Online Photo Albums - Where to upload my digital photos online?

Digital cameras are no longer a thing of the future but instead classical cameras are now a thing of the past. With the growing popularity of digital cameras and the arrival of mobile phones, PDA's and other devices with integrated digital cameras the amount of pictures taken now-a-days is huge. Since one of the most important benefits of digital photos is the ability to easily share them with friends and family, a lot of sites that enable users to create online photo albums and share them have appeared online.

In this article we will review some of the most popular sites that offer the ability to upload digital photos online, create online photo albums and share them with others.

Online Photo Album Sites

Service	Summary
Flickr	Once uploaded the photos can by adjusted (the basic functions like: add notes, rotate, delete are available), viewed in different sizes (Flickr automatically generates different photo sizes like: thumbnail, medium and large), posted to just about any blog (LiveJournal, Blogger, Moveable Type, Typepad, Manila), and commented by people. Privacy settings can be set for each photo, the pictures can be private, viewable by friends and family, or public. Pros: Extensive photo organization features
Photobucket	Besides providing a place to store your online photo albums Photobucket also provides image hosting for eBay, live journals, blogs, and message boards. Photobucket's service comes in two flavors: the free account (1GB disk space, 10GB monthly bandwidth and 1MB max image size, as of Apr' 2006) and the premium account at $25 per year (5GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth and 2MB max image size). Cons: Un intuitive interface
Myspace Pictures	Myspace is a social networking web sites which enables users to share pictures, create personal blogs, profiles, join groups and use internal email. Myspace permits users to upload as many images as they want and share them. The uploaded pictures can then receive a caption, a ranking and comments from Myspace members. Cons: The image manipulation features offered by Myspace are very limited.

Recommendations

The problem with uploading the original photos online to those services is with the large photo's sizes due to high resolutions (picture's width x height) and poor image compression (very high JPEG quality) which will require a large amount of time or bandwidth to upload online. Since you and your friends will visualize the pictures automatically resized at a much lower resolution than the originals (no more than 800x600) it isn't recommended to upload the original pictures if you do not plan to order professional prints.

In addition the original pictures have cryptic names given as default by digital cameras (like "Dsc3212.jpg") so they cannot be identified by name. In order to painlessly solve those problems you can use a purposely built software like BatchPhoto.

Step 1 - Add Pictures

Step 2 - Add Filters

Step 3 - Setup & Go!

BatchPhoto lets you select a group of pictures, define a series of edits, and apply them in a single operation. So you can resize and rename dozens of pictures at the same time not only one at a time. Learn more about BatchPhoto