 
Pramod de Silva
Gone are the days when you had to mail your precious pictures of that
beach holiday to relatives or friends abroad.
The Internet is here. Now all you do is upload your pictures to the
Web and anyone, anywhere in the world with Internet access can see them.
Well, don’t want everyone in the world to see your pictures? You can
just invite your friends and relatives to see them.
There are hundreds of sites that help you do that, but only a few are
popular. The biggest is Flickr, (www.flicker.com) owned by Yahoo!. You
can log into Flickr with your Yahoo account or create a separate Flickr
account.
Flickr is the 30th most popular site on the Web - with nearly 3,000
uploads a minute it has to be. You can add videos as well, though it is
no match for YouTube in that department.
You can make basic adjustments to your pictures before uploading via
Flickr’s desktop uploader or directly on the site.
Flickr has some messaging functionality - you can post messages to
your buddies, though it isn’t Facebook or Yahoo Messenger.
Google’s Picasa is another popular photo application. Download the
software program at picasa.google.com and you are just steps away from
showing your albums to the world. It has more adjustment facilities than
Flickr and you can work offline till you connect to the Net.
Also check out www.photobucket.com, a free online service similar to
Flickr.
 It offers a slideshow facility as well as direct shooting of photos
to your own blog or social networking site.
Photobucket also accepts other images such as posters and art.Don’t
forget Facebook, which also accepts photos and videos. Granted, it is
mainly a social networking site, but what good will it do without
photos?
Yet, if you are more a photographer than a casual snapper, head to
Flickr or Photobucket. There are many file sharing/storing sites such as
MediaFire which accept pictures and images, but remember that these are
not primarily photosharing sites.
They serve as ‘cloud’ hard drives, so you can store thousands of
photos for your own use.There are hundreds of fee-based photo sites as
well, but why spend when you can have it all for free? Try Shutterfly,
Fotki, Webshots, Snappages, Printroom (mainly for pros), Smugmua, among
others. Some sites do offer a higher-storage fee based option as well.
Sharing your photos with the world has never been easier. |
