Sharing Your Photos Online
 There was a time when sharing your photos online was a lot of work. You took digital photos, or scanned prints and placed them on your desktop computers. Then, you built an album with photo album software. After that, you uploaded the lot to your Web site. In many cases, the results weren't all that spectacular -- you had a photo album, but it didn't look all that attractive.
Thankfully, those days are over. We're in the world of Web 2.0 now, and sharing your photos online has not only become easier, but it's become a lot more flexible and fun. All you really need is a digital camera and a high-speed Internet connection, and you're ready to go. This TechTip looks at three Web-based photo sharing services. All of them pack the features and functions that you need, and probably a couple of more that you didn't know you needed.
Common Denominators
The services discussed in this TechTip, and most photo sharing sites in general, have a number of common features. Two of the most important are tagging and geotagging.
Tagging is simply a way of categorizing your photos and making them easier to find. A tag is simply a keyword -- for example, the name of an event like "My 40th birthday" or just someone's name, like "Kiri". If you have a large number of photos online, tagging them makes it easier to zoom in on the picture that you want to find w hen doing a search. And if your photos are visible to the rest of the world, tagging them makes it easy for other people to find them.
Geotagging takes tagging a step further. Geotagging your photos enables you to tell people where in the world you took the photo. So, if you upload a bunch of snaps of your vacation to Madison, Wisconsin, you can tag the photos as such and, depending on the service, those photos will appear on map. It's a neat feature, and one that offers a unique way of organizing your photos.
Flickr
Flickr is one of the more established photo sharing sites, and is still one of the most popular. While some people say it's difficult to use, the truth is the opposite. While the interface isn't very intuitive, it's easy to master once you've used it for a while.
 So, what does Flickr have to offer? First, it enables you to group your photos into sets. A set allows you to easily organize a group of like photos into albums. Say, for example, you're a Corvette fan and have photos of Corvettes from the 1960s to the 1990s. You can create a set for each decade. From there, you can specify whether or not the photos can be seen by everyone on Flickr, or only by your friends and family. People who view the photos can also add comments to them.
You can also view the photo in a set as a slideshow. You can control how slowly or quickly the slides change, or manually advance the photos. The only thing that you can't do is add transition effects.
On top of that, you can create or join groups. These are like a shared pool of photos on a particular subject -- say, sports action shots or unique bits of urban architecture. Members of a group can upload pictures to the pool, and comment on them in the group's message forum. While this feature may not appeal to an individual user, groups are great for members of a club or even a staff at a company.
Flickr's geotagging feature is a cut above that of most Web-based photo sharing sites. Instead of merely enabling you to tag your photos with a location, you can literally click and drag photos on to a location on a world map. I did this with a bunch of pictures that I  took in Beijing last year, and the process was very smooth and easy.
Flickr offers two levels of membership: free and pro. Free membership allows you to upload a maximum of 100 MB of photos each month. While that seems like a lot, it's easy to use up that amount very quickly. A pro membership costs $24.95 (USD) per year. This gives you an unlimited number of uploads, as much storage space as you need, and the ability to archive your photos.
If I have one complaint about Flickr, it's the welcome page that appears after you log in. It contains a lot of information and links that I find irrelevant, and I can't seem to find a way to avoid it.
Fotki
 A scrappy yet elegant photo sharing site is Fotki. The interface is clean and easy to use, and the site has a number of interesting features that other photo sharing services lack.
First and foremost, Fotki is a photo sharing site. You can upload your pictures to an album on Fotki, either using the Web interface, an FTP client, or a batch uploading tool that you can download from the Fotki site. You can also point to a photo somewhere on the Web (even on another photo sharing site) and include it in a Fotki album. While uploading from within the Fotki site, you can include information about the photo, including geotagging in it.
But, photo sharing isn't the only thing that Fotki does. You can also link to videos on such sites as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace TV, and Vsocial. So, if you have a favorite video on any of those sites you can play it from within Fotki without having to navigate and search for it, or filling you browser's bookmarks with a large number
of videos.
 Fotki also enables you to create and post blogs, called journals. The journals aren't anything fancy – they have none of the visual style of the blogs that you'd create, say, with Blogger or WordPress. But, they're more than serviceable. And you can make the journals available to everyone on Fotki, just your contacts, or just to yourself.
Like Flickr, Fotki has two membership levels: free and premium. A premium membership is $50 (USD) a year, but if you use all of Fotki's features then the price will be well worth it. A premium feature that professional photographer, or an aspiring pro shutterbug, might find useful is the ability to sell photos. You can set your own price, and Fotki takes care of everything else.
I like my Web applications to do one thing, and one thing well. With all of its features -- photos and video hosting, blogging, and photo sales -- Fotki seems to be trying a little too hard and diluting its core strength. You might not feel the same way. If you want a one-stop shop for all of your online media needs, then you might want to give Fotki a closer look.
Picasa Web Albums
Like all of Google's other Web applications, Picasa Web Albums is very simple -- it does one thing, and does it well. On the surface, Picasa Web Albums seems a bit bland. But, don't let the plain exterior fool you. The service packs a great deal of power
and flexibility.
 First and foremost, Picasa Web Albums is a photo sharing site. This means that you can post your photos to one or more online albums, and make them available to anyone using the service or keep them private. The service also uses the Google search engine that enables you to search for photos in all publicly-available albums. About 15 years ago, I spent a few moths traveling around Japan. One of the places I remember distinctly is a part of the city of Osaka called Umeda. I plugged "Umeda" into the Picasa Web Albums search engine and came up with over 1,000 photos. And, I tell you, the place has changed since I was there!
Some of the other features of Picasa Web Albums really make it a strong service. If you have a smartphone, you can view and search your Web albums from anywhere. You can also turn an album into a slideshow that you can embed in your blog or on your Web page. Picasa Web Albums turns the album into a Flash slideshow, and gives you a link that you embed on a Web page. Any time you add or remove a photo from the album, the slideshow is
automatically updated.
If you have a blog on Blogger (which is also owned by Google), you can view any photos or graphics that are published on your blog in Picasa Web Albums. Unfortunately, you can’t post images from your Picasa albums to your blog.
If there's one drawback to Picasa Web Albums, it's that you only get 1 GB of storage space. That's about 4,000 photos taken at a standard resolution. If you're one who likes high resolution photos, the 1 GB of storage space won't hold many photos. However, considering that Picasa Web Albums is a free service, that's not too shabby.
Conclusion
Sharing your photos online has become a lot easier over the last couple of years. You can literally point and click, and have your photos available to your friends and family, or just about anyone else on the Web. The three photo sharing sites discussed in this TechTip will probably appeal to most people, but they definitely aren't the only game on the Web. If you want to learn more about what's out there, check out this very thorough comparison of popular photo sharing sites.
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