Photo Sharing Services

So, Whats The Big Deal About Photo Sharing?

Until the advent of Internet Photo Sharing Services, many of us had real difficulty finding an appreciative audience for our photography. Few ever managed to get published in magazines. A few managed local photo shows at Art Guilds or Photo Clubs. And, of course, our long suffering spouses, relations, and friends got to see our new work, but that was about it. We made prints to hang on our own walls. We gave prints as gifts. We made Christmas cards. We filled albums. We worked for the satisfaction of the work, to grow as image takers, and got, really, very little affirmation.

The internet changed all that. It is now possible for anyone, from the snapshot shooter to the serious image maker, to find a community of like-minded folk that, literally, embraces the whole world. Sites like Fotki, Flickr, WebShots, Picassa Web Albums, pbase, Shutterfly, Photoshop.com and a host of others provide easy photo sharing and one level or another of interactive community for photographers worldwide.

Simply upload your photos to one of these sites (most offer limited free plans, or at least free trial plans), and then take a few hours to explore what others have posted. Make appropriate comments on the work you like. Because your comments are linked back to you and your images, it will not be long before others are commenting on your work, even inviting you to place your work in special interest groups which collect images around a theme, or sometimes even around an attitude toward photography. Some sites feature award groups, and your images will, if your persist in commenting on others’ work, attract awards.

It is hard to express just how affirming it all is. Suddenly you have an all but unlimited audience for your work, and an audience that shares the same passion for images that you do. I can guarantee that joining a Photo Sharing Service will make you grow as a photographer. Having an appreciative, and gently critical, audience will do that for you. An audience of peers is a great learning resource. You will discover additional motivation to take pictures. If a week goes by without posting something new on your site, you will begin to itch. You will be forced to get out and capture something and get it up there where all your new photo friends can see it.

My first Photo Sharing Service, almost by accident, was Flickr. I still love Flickr. I have over 5000 images up on my site, and I have found, or been found by, over 300 photo friends from all over the world, from every continent, from countries I will never get to visit. Their comments range from generously affirming to mildly critical, and that is good. The affirming ones tell me what I am doing that works for others, and the critical ones tell me what I am not.

Then too, I get to see a vast amount of photography as I check my contacts page daily. The contacts page displays from one to five thumbnails of the most recent posts from each of your photo friends. You can comment just by clicking a thumbnail and scrolling down to the comment box on the image page.

 

Flickr makes it easy to keep up with comments others have made on your work. This is the page to build relationships from. When someone comments on your work, you can just click their icon and visit their site, and leave a few comments of your own.

I have joined (or mostly been invited to join) over 350 special interest and award groups. I actively participate in maybe 50 of those, posting at least one image a month to each.  I have even been asked to moderate or administer 15 of those groups. I have started two groups of my own.

It is so much fun, I have to limit myself to an hour or so a day of Flickring.

And it has changed my photography. It has changed me as a photographer. Both for the better.

So, what I am saying here, should you still be missing the point, is that you should belong to an internet Photo Sharing Service. It will be good for you and it will be good for your photography.

Choices:

You could do worse than to choose Flickr. There are a lot of things I like about Flickr, most of them having to do with the ease of building community around images. The contacts system (see above), the Flickr mail system (send a private email to any Flickr member), the groups (see above) are all excellent ways of building an audience and of sharing your insights with others.

I also really like parts of the organizational ability of Flickr. What attracted me to it first was the fact that you can upload a photo once, and then index it in many different ways. It can be part of many different sets of similar images, or images from particular places or particular times. Sets of images can be part of collections of similar sets. All working from a single copy on the Flickr servers. Unmatched efficiency. If you are primarily interested in being able to organize and retrieve your work in logical, but flexible, ways, then no one does it better than Flickr.

There are also two excellent image uploading programs for your desktop which allow you to upload, and organize, batches of photos to Flickr. You can add tags, descriptions, titles in bulk before uploading, and you can specify which sets the images go to, or create a new set right from the desktop. Nothing could be easier.

There is even a pretty good plug-in for Lightroom that will upload image directly to Flickr…though its tagging, description, and set features are limited.

On the other hand, there are things I do not like about Flickr. The photostream concept is, as far as I know, unique to Flickr. Photos are displayed on your homepage in the order they were uploaded, last first, no exceptions. While a Set is something like the galleries or albums other services provide, once you click a thumbnail in a set, you are taken to the main page for that image, and it is really easy, and very likely, that you will lose your way back to the original set before you are very far into exploring one.

