With the increasing availability of digital cameras, photography has become one of the most popular hobbies recently. Thousands of pictures are taken every day to capture the memorable, notable and just funny moments of people’s lives. Photo sharing websites have made it easy to share them with your family, friends and random people who might appreciate the message or the atmosphere of your take.

Using photo sрaring websites, you can store your photos online saving space on your computer, you can create your public or private online photo galleries and link to them from your photography blog or website, or you can simply showcase them for your family and friends. There are dozens of photo sharing websites now. We are posting a list of the top 20 to help you decide which one(s) to use if you don’t have a web photo gallery yet. In case your current online image gallery or photo sharing site does not provide you with enough features, you might want to check out the following photography websites to find a better solution.

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Flickr

Out of all the photo sharing websites, Flickr’s community is the most popular in terms of audience and features, such as tag support, descriptions, set groupings, ability to place photos on a world map, etc. The user interface is excellent, with drag and drop organizing, multiple online photo editing, and easy linking. Also Flickr has recently added video sharing to their website. It offers free accounts with limitations placed on photo uploads and other features, while the $25/year Pro account promises unlimited uploads, storage, and sets.

SmugMug

SmugMug is a premium photography sharing website with an emphasis on professional photography. SmugMug site has no free account (though there is a 14-day free trial). There are three levels of membership: Standard, Power, and Pro. Power and Pro level users can customize their photography sites. Pro users can mark up their prints for sale, where the photographer gets 85% of the markup over the base photo price. For all account types SmugMug allows the upload of an unlimited number of photos, keyword tagging for searching and categorization of photos, Google Maps integration for photos with GPS. Viewers can ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ photos to select the most popular photos using PhotoRank.

Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. Its main advantages are easy linking, simple photo album and video management, and the ability to send photos to MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, Friendster, and others. Photobucket’s free account has 1 GB of storage. The maximum photo size is 1MB or 1024 by 768. Also, a maximum of 30 photos per slideshow and 25GB of traffic per month are allowed.

Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums is Google’s popular photo sharing and uploading site. Picasa Web Albums offers free 1GB of storage, a robuts photo search engine, photo tagging, and a companion desktop photo organization tool. Embedding slideshows and linking to photos is easy. Online photo galleries are organized by drag and drop. The only thing missing is the ability to edit photos online. Also, Picasa Web Albums works well with Blogspot.com, so you can easily blog any photos you upload on your Picasa Web Album.

WebShots

Webshots is an outstanding photo sharing service for families or professionals. The site is supported by advertising. Users can become ‘Premium Members’ for an annual fee which allows them to view the site without ads and also to upload a larger number of images to their own online galleries. All members get a free homepage where they can share up to 1,000+ photos publicly. Webshots Premium allows for 5,000+ photos, and 500 more are added to one’s capacity each month. Although you can’t upload videos, post comments and embed links to your website, you can still share your pictures through photo messages, online photo albums, custom prints and gifts.

Fotolog

Fotolog is one of the oldest and largest photo sharing website online. The website offers both free and subscription accounts. The free version is ad-supported, and limits users to uploading one picture per day, and having only 20 comments (in their ‘guestbook’). The free user can also customize their page and add other fotologs into their ‘Friends/Favorites’ list. Paying members, known as ‘Gold Camera patrons’ can upload up to 6 pictures a day, have 200 comments per photo and can access better customer support. .

SnapFish

Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service currently owned by Hewlett-Packard. Snapfish offers free membership with unlimited photo storage. Its members can share photo albums, individual photos, animated Snapshows, Group Rooms or Snapfish products. Members can share via email, link URL, and to various other web services such as Facebook, Blogger and MySpace. Snapfish profits from their personalized photo products such as prints, photo books, cards and mugs. Snapfish members can personalize their products in several ways such as adding their photos and, in some cases, adding captions or designed templates. SnapFish is a popular site, however it doesn’t have tagging opportunities.

