Pro Photo Host

When it comes to hosting your photos online you have several options. Whatever you do you need to be careful if these photos are important to you. A few photographers that we know use Snapfish which is a photo sharing company owned by Hewlett-Packard Company. It’s a fairly easy to use website and you can invite members to view you photos by invitation. Currently over 60 million people have used the service since it’s launch in 2000.

Some people are worried about free photo hosting so they go down that paid route. One concern is that a free photo hosting company could go under and the photos would be lost. That’s an understandable concern when so much time and money go into getting the right photos you don’t want to put them at risk. Some friends on mine use their business web hosting accounts to add their photos to. One of them installed a Coppermine Photo Gallery in a subdirectory of this website so he can share his photos with others. This makes for a low cost solution as most web hosting companies only charge a small monthly fee.

When it comes to comprehensive photo hosting websites, Shutterfly wins hands down.  To visit the Shutterfly website for the first time, the novice might feel a bit overwhelmed.

Shutterfly offers a number of different services under free memberships as well as items that you pay for.  To access the service, you must sign up for a free membership. The membership will enable you to upload your photos and create a gallery of albums.

Your albums are the key to Shutterfly, and you control who has access to each album.  Shutterfly makes it very convenient to take images from your albums and turn them into prints.

The pricing for prints and gifts is very affordable and you can choose from standard print sizes or specialty gift items.  If you’d like to create a mug or note card from one of your images it is effortless to do so.

If your goal is to create prints and gifts from your photos, rather than looking for ways to embed your images into blogs or websites, than you’ll find Shutterfly advantageous.

Shutterfly provides you with plenty of tools to keep your images private as well.  After creating galleries you can password protect them.  Shutterfly is designed more as a way to sell your photos by turning them into items, than a site designed for easy viewing and distributing your photos across the Internet free of charge.  Professional photographers will find that by using Shutterfly they can easily and simply sell their photos.

However, these services are not included in the free membership.  To take access of the Pro Gallery and to begin selling your work through Shutterfly, you will need to sign up for a Pro or Premier account.  A Pro account will provide you with 5 gigabytes of space to host your photos and costs $99.00 a year.  The Premier account has unlimited hosting space and costs $199.00 a year.

The Shutterfly Pro and Premier galleries are perfect for the photographer who wants to open his or her online store, but isn’t ready to handle the technical aspect that comes with that endeavor.  Shutterfly will handle all financial transactions, and will also take care of shipping and customer service.

The photographer never needs to deal with these issues on a personal basis.  Also, you will get your own website address where customers can come and browse through your store.  Shutterfly provides a convenient and effortless way to host your own shop online.

One of the best features regarding Shutterfly, is that they ensure that viewers of your photo gallery store will not be able to right click and save any of your images.  Protecting the photographer’s copyrights to his or her images is of the utmost importance, and the Internet has made it easy for many to take images that do not rightfully belong to them.

Shutterfly understands the needs of photographers and encourages all to copyright protect the back of their photos.  Additionally, they have taken necessary steps to ensure that all photos are protected from unlawful use while in galleries.  Visitors will not be able to print screen or right click, copy and paste your images.

Developed by Google, Picasa is one of the premier photo hosting sites available on the net.  Unlike other photo hosting sites, Picasa is a completely free photo hosting site.  In Beta format, Google continues to make changes and advancements to Picasa on a continual basis.

For users of Picasa, staying up to date on new features is an important aspect of using the program.  Picasa is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

To begin using Picasa you’ll have to start by creating a Google Account.  If you already have a Gmail or Google Adsense account, you can use the same login information for Picasa.  After your account is set up, you’ll download the Picasa software.

Picasa will scan your computer and find all of your photos.  After Picasa locates your files, you can create web albums.  In addition to finding the pictures on your computer, you can also use the Picasa program to import photos directly into your web albums from your digital camera.

If you have a lot of photos on your computer, and would like a fast, easy way to import them to the web, then you’ll definitely like Picasa.

