Favorite Memories go digital: Web sites offer albums

Tech Talk

So you've made the transition from your outdated point, shoot and develop 35mm camera to a snazzy point, shoot and share digital camera. This is a transition I also have made and, similarly, I am sure the sharing of your photos has become a weekly obsession. This includes uploading after you get home from the weekend haze, a vacation, et cetera. A large percentage of the digital photography world uses some type of sharing tool to share memorable (or not so memorable) pictures with the planet. With the plethora of choices available, it is essential to review several online photo sharing services in order to decide what service is most beneficial.

One service is www.smugmug.com. Smugmug provides a designated URL for pictures (username@smugmug.com) where all of one's galleries are live on the Internet. Smugmug.com offers an incredibly seamless, automated (multiple photos with one click) upload of a user's images. In a Microsoft Windows-based environment, users simply drag and drop the photos into the gallery and click "upload." If you are not using Windows, smugmug offers automated upload tools for most platforms. While one can have an unlimited amount of photos online, uploading is limited to 100 megabytes of photos at a time. However, smugmug allows users to segment uploads, so the 100 megabyte limit isn't a big deal. Smugmug's galleries all are very professional, aesthetically pleasing and intuitive to navigate. No limits are placed on the viewable resolution of a user's photos, as one can select small, medium, large or original-sized photos.

Webshots, at www.webshots.com, offers both free and pay-for-sharing services. The free service allows you to upload a max of 240 photos. Every user has a username address that is a bit more difficult to remember. The upload tool is a bit clunky, as users will have to go through and manually select each individual photo to upload; if your photos aren't descriptively named, this can be a nightmare. Also, the free service is ad-based, meaning there are ads somewhere on the same pages as your pictures — the other services have no ads at all.

Another site, www.sacko.com, is a completely free site that offers unlimited photo storage. Sacko.com instantly stands out from the others as it is a flash-based site (and therefore is very animated). Sacko.com utilizes a drag-and-drop Windows-style upload tool that works efficiently.
The final site looked at was www.splashbulb.com. This site is designed as a communal place for photographers to share photos with one another. The site could become very powerful, convenient and useful when used by friends and family to share photos. Splashbulb, like smugmug and sacko, allows unlimited photos to be stored on the service. A simple and intuitive upload tool is provided with the Windows drag-and-drop-based functionality. Splashbulb has an additional fun tool — the ability to add thought bubbles to photographs. Splashbulb has a unique cataloging feature, allowing users to catalog based on place, person, date, et cetera and then to view all photos in a particular group in a single album at once.

All these sites require a simple registration process before one can use the service. Each service caters to different users depending what users are looking to do with their photos and how much time users want to spend on it.