ShutterFly

Unlimited storage, easy drag and drop organizing, and editing tools make Shutterfly photography sharing website a good choice. Users can invite others to view their Shutterfly Share sites that include comment forums, photo books and links to YouTube videos. However, the community section allows you to browse slideshows, but not individual photos. You can only comment on the entire slideshow. Shutterfly has no features for creating links to a picture from another website. And even though there is no limit to the photo size that you can upload, it will be reduced and you will not be able to access the original file size.

Zooomr

Zooomr is similar to other photo and image sharing sites with a number of so-called Web 2.0 features such as tagging, Ajax, RSS, and GeoTagging. Unusually, Zooomr has a multi-login capability, using a service called OpenID. The site has no limits on uploading, storing, and archiving photos. There is however a PRO account option, which is free of advertising and allows users to see who “Faved” and commented on their photos with a feature called “Social Stream”. Other features include LightBox, which resembles a slideshow allowing users to append short audio commentary to individual photos; SmartSets, which are dynamically-generated albums; and PeopleTags, which allows users to add themselves inside photos and search for people inside photos. It is not possible to delete one’s account.

Photoshop

Photoshop.com is focused on managing, editing, storing, and sharing photos online. Currently US-only, Photoshop.com works from any Flash-enabled browser. It is also able to connect to both Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7. This latter feature lets you back up and synch the digital photos from your hard drive with those in your online gallery. The user interface of Photoshop.com is very intuitive and quite easy to navigate. For quick help, you can mouse over a particular area of the screen and a pop-up bubble will appear with brief information on that tool or feature. There are two levels of membership: the Basic level is free with 2GB space and the option to purchase additional storage starting at $19.99 per year. The Plus level costs $69.99 per year with 20 GB included storage space, and $129.99 per year with 100GB and requires either Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 or Adobe Premiere Elements 7 to use Organizer.

Fotki

Fotki is another great online photo sharing service. Fotki attracts an international audience of more than one million people with photo sharing, blogging, printing and selling. You can dictate photo frame style, album layout, who can access originals, who can order prints of your photos, whether the camera model is shown, who can share your photos and more. Fotki has a unique online journal where you can write about your photography and pictures. Fotki offers unlimited photo storage with premium memberships. Premium members can sell prints of their photos at a price they set and even have access to a convenient selling cart. This site doesn’t allow you to form private groups and unlike some of the others, you can’t upload video to Fotki.

Kodak Gallery

KodakEasyShareGallery is for those who want an inexpensive, no frills, easy–to–use service where they can upload their photos so that friends and family can view them and add comments. This is a no hassle service but does not offer blogging or easy access to other’s albums or photos. Kodak Gallery provides free unlimited online photo storage for 12 months from the date you first upload an image to your account. That means you can upload as many photos and develop as many rolls of film as you like. Your stored photos will be online as long as you’re an active member of the Gallery. “Active” means that you make at least one purchase from the Gallery at least once every 12 months.

My Photo Album

MyPhotoAlbum is an excellent choice for the person who wants to store photos and share them with friends, family members or others around the world. People can print copies of your photos for their keepsakes. MyPhotoAlbum offers a step–by–step process for signing up for either a free account or a Club Account with more features. The club account is $15/year. MyPhotoAlbum can be personalized to fit your needs. You can select the look of your album from various options and choose how you would like to display your photos. Choices include hardcopy print options, thumb nailing sizes, photo–ratings, visitor photo commenting and more. You can add photos or video to your album via MPA OnTheGo, One–by–One Upload or the MPA Video Tool that currently accepts mov, avi, wmv, mpeg, mpg, and mpg4, wmv3 files.

PrintRoom

You can use Printroom photography sharing website to create your own online studio to sell photos. Printroom.com allows you to set up public and private galleries for your photos and market them to your clients. You can set the types of prints and the prices, develop specific picture packages, as well as create promotions and discounts. Printroom handles the printing and payment details, you reap the potential profits of your images. Print quality is excellent. Free account allows for only 300MB of storage. Additional storage available for $20/100MB.

