What website do you use to share photos?

Hi,

I was wondering how you share your photos? Do you us Flickr, Picasa, plain old email, blogs, or something else?

Personally, I found Flickr to be a little too public. I don't want every photo I took showing up in my photostream, especially if they are more personal pictures. Since I also run a blog, sometimes this meant uploading photos twice.

I haven't tried Picasa since I found that they weren't color-managed. I'm not sure if that's been fixed yet.

One thing I've been working on recently is a new website that helps share photos. One goal is to allow sharing 5-10 photos at a time, which is something I do often but a lot of websites don't let you do easily. The project is at http://tinyuploads.com/ , if you'd like to take a look and leave some feedback. I've been using this the past year to share pictures, and recently decided to built it out so other photographers can use it too.

Am I missing any websites? How do you share photos?

Cheers,
Patrick

here's a vote for Smugmug.com, that's what I use. It is not free, but it is a very good site, and has no advertisements.

DPreview.com. Haven't posted my pictures anywhere elsewhere - most are just on my hard drives - and the more exceptional ones go here for critique.
--

Overall I can't say enough positive things about this camera. Sure it would be nice if it had HD video or a higher resolution screen but those aren't required to take fantastic pictures.

Picasa for the moment

Zenfolio lets you break up your collection into numerous small albums. Each album can have its own URL for direct access. Password protection is also an option. But once the viewer is at any of your albums he can then jump to your "home page" and see links to all of your albums. I don't know of any hosting service that allows for completely isolated albums. For that I think you will need your own web site and upload from an album builder on your client computer.

Kelly Cook

undercrimson said:

I haven't tried Picasa since I found that they weren't color-managed. I'm not sure if that's been fixed yet.

Click to expand...

What do you mean? What does the photo hosting site have to do with color management? Color management involves profiles that are embedded in metadata (which is done on your own machine with an image editing program, like PhotoShop) on one end. The other end is the program (web browser, in the case of photo hosting) that displays the images extracting the embedded profile and using the profile to interpret how to render the color for each RGB pixel.

All the photo hosting site does is store the image files. What part of the color management process does an image hosting site play?

Or are you talking about the client side Picasa program? Yeah, that isn't color managed, but that isn't needed to upload images to PicasaWeb.

Color management on the web is problematical, because Internet Explorer isn't color managed. Making a hosting site that blocks IE users doesn't seem workable right now.

undercrimson said:

One thing I've been working on recently is a new website that helps share photos. One goal is to allow sharing 5-10 photos at a time, which is something I do often but a lot of websites don't let you do easily. The project is at http://tinyuploads.com/ , if you'd like to take a look and leave some feedback. I've been using this the past year to share pictures, and recently decided to built it out so other photographers can use it too.

Click to expand...

Interesting. I took a quick look at your site but I haven't signed up. I've never felt the need to share 5-10 photos. When I want to share, I want to share a larger subset of my collection. And I want to do it hierarchically. Flat organization gets unwieldy if your collection has hundreds (or thousands) of albums. I want to be able to share a slice of a hierarchy, not just a few pics. (Which implies being able to create a hierarchically organized collection of image albums.)

undercrimson said:

Am I missing any websites? How do you share photos?

Click to expand...

I started with PBase, but got frustrated when I discovered that it is "write-only"--there is no easy way to migrate my albums to a different site. I spent a lot of time organizing albums and writing captions. I don't want to to have to redo that from scratch if I move to a different hosting site. I then tried SmugMug. The data that describes SmugMug albums is readable and writable in theory, but I found that the SmugMug API to be more arcane than I can handle. Also, SmugMug doesn't really support hierarchical organization.

I'm in a slow process of "rolling my own" image management system, but I'm not as far along as you are in your project.

Can you explain what your project does in a bit more detail. For example, one of your descriptions is

Create photo galleries
Make groups of photos you can share in a variety of ways.

What is a "variety of ways"? And

Automatic image resizing
Images are resized before being uploaded, so you don't have to shrink photos.

Um, is this considered to be a feature? What resolution are they resized to?

etc. Yeah, I could find out all this if I signed up and experimented, but I'd be happier to know the answers without needing to invest time doing this.

Wayne

Picsasa used to strip the embedded exif data out of images, including color profiles, so colors would appear different. I've heard this is fixed now, but I checked a few months ago and it still wasn't -- so I don't know.

I actually do share 5-10 photos pretty often. That's about the range of photos I'd share in a blog post or in an email if I went out photographing one day. The photo set usually doesn't warrant creating a full blown album though, and they're sometimes just quite random anyways.

As for TinyUploads.com features:

"Share photos in a variety of ways" - You can create links like ( http://tinyuploads.com/tech_med ), full-size links ( http://tinyuploads.com/tgfb_full ), or blog embeds.

"Automatic Image Resizing" - This means images are resized before being uploaded -- it's a pretty novel feature and technically not entirely trivial to implement. The maximum dimensions right now are 1024x1024, which is about standard for web-browser viewing. A lot of digital cameras take photos of size 5-10MB, which can take a long time to upload and many uploading sites just rather restrict the size limit to 2MB or 3MB. TinyUploads has no size limit in that sense, so it's a "feature".

Patrick

undercrimson said:

Picsasa used to strip the embedded exif data out of images, including color profiles, so colors would appear different.

Click to expand...

Yuck. I haven't used Picasa for my own pics, so I didn't know they did this. I guess Google's motto of "Do no evil" is subject to interpretation.

But again, if you have images that are in different color spaces, they'll look different to IE users, because IE doesn't pay any attention to color profiles.

undercrimson said:

"Automatic Image Resizing" - This means images are resized before being uploaded -- it's a pretty novel feature and technically not entirely trivial to implement.

Click to expand...

No it isn't trivial. You need logic on the client side to to this. I'm still using Perl/PHP and ImageMagick and those tools won't work to transparently process images on a client before uploading.

undercrimson said:

The maximum dimensions right now are 1024x1024, which is about standard for web-browser viewing. A lot of digital cameras take photos of size 5-10MB, which can take a long time to upload and many uploading sites just rather restrict the size limit to 2MB or 3MB. TinyUploads has no size limit in that sense, so it's a "feature".

Click to expand...

OK, now I see where you are coming from. I PP heavily myself and want complete control over all aspects of image manipulation. I do sharpening after resizing, etc. But my wife doesn't. She doesn't want any part of PPing; all she wants to do is upload images straight from the camera.

I don't do blogging or Facebook, so I'm not tuned to them. I'm still working on traditional image collections where the only thing on the site is the image collection.

What you are doing sounds cool. It just is in a different direction than the direction I'm going.

Good luck.

Wayne

I use and really like Zenfolio. I do not think this is correct regarding passwords.
At least if you use a group with a different password from your home
page, I think you can prevent people from getting to see everything.

Funehiki said:

I use and really like Zenfolio. I do not think this is correct regarding passwords.
At least if you use a group with a different password from your home
page, I think you can prevent people from getting to see everything.

Click to expand...

That was what I did on my Zenfolio account. Created a Group with password, to conceal the albums contained within that Group. However, the icon for that Group is still visible to the public. In any event I got the impression that the OP wanted albums that are completely isolated from each other. With most photo sharing sites that would mean a separate account for each album. Not very practical.

Kelly