Online Photo Hosting Advice
Online photo hosting is the online publishing or hosting of digital photos. You generally host your photos in order to share them publicly or privately with others, manage your photos, create slideshows, photoblogs, link your photos to auction listings, etc...
How Online Photo Hosting Works
Choosing a good online photo hosting service is something you should do your due diligence with before you commit to the service. Some photo hosts will tempt and entice you with low cost hosting and unlimited bandwidth, but always check the fine print. You kind of need to aim for the middle ground - a host that's not too pricey and 'feels right' to host your photos with.
Perhaps the best way to choose your online photo hosting service wisely is to consider these points:
- Customer support - do they have a 24 hour help desk?
- Past and current user feedback (very important!)
- Host reliability - good uptime, few downtimes?
- User-friendliness - easy to use?
- Bonus features - always nice
- Any hosting awards displayed proudly?
Keep these factors in mind when you browse for photo hosting sites. Look for positive customer and user feedback, and read what the users are saying at the forums. Also check their FAQs and online help section. Is it easy to find answers to your question? Good user feedback is essential and usually an excellent indicator of quality online photo hosting.
A quality photo host should provide you with enough space to host your photos, easy and simple uploading of your images and other related tools such as ways to present and manage your images. Some will hand you a personal member page too - these often include a chat box, weblog (online diary), tagging, photo albums and templates, and commenting facilities.
Depending on what you want to do - a good photo host will allow you to present your images in different ways such as with Flash slideshows, in photo galleries, and let you 'hot link' your images to other sites. This is convenient when you are running an eBay listing for example and you need to add more photos to your auction.
A Few Popular Online Photo Hosting Services
- Photobucket
- ImageShack
- TinyPic
- ImageHosting
- SmugMug
- Pict
So why go with online photo hosting? Well, simply said, you need somewhere to host your photos, right? And what if you could even let your friends and family organize, comment and create your photo albums and then share them with their friends?
You can also get your photos 'out there' into the world and onto blogs, forums, eBay auctions, and tell your unique story with photographs. What about if you're traveling and far away from family - online photo hosting makes a lot of sense. You can share what you're doing, where you're living - it's better than sending a bunch of photos home, and much cheaper!
Lastly, look for a photo host that'll let YOU be in control of your images. Also look for ease of use - you want to be able to get in there, set up beautiful looking image portfolios and talk with other photo enthusiasts. Not to mention share your images with the world through weblogs and social media websites!
SmugMug is another photo host to consider too. Focused on quality, with no advertisements, SmugMug costs about $39.95 to $149.95 a year and is the sort of image sharing/photo sharing host that you can trust for your most prized photos. SmugMug also allows you to offer your own photo merchandise for sale including photo books, photo cards, canvas prints and photo stickers. Add videos, slideshows or host your own cool photo gallery. Try SmugMug free here.