moolyn

I've always used kodakeasyshare to share my travel photos with friends and family but was impressed recently by the look of photos posted here using flickr and picasa.

It wasn't just that the photos themselves were great but I liked that good sized thumbnails appeared on one scrollable page and could be individually enlarged.

I'm planning to sign up for both and see how they compare to kodak for ease of use but would love to know the pros and cons of flickr and picasa from people who already use them. I'm starting to organize my photos from our recent trip to the UK so your opinions would be especially helpful right now.

Here are he recent threads with the photos I was impressed with plus one of mine that used kodak to compare.

picasa: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=35036556

flickr: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=35030520

kodak: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34811293

hetismij

You could also look at www.photobucket.com - you can make albums and slideshows there and add your own comments too. I haven't really used it much - we have our own website which I use for photos using JAlbum, but it is a good simple site. I use it mainly for posting photos on other forums.

Tim_and_Liz

You could also start a travel blog at www.blogspot.com once you photos are organized.

andrys

I think you're probably looking only for free hosting sites?

The one I use ( pbase.com ) costs $23/yr so that wouldn't do, but I like it. My travel pics are at http://www.pbase.com/andrys there.

picasa's nice but very cumbersome when people want to go back to find a picture in the middle of all that. Unlimited storage though!

flickr has a good crowd, though I don't like the layout very much and I find navigation a bit odd. But their searching mechanism is great (tags) and people can find you more easily. Friendly place. Defaults to smaller images.

My favorite for friends and family wanting to start up same day while having a nice, big 800x600 image in all shots as default (with minimal advertising ruining your images) is http://myphotoalbum.com
My older cousin put up 4 albums in one day without ado and you can see them as samples at http://leeyuen.myphotoalbum.com
Extremely easy to use with a good interface. I may get a backup account there.

moolyn

hetismij, thanks for suggesting yet another possibility. Photobucket seems like a great site for finding photos of specific places and subjects but I found the advertising a bit distracting.

Tim and Liz, I'll keep blogspot in mind in case I ever want to start blogging so thanks for responding.

Andrys, your comments on picasa and flickr is just the kind of information I'm looking for. Thanks also for sharing your cousin's albums on my photoalbum.com as it's difficult to get an idea just from the home page alone.

I was thinking of a free site but was very impressed with pbase, maybe because your photos are so good. $23 a year doesn't seem like much to pay for such a sophisticated look with no advertising and lots of space for comments and I assume lots of space for photos. Is it difficult to use or did you just make it look difficult because of your website expertise?

andrys

Moolyn, some of us customize our front pages at pbase.vom, which takes more work, but they just gave us a free front-page slide-show that we can tweak and I tested that at http://www.pbase.com/andrys/abtravels

The place is pretty simple to use but does take a day to look at all that it offers on your editing pages. The drawback for some is it doesn't have a way to let the visitor order prints but that'll come. Most of us love the fact it has no ads and there are several nice templates to choose from for our pages.

I have about 5 friends who joined this year for those reasons and they find it pretty easy to use. We get nothing when friends join, unlike some other places.

smugmug.com is perhaps an easier place, offering more but it costs more and many of us prefer pbase's clean, less flashy look. People's tastes will differ though. smugmug.com has terrific customer