I do not like the fact that the only way to choose what photos are most visible on your home page is to upload them last.

Worse, there is no easy way to link to and directly display a larger size image than is displayed on the photo page. You can view them easily from the page, but all links pretty much come back to the same main photo page.

And, most of all, I don’t like the look of either the home page or the individual photo pages. The images are displayed against a bright white background which does nothing to show off their quality, and too often distracts. And, I do not like the fact that there is no way for the user to change any of that. Layout options are limited to non-existent, and you have no choice of the background color.

That said, I will be maintaining my Flickr site for the foreseeable future. The community there is just that strong.

That does not mean that I have not explored alternatives. In fact, over the past month or so, I have put up trial galleries on many of the other Photo Sharing Services (PSSs), just to see how they work, and how they look. I have also done a limited amount of exploring the galleries of other posters, in order to see the range of display options, and to try to assess the overall quality of the images shared (since we are talking about peer groups here).

As I mentioned before, almost all of the other PSSs organize your work by galleries or albums, groups of images around a central theme, or taken in a particular region, or uploaded at the same time. You can upload images to a gallery/album you have already created, or create a new gallery/album for each upload. However, none that I have looked at have Flickr’s ability to put a single image in a number of galleries or albums  without duplicating the file on the server.  Still, for most purposes, the gallery/album organization makes more sense than a photostream. The metaphor is more like the physical than it is like Flickr’s database approach. When visitors visit a gallery/album, they are inside the gallery/album. All photos are displayed as part of the gallery/album, not independently. You don’t have to, so to speak, go outside the gallery or album to the central storage area to look at the actual image.

Your home page, on most PSS services, reflects this organization. Your visitors will see the galleries/albums you have created (or in some instances the groups of galleries/albums, grouped by subject matter, that you have created). Most PSSs offer at least some control over how, and in what order, your galleries or albums are displayed. 

And, while a plain white background is still the default among most PSSs, most offer the user the option of changing the background of the whole site, or even of individual galleries and albums. I am going to call these abilities, in what follows display options.

All of the services feature some kind of bulk up-loader to make uploading folders of images much easier, and sometimes to handle the tagging and description tasks in bulk. Where appropriate I will mention some of the better, or more unique, ones.

Finally, this not an exhaustive review. I have only looked at some of these while I have tried others. I don’t claim to have correctly identified the actual strengths and weaknesses of each service, and there are certainly features I have missed or misunderstood. This is more my impression than it is a complete review. I actually came to my conclusion and picked one before I did much more research, and I will tell you why I picked it. That is not to say that another choice might not suit you better. Still I hope this will be of some service to those considering a PSS.

The Also Rans

Photoshop.com/Kodac Galleries

Photoshop.com is Adobe’s answer to photo sharing. Adobe still has a deal with Kodac Galleries for on-line storage and printing of work from Photoshop Elements, but they have rolled a lot more than photo sharing into Photoshop.com, and made it an integral part of the operation of the latest Elements. Besides storing your work and displaying it in traditonal galleries, Photoshop.com has an on-line version of the Elements photo editing application, so you could, in theory, do your image processing right on the site. It is the whole cloud computing thing. I say, in theory, because, at least on my machines, Photoshop.com is the slowest of the services. It is all flash based, and even with the fast flash engines in Firefox or Chrome, it is painfully slow. Explorer really drags. On the other hand, it is elegant, with the attractive (imho) mat grey backgound that, since Lightroom, has rapidly become the Adobe trademark. It is not that I like mat grey, you understand, it is that the backgound makes the images look good!

Since I use Elements as my secondary image processing solution (with Lightroom as my first), I will be watching how Photoshop.com develops.

Kodac Galleries is primarily an internet print on demand site, a direct competitor for Shutterfly, and has much the same look and feel. Sorry, not, in my opinion, for serious photo sharing.

WebShots

Before starting my research on Photo Sharing sites, I had never heard of WebShots, but apparently they have over a million members. The killer here for me is the pervasive nature of the ads…all over the place. Maybe they have a professional, paid for, subscription that gets rid of them, but I did not find it. Visits to the Galleries they feature as Pro sites still showed ads. They might, indeed, have a vibrant user community that would be fun to get to know, but I just can’t get by the commercialization of the site.

Picassa Web Galleries

Picassa is a desktop image editing application that is available as a free download from Google. It has an excellent tool set, and automatically scans your hard drive and adds new images to its index so it is always up to date. Images are organized by folders in a logical way that reflects where they are on your drive. You can tag them and group them in interesting ways. It is a lot like a simplified version of Photoshop Elements and I often recommend it for new photographers on a budget for basic image editing and cataloging. Once you graduate to full blown applications like Elements or Lightroom, your need for Picassa will probably disappear, but it is an excellent place to start and the price is certainly right.

Picassa Web Galleries is Googles’ answer to Yahoo’s Flickr, or might be, it were better implemented. The fact is, PWA is the one site that is even more inflexible than Flickr, at least as far I have been able to discover so far. Its strength is, of course, its seamless integration with the Picassa desktop ap. You can manage your web galleries using Picassa with very little effort at all. 

However the Gallery and Photo views are uninspiring, and seeing the images at any scale but the relatively small default is a chore. 

Though there is provision for commenting on others’ work, an Explore page that gives access to what others are posting, and a Favorites system for building relationships, they appear to be still working on developing  the kind of community that is Flickr’s strength. The tools are there. With time Picassa Web might be a real alternative to Flickr, especially with the strength of integration with Picassa desktop.

Unfortunately, it still does nothing to set off the beauty of your work. Plain white pages.

Fotki

Fotki is one the oldest photo sharing communities. They just had their ten year anniversary. That alone is impressive. 

Fotki is my clear runner up. Though the default layouts are no better than Flickr, maybe worse as they tend towards the cute side, they provide a wide range of display options, so you can make your pages look just about any way that suits you. And the community seems strong. Still, and maybe this is an unfair observation, based as it is on a very limited sampling, the overall quality of the images posted to Fotki does not seem to be equal to that on Flickr. There are a lot of family albums, and a lot of snapshots of the vacation. This is fine. It serves a purpose, especially for friends and family, but it might not be the peer group you are looking for (should you be looking for a peer group??).

My Pick for my Pics

SmugMug. An absolutely terrible name, but behind the name is one of the most elegant photo sharing services out there (the most elegant in my opinion). If your primary objective is to store full sized copies of your finished work, and to display them to their best advantage, then SmugMug is the place. I should say up front here that SmugMug is one of the more expensive sites. They have no free plan, and the basic service (which includes a lot) is $40 per year. For a bit more you can be an Power User, which gives you pretty complete control over how your pages look (some html or CSS programing necessary) and even teh option of using your own url to replace smugmug.com. The Pro account ($150 per year) ads a professional sales service where you can set your own prices on prints, mugs, and even downloads of your images.

SmugMug offers a whole menu (as in drop-down) of display options for your galleries, which you can lock in gallery by gallery, or leave open so that the user can choose his or her favorite view. And, with the graduated gray background (you can also choose white should you prefer) your pics will show to their best. Besides gray and white they also offer a whole range of themed color choices. Finally, it might be imagination, but a friend commented that the images displayed also seem to show less compression artifacts than the same images on Flickr. 

The slideshow feature on SmugMug is absolutely stunning. Your images fill your screen and look simply amazing.

There is a full comment system, and you have the ability to choose friends or family and display a link to their work on your homepage, but the community building functions of SmugMug seem to take place more in the sister site, Digital Grin Photography Forum. Digital Grin provides forums for most kinds of photography where they encourage posting your images, as well as equipment and technique forums. 

In addition, SmugMug has one of the most complete sets of purchase options currently available. You can buy standard or matte prints in many sizes, prints on canvas, framed prints, wall floats, mugs, t-shirts, etc. etc. and relatively reasonable prices. You also have direct links to two different book publishing services: Blurb and MyCanvas.

SmugMug offers a free 14 day trial plan, but be careful. SmugMug makes your photography look really good, and if you try it, despite the fact that will cost you $$$, you will very likely become addicted. (They count on that.) 

(By the way, don’t subscribe to any paid service before doing a google search for discount coupons. I turned up several for SmugMug, and ended up saving a significant amount of money on my first year’s subscription.)

So, I will maintain my Flickr Photo Sharing site for the sake of the strong community and the many friends I have made there, but if I want to impress someone with the quality of my work, I will be sending them to my SmugMug site: Wide-eyed In Wonder and Belief.

Conclusion

No matter what, I encourage you, if you do not already share your images on-line, to get hooked up with a Photo Sharing Serivce. It will be good for you. And, if you already have a site, or start one, post your url in the comments on this piece. More fun!