BrewZone

Sharing Photos Online

2. Pick the best solution

Once you have clear definitions of how your photos will be used, how much money you can spend and how much time you are going to put in, you are ready to decide how to post your pictures. With so many options around, there should be a perfect fit somewhere. It’s just a matter of finding it.

You will probably end up using one of six types of solutions:
1. Photo printing sites- sites primarily designed for uploading digital images for printing that also offer online sharing.
Best for private Photo Album, Doubleprints and some Artshows, when privately sharing recent photos is the main focus and users are likely to want prints. Especially convenient if you are getting film processed.
2. Photo sharing sites- sites designed for sharing your online pictures with friends and family.
Best for Photo Album, Slideshows, Doubleprints, Art Show, when uploading your digital shots with some commentary when others might want to print. Some sites are more private, others more public. Most have privacy control options.
3. Photo sharing communities- sites designed for discussing photos.
Best for public Photo Album, Slideshow, Art Show and Gallery, when you are looking for interactions with strangers about your images. Most have the ability to keep some or all images private, but the big advantage is the community access.
4. Blogs- sites for frequently publishing text and images.
Best for Photo Album, Illustration and some Art Show, when likely to write about the story in the pictures and you want to gather comments mainly from people you know. A blog is technically public but won’t generally be widely viewed unless you actively promote it to get yourself known.
5. Social networking sites- sites for sharing your life with others.
Best for public Photo Album, Illustration, for those already using or planning to use such a site. These sites use photos as part of the community experience, so no point posting here if you aren’t planning to be socially active.
6. Personal websites- sites that can be customized for any purpose.
Best for public Slideshow, Illustration, Hobbyist and some Gallery when pictures are just one part of the project and you will also publish lots of text, promote a business, sell things, or you have very specific design ideas. Requires the most effort, so only best if you have a specific need.

In addion to these basic types there are thousands of other possibilities. Hobbyists in particular will find niche sites organized by people within the hobby that fit very particular needs. Art or pro photographers can find very creative ways to spread their images using everything from contests to stock photo banks. For these special needs, start with the photos you look at and track down where and how they are posted on the web.

And finally, the wonder of the web is that you can easily have more than one photo site. Blogs, social network sites and websites that have their own photo support can also integrate other photo sites that provide more photo-specific features. So, you might have a MySpace page illustrated with photos in your Flickr album and also with links to your Walgreens pictures. Or you might use a photo printing site for family pictures, but post hobby photos to a different specialty site.

If you haven’t really decided the type of site that might suit you best, consider a few examples from our friends and family.

Busy Mom (Photo printing site for Photo Album and Doubleprints)
One friend who is a busy mother of two running a home business wants to share pictures of the kids with friends and family out of state. She uses a film camera and goes to a local drugstore to get the pictures developed and for no extra cost she can have them upload the pictures to a website for her. They email her a link that she can send to others. She rarely has time to go online and add captions. She also occasionally goes to a department store for formal portrait sessions and they also offer web services. The sites all offer the option for us to order prints to pick up at our local store or have mailed to us.
Limitations: They usually only store photos for a limited time, sometimes for a set period from your last purchase. One site she used required us to create an account, which means the headache of tracking a login and password just to view her pictures.
You will find services like this offered by Costco, SnapFish, Walgreens and Winkflash as well as JC Penny and Sears for portraits.

Blogger (Blog for Photo Album, Hobbyist, Art Show)
This friend created a blog to publish her writing using her Mac and Mac software and a Mac users hosting site called .Mac (note: Apple is currently changing .Mac to MobileMe - some terms may change). One feature of the software is photo pages, which she has used to post a variety of snap shots, but also to narrate images of her hobby, triathalons. Recently she upgraded to a high-end camera and so now she is also posting artistic shots. The .Mac site charges about $100/year for hosting her blog and pictures.
Limitations:  With blogs and websites, once you post your photos they are there until you remove them, so they tend to accumulate over time and can become more difficult for users to navigate. Also, when she had challenges with the software that she was too busy to fix, she couldn’t post for several months.
WordPress.com and Blogger are designed for quickstart blog creation. Blogger is a Google product that uses Picasa Web for photo storage, which makes uploading very easy if you use Google’s free Picasa picture organization software on your computer.
Other sites, like Fotolog, are specifically designed as photoblogs, with an emphasis on daily photo posting.

Newlyweds 1 (Social networking site for Photo Album and Doubleprints)
After this young couple got married, they wanted to share all the digital snaps taken by friends and family as well as their official wedding photos in one place. They already used Facebook, and decided to post them there.
Limitations: Call us crazy, but we don’t trust Facebook, and since you have to be a member to view these sites, we have never gotten to see the wedding shots.
MySpace and Buzznet? are also designed for sharing within your social network

Newlyweds 2 (Photo sharing site for Photo Album, Doubleprints, Slideshow)
Another pair of friends who just got hitched had a different solution for sharing everyone’s wedding photos. They used the family group account on SmugMug, a photo sharing site. All the family members have access to upload their pics to the same wedding album, and the bride created an album of her favorites out of the hundreds uploaded. Elsewhere in the account, her aunt has a collection of shots of her environmental sculptures and they other albums, like one for new babies.
Limitations:  Sharing access to everything with the group can lead to some amount of chaos, with differing organizational styles and stuff moving around.
Similar services are offered by dotPhoto, Photagious and Photobucket.

Camera Nut (Photo sharing community for Photo Album, Artshow, Gallery, Hobbyist)
We were introduced to the many uses of Flickr by a camera collector and Flickr power-user who regularly posts a hundred or more photos a week.  Many use Flickr like my Dad did, just to post snapshots and send links to friends. Our camera nut posts pictures of his daily activities for friends, but he also actively exploits the Flickr community to learn about photography, share his various specialty interests, and occasionally get published on other sites or local papers. He adds almost every photo to one or more “pools” based on the subject matter, location, camera type, or technique where he can generate specific interest and get feedback from strangers. He doesn’t spend much time captioning as he posts, though he is very good about responding to all comments and questions from viewers. For just $25/year, he has unlimited storage so he can keep as many photos as long as he likes.
Limitations: The free account is a bit of a teaser, since you are limited three ways- how much you upload each month, how many pictures are displayed and the number of albums you can have. Also viewers, even in the specialty pools, tend to focus on the positive, so it’s not the best place to get critical feedback for improving your shots.
PhotoSIG and PBase are also photographer communities where you might get more constructive feedback for improving technique.

The Pro (Website for Gallery)
We have been very inspired by one friend who has made a decent side business selling photos online. He maintains his own website with professional quality images organized into albums and has a shopping cart system for ordering prints. He collects the orders, then places a drop-ship order using his account at a professional digital printing service to send out the ordered print.
Limitations: Managing the images and the order process requires time and skill.
We use Menalto Gallery on BrewZone which can easily be set up for selling images. You can also set up pro accounts on sites like dotPhoto and SmugMug where the orders go directly to the printer and save you some effort. Fotki is another interesting alternative- a photoblog site that allows you to sell directly from your photo albums with an upgraded account.

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This article was written on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 and is filed under Mastering Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.