The secret behind Picasa’s photo sharing is the web albums.  You will automatically get up to 1 gigabyte of free hosting, to store your photos in.  One gigabyte is roughly the size of four thousand photos.  However, if you feel you need more storage, you can purchase more.

Picasa Web Albums also provide additional benefits.  When viewing other people photos, you can tag them with specific keywords, making it easy to identify and group people you know.

When all of your photos have been scanned and organized, you can select the Picasa tab, “Sync to Web’.  This option enables you to put your folders online easily and quickly.

Once your folders are established, you can determine if you would like to keep them public, where anyone can view them, or if you’d like to make them private.  Once you log into your web album, you‘ll see a series of choices under different tabs.  These include your photos, favorites, explore, and upload.  The import feature is one of the major elements of Picasa, and what separates Picasa from other photo hosting websites, is that you actually have a program installed on your computer.

Every time you open Picasa, it will scan your computer’s hard drive for new images.

Since Picasa is a program installed on your computer, it is very user-friendly.  The user can control the files easily, adding tags and organizing their images in a manner they choose.

The sync to web and share features allows users to easily upload and distribute their folders or images from their own computer desktops.

Due to the fact that Picasa is very easy to use and provides a number of automatic functions, once the program is initiated, it has become one of the top photo hosting sites and programs available.

You can easily set the program to handle the image formats you prefer, or even disable automatic imports through the tools and option functions.

Picasa continues to lead the way when it comes to implementing the latest in technology with digital photo sharing and hosting.

For the photographer who gathers hundreds of images, finding a photo hosting site is critical.  If you’ve ever experienced a computer crash, and hadn’t backed up your digital images, you understand how devastating it can be.  Taking digital images is fast, quick, and easy.

The images are easily transferred from your camera to the computer and are stored on your hard drive.  As long as nothing happens to your hard drive, you’re all set.  However, certain situations arise and you might want to share your photos with other people.  Photobucket is one of the top rated websites that will accomplish that task for you.

Photobucket will allow you to upload your photos in a manner that makes it easy to share and distribute your images.  In addition to photos, you can also upload and share videos as well.  You can upload your images to Photobucket and determine a size format for the photo while it uploads.

This provides a great advantage and makes it easy for the user to ensure that their images are the size he or she wants.  Once your images are uploaded, they will be available with instant html coding, enabling you to instantly and easily embed your photos online.

Users of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LiveJournal can then copy and paste the code directly into their sites.  Blog users also find that Photobucket is a great way for adding images to blogs.

Photobucket is owned by Fox Interactive Media, which owns plenty of top Internet sites.  In addition to Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media also owns MySpace, making it very easy to use Photobucket on MySpace.

MySpace users continually see advertising for Photobucket and the applications are linked together.  Those with MySpace accounts frequently use Photobucket for their image hosting needs.

Photobucket provides two types of services, these are free and pro accounts.

With a free account, you are given up to one gigabyte for hosting both videos and images.  Your monthly bandwidth limit is 25 gigabytes.

You can create slideshows of your images and you have the option of making your albums private or public.  With a free account, you can also set various levels for your albums.  One album might be set to private, while another is set to public.

A free Photobucket account let’s you create your own URL’s so that your friends and family members can go directly online and view your images.  There is also a printing solution, called Photobucket Goods, that lets you choose a variety of options for your images.

You can create books, posters, tee-shirts, and more items through Photobucket Goods.

With so many great features in a free account, you might wonder what the benefits are in a pro account.  Well, it won’t take long for the enthusiastic photographer to realize that he or she is filling up their hosting quickly.

Where the free account provides you with 1 gigabyte of storage, the pro account offers a whopping 10 gigabytes.  When it comes to bandwidth, the pro account can’t be matched.  The free account provides you with 25 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.

That means that once you exceed those limits, access to your images are gone until the next month.  With a pro account, there is no limit to your bandwidth. With all of the options available, it is no surprise that Photobucket continues to be one of the top photo hosting sites.