Look on any typical phone or camera memory card and you'll find photos going back years, languishing in a place where nobody can enjoy them. It doesn't have to be that way. Plenty of sites — many of them free — let you easily save and show off your photos, as well as make them into books or let friends and family print copies. Some services even allow you to sell your photographic art.
A good photo-hosting service should offer six things:
Space: Enough storage to keep all of your photos in one place over the years at low cost.
Quality: Your photos should be preserved in all their high-res glory, not compressed beyond recognition.
Ease of Use: You need to be able to upload photos easily, and edit them if you wish.
Ease of Access: Finding photos by date, by tags or by other means can be achieved without hassle.
Shareability: A good photo site makes sharing photos as easy as taking them, allowing you to post pictures to sites like Facebook, Twitter and others.
Printability: You or someone else who likes your photo should be able to buy a print or put together a photo book easily.
Quality: Your photos should be preserved in all their high-res glory, not compressed beyond recognition.
Ease of Use: You need to be able to upload photos easily, and edit them if you wish.
Ease of Access: Finding photos by date, by tags or by other means can be achieved without hassle.
Shareability: A good photo site makes sharing photos as easy as taking them, allowing you to post pictures to sites like Facebook, Twitter and others.
Printability: You or someone else who likes your photo should be able to buy a print or put together a photo book easily.
To find out which photo sites offer the best bang for your buck, we tested 10 of them by uploading an assortment of photos from our camera reviews, tagging and organizing them as the site recommends. We then looked at the various ways we could share and print photos to determine which site offers the best and easiest-to-use range of features.
Flickr
Launched back in 2004, Flickr suffered under several years of neglect from owner Yahoo. But a recent revamp has made it once again a great option for photographers who want to show off their work. Flickr provides a remarkable 1TB of space for free, with ads on the site, or $49.99 a year without. Flickr also offers a great selection of tools, extensive tagging features and support for both viewing and downloading photos at a variety of resolutions (including the original size).
A very easy drag-and-drop system allows you to organize albums of your photos and collections of photos from you and other photographers. Once you have created an album of photos you like, you can print a 20-page photo book for $34.95 (plus $0.50 for extra pages). Overall, Flickr is our top pick and Editor's Choice award winner, thanks to its massive amount of storage and a simple, clean interface that makes it a joy to use.
500 Pixels
Aimed at the serious photographer, 500 Pixels offers an image-focused design that puts your photos front and center, providing a clean and elegant way to display your best images. You can organize your pictures into Sets (photos on a particular theme) and Stories (photos of an event) that present the images in a strikingly dramatic fashion. The free version of the service allows you to upload 20 photos a week (unlimited uploads cost $25 a year). You can also sell prints, but with prices starting at $36 for a 12 x 18 print, these are aimed at those who want art on their walls, not a quick snap of Aunt Doris.
The big kahuna of social sites also offers a surprisingly good set of photo-haring and editing tools. After uploading photos from a cellphone, Web browser or desktop client, you can create albums, add captions and tag photos by date, location or the people in the pictures. Facebook does squish the images down, though, to fit onto the page. Facebook recommends sizing pictures to 720 or 960 pixels wide. You can use 2048-pixel wide images if you use the high-quality upload option, but they still get compressed for viewing.
There is no way to share the original-size photo, a situation that leaves many Facebook photographers gnashing their teeth. But if a lot of your family members and friends are already on Facebook, it's a great way to share casual shots or family photos.
Google+
Google rolled many of the features of its Picasa image-editing program into its Google+ photo-hosting service, which allows you to do a lot of
tweaking right in the Web interface. This includes auto enhance, crops and rotations, and filters such as Vintage, which adds a faded and scratched photo look. The Tune feature also offers a lot of power to fix things like white balance and overexposure, with a live preview that is surprisingly fast for an online service.
Google+ lets you tag images by location and person, and they can be linked to other services, such as Google Maps. Photos can be compiled into albums, with comments and captions, but there is no built-in support for printing individual images or photo books.
Photobucket
The free version of Photobucket offers 2GB of space — enough for many thousands of photos, though it comes with ads. You can remove ads and up the storage space to 10GB for $29.99 a year. Photobucket has a generous collection of editing tools on offer through a simple, easy-to-use interface. This list includes unusual tools like the smart color brush, which selectively adds color back into a black-and-white image.
Once you have edited your photos, you can organize them into albums or stories — the latter a neat scrolling presentation of photos and accompanying text several users can compile. Photobucket provides extensive support for selling prints. Visitors can buy individual photos, photo books or even things like fleece blankets and tablet cases with your photos on them.
Canon Irista
A newcomer to the photo-sharing world, Irista comes from Canon, but doesn't require a Canon device to use. Plenty of features are available,
including uploader programs for Mac and Windows computers and support for quickly sharing photos to Facebook and Flickr (but, oddly, not Twitter or other social networks). The system is easy to use, with powerful tagging and album-creation features, but there is no direct support for buying prints or creating photo books, and no mobile apps. A free account gets a generous 10GB of space, or 50GB for €50 — about $67 per year. (Irista was launched by Canon's European division but is available in the U.S., too.)
SmugMug
SmugMug is another design-focused site that offers a stylish home for your photos, with a custom home page (such as richardb.smugmug.com) and a large number of well-made design templates. It costs more than other services, though, as SmugMug has no free version (though there is a 14-day free trial). The cheapest level of service costs $5 a month or $40 a year.
You do get a lot for your money, with unlimited storage of photos and 1080p videos, and a good range of editing tools that are simple to use but powerful. These won't replace Photoshop in a pro photographer's toolbox, but they are more than powerful enough to fix most common photography issues and tweak a photo to look its best.
Apple iCloud
iPhoto allows you to create cards, calendars and photo books (starting at $19.99 for 20 pages and $0.69 per additional page) from the photos. However, to edit or make these items, you must have Apple's iPhoto application, which leaves out Windows users.
EyeFi
The EyeFi service is a combination of hardware and software. An EyeFi SD Card (like the $49 8GB Mobi) plugs into your camera and has built-in Wi-Fi to upload your photos to the company's new cloud service. From there, you can share images in albums (named after the date they were taken, or by event) or upload them to social media sites like Facebook, or other photo-sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug. However, there is no support for other online services such as Twitter or Google+.
You get three months of free service with a new card, after which you pay $49 a year for unlimited storage. That's more expensive than most of the other services, and the features offered are more limited. The instant upload features of EyeFi are useful, but it's not a great option for hosting photos afterwards.
Dropbox
The cloud file-sharing service has added support for photos recently, with the latest versions of its Android and iOS apps automaticallyuploading photos from mobile devices to the service. You can also upload images from your computer to Dropbox as you would with any other files. Once photos are in the cloud, you can create and share basic slideshows that anybody can access, or share the files directly with other Dropbox users.
Unfortunately, there is no tagging, no printing and no way to edit the files online. As such, Dropbox is only a good option for photographers who want to share original photos with others, such as for editing in programs like Photoshop. Dropbox offers free 2GB plans and 100GB Pro plans for $9.99 a month.
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