DotPhoto

DotPhoto is an excellent, family–friendly service where you can customize and organize your personal photo and video albums. If you’re a professional or semi–pro, you can create your own webpage and sell your photographs online. This service uses the “Lifetime Photo Locker.” Your locker has unlimited storage space even if you just sign up for the free account. DotPhoto’s drag and drop system makes it easy to organize your photos by caption or date. You can also set the category of each photo making it convenient to find. ou can fix red eye, crop, rotate, brighten, zoom and more. There is even a tool to add a sound caption with each photo. ALso, it provides secure and user–friendly systems for storing and organizing your photos.

Care2 Connect

If you want to join a group with a cause to make a difference in something, then Care2 Connect is the site for you. Not only can you share your photos and images with friends, family and others, but also you can get in touch with others that have similar likes, dislikes, drives and desires concerning a myriad of groups, causes or organizations. Care2 Connect allows you to upload as many as 200 photos over any 30–day period. This means over time you have unlimited storage capabilities—all for FREE. (Accounts that are inactive for 45 days may be subject to storage restrictions.) You can’t beat the price—unlimited storage for FREE.

Pbase

PBase.com was designed and developed for photographers, artists and everybody else who wants to upload images and display their photography for others to enjoy. Through PBase.com, you can direct image link, which is posting your photos on other sites. You have an unlimited number of galleries, and the number of photos you can store is only limited by the amount of storage space you have purchased. PBase.com offers a couple choices when purchasing storage space. For about $23 a year, you can get 300 MB of space, or for $60, you can get 900 MB. Extra storage can be purchased in increments of 300 MB. However, PBase lacks some features that are growing in popularity such as being able to upload by email or camera phone, uploading video clips and selling your photos directly on PBase.

Picture Trail

PictureTrail offers a good service for the money—their storage limits are somewhat smaller, but the site is quite easy to use. The uploading process involves a few more steps if you need to download their software in order to do batch uploads. They allow you to store 500 photos or 50MB, which ever comes first. You can purchase space at the rate of $10.00 for every 500 photos annually. This site allows you to customize your homepage by adding “About Me” text, a cool avatar and select a page background to suit your personality. You can also include graphics for each album, picture borders and page backgrounds. Picturetrail has some editing options including soft, bold, photo–realistic and occasion backgrounds that enhance the display of your albums. You can also add music to each album and view your pictures as a slideshow.

Buzznet

BuzzNet is a photo-sharing community. It shares most or all of Flickr’s strengths, and has a few additional features as well. Sign up for a free BuzzNet account and you can upload photos directly to their website, or email photos with a unique email address that contains a keyword you choose. This allows for easy mobile photoblogging. Pictures can be tagged by you and anyone else. Users can search/browse by these tags, and they are indexed at Technorati as well and thumbnails are shown for technorati searches for those tags. BuzzNet only limits the number of total photos (120) you can upload per month and not the megabytes. Each photo can receive buzz from other members. Top buzzed members and top content contributors are recognized throughout the site.

Pixagogo

Pixagogo is a user–friendly, web–based service where you can share your digital photos in high quality, and you decide who can view them. This service has various practical features including a free trial and is one of the top ten online photo albums on the web.There’s no limit to how many photos you can add or how many albums you can create. If you choose to make your albums public, your photos will be added to a huge gallery of Pixagogo user photos.

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Want to have a professional photography website of your own? ReadyPhotoSite is an all-in-one solution for your personal photo website. We provide stylish website design, easy website management and maintainance, but what’s most important is the in-built beautiful online flash photo galleries and slideshow options - you can upload unlimited photos and create unlimited albums to make stunning presentation of your works.

ReadyPhotoSite - a photographer’s home on the Web!

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