. As Internet connections get faster and sharing photos over the Internet becomes more common, many people are starting to keep their photo albums on the web. There are lots of advantages to this. It gives you a place to store them, without having to worry about your hard disk failing, and it lets other people see and comment on them – whether they’re your family, your friends, or just random passers-by.
The most popular online photo site is Flickr, now owned by Yahoo. Flickr was one of the first sites to use tags for classification instead of categories. Tags basically mean that you can make up your own categories, and have as many different ones as you want attached to each photo. Everyone gets their own gallery for free, and because it’s been around for a while now, Flickr has a very active community, with most photos attracting a comment or two, and the most interesting (that is, most commented on) photos being given a special showcase page.
Yahoo has also used its purchase of Flickr to improve its own Yahoo! Photos service, which now runs on parts of Flickr’s software. Yahoo! Photos is a little less geeky than Flickr, and better integrated with their other services like email, if you already have an account there.
Another well-regarded online photo sharing site is Snapfish, which differs from Flickr in that it is less community-oriented and more focused on letting you make prints, put your photos on mugs, calendars, posters, T-shirts and more besides.
If you’re more interested in just having a place to store photos that you want to put on your own website (saving on bandwidth bills), you could try Photobucket, a free photo hosting service that allows ‘hotlinking’ from your website, blog, eBay, or whatever you want. You get a whole gigabyte of space for free, but the amount of bandwidth transfer is limited, so be careful.