alexa rank of 33.
2. ImageShack
Imageshack provides a very easy and simple interface to upload and share photos. That’s the reason it became the 5th largest photo hosting service in the world in almost no time. If properly marketed, it can easily post a threat to the Bigshots in the photo-sharing market. But it is the only one in this list which doesn’t support geotagging. Imageshack currently holds an Alexa rank of 63.
3. Photobucket
I have been using photobucket for over a year and I loved the way they let me organize my photos. And password protecting photos are a breeze. Very well organized and user friendly layout. Free users are alloted 1GB of image storage. If you upgrade to a pro account, you’ll get 10 GB storagea. with over 50,000,000 registered users, Photobucket has an alexa rank of 39.
4.SmugMug
Now it gets pretty interesting. I would hardly ever recommend a paid-only service but Smugmug is really worth it. $40 a year is not a bad deal. It gives unlimited photo sharing space to members. I personally liked the search feature. It has a limit of 12 mb per photo for standard users and 24 mb per photo limit for pro users. It has an Alexa rank of 1,945 and over 315,000 paid members. If you want to try this service, there is a 14 day free trial version available on the website. You get the features of the pro version during the trial.
5. Picasa
Last but definitely not the least Picasa, like any other Google service, is highly recommended. It’s not because I love Google, but because of the awesome service I found in Picasa. Download it once and you’ll never think about anything else. The most decent photo management service I’ve ever used. Registration is obviously free and it gives 1GB of free space for photos. Only one in this list to support animated GIFs. IT has a userbase of over 500,000 members and holds a global Alexa rank of 326,552.
Well that’s it for now. What else services/websites do you want us to compare/write about?
Cheers!
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{ 14 comments }
Imageshack sucks bigtime. You can’t use flickr for commercial image sharing. Plus free users have a 200 picture limit. ImgX is one of the best, and should’ve been mentioned.
Hey Sathya, I am not sure why didn’t you like imageshack. And there is no picture limit for free users in Flickr. The limit is of 100MB per month, that’s it. You can upload any number of pictures to your free account. Here is a comparison on the official site. http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28 . Thank you for your comment anyway. Keep visiting.
No, he’s right – flickr *has* a picture count limit (not on pro, of course). I think its a couple of hundred pics.
Ok, I should’ve been more specific. flickr (basic) limits images shown on Photostream to 200 most recent images. One of the main reasons why I went pro, in addition to the 3-set limit which was there earlier.
As for Imageshack:
ImageShack has a 100 MB per hour bandwidth limit for each image. This sounds like a lot, but do the math: that’s 1.66 MB per minute, or about 28 KB per second. And the larger your image is, the faster you’ll burn through that meager allotment
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000807.html.
That, plus its pretty darn slow, infuriatingly large number of popups – all are my reasons.
Yeah you’re right. though it doesn’t seem slow to me, but I’ll agree on the popup part. But surprizingly, it did a lot better than the other image hosts I tested. And hence it made it to the top five
Thanks for the list. Do we need credit card to sign up for the free trial of Smugmug? And do you have a list of video sharing sites (free) ?
Hello Manasi, first of all thank you for your comment. No, you don’t need a credit card to try Smugmug. And I haven’t reviewed video sharing sites yet, but that’s a good idea. Probably I’ll write about it very soon.
nice recommendations
I have used almost all the services except smugmug, time to explore
Glad you liked. And for smugmug, you get a 14 day trial, so you can go for it
I hate flickr they are not friendly with free users, I prefer google picasa for my family albums and imageshack for forums email web etc photo sharing.
I prefer using Photobucket a lot for image sharing and this has a major setback like bandwidth problem which makes it suck big time.
But, if there are somethings which I wish to share just with a team of like minded persons then I prefer using Picasa hosting for images. That’s the best which works for me and which I use second to Photobucket.
I love flickr however I do use http://www.imagedough.com a lot as well
We’re trying another approach — instead of just focusing on photos, we’re playing with the idea of allowing users to combine them (photos) with other types of media. I know flickr allows for videos, too, but what about notes, links, files? When I share photos with my family, I sometimes share a link, too, of the same subject matter. We’re offering 2GB for photos, 1GB extra for video, and for free — with a 150MB limit per month for photos and 250MB limit for videos. No daily limits, and up to 5MB per photo (and files) uploaded and 100MB per video uploaded. Just another multimedia option for image sharing.
I just signed up with http://www.mejuba.com. Unlimited storage for both videos and pictures and it’s completly free.
No monthly limits or qoutas.
Photos and videos are stored in their original formats and sizes and are kept unmodified for backup.
I also like that you can geo-tag your stuff so it shows up on a map. And you can search for stuff on the map – that’s cool!.
As the only site i know of it uses a Windows Explorer like navigation with folders – super eacy to use – even has drag and drop!.
I can highly recommend it.
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