If you’re looking for a place to put all those photos you took, why not try one of the online photo-sharing sites? There are free ones available, and that might be a place to start to see if you like it, but there are some disadvantages to free sites. Most show ads on your photo pages – they have to pay their expenses somehow! The problem with that is you have no control over what ads are shown, so you may have you beautiful wedding photos side-by-side with Viagra ads. Not a pretty picture.
There are also usually limitations to the size photos you can upload, how many, and the bandwidth used (how many people are looking at your pictures).
Paying for an online photo-sharing site has advantages. Take all the features available at Smugmug for instance:
- NO requirement for viewers to register!
- Add photos from camera phones.
- Be notified of comments.
- Buy professional prints & gifts.
- Full Screen Slideshows!
- Create and join communities.
- Create private ShareGroups.
- Find popular photos fast.
- NO ads or spam!
- Network with friends and family.
- Organize pictures.
- Photo Editing to crop bad parts, enhance the rest.
- Personalize with your own URL and themes.
- Post photos in blogs & forums.
- Tools like Web 2.0: Tags, RSS feeds, APIs, and Ajax.
- Track unlimited traffic to your photos.
- Unlimited storage!!!
- View photos on Google Maps.
- View photos on your iPhone, online or send them by email.
- View your photos by timeline.
- Securely backup your photos.
This is a lot of good stuff for only $39.95 a year. Think about it, that’s only about $3.33 a month. You get a lot of photo-sharing features for your money.
You can check out Smugmug with their free 14-day trial offer. You don’t even have to give them your credit card to try them out! Just discontinue the service if you don’t like it well enough to continue – No worries they’ll charge you! It’s a great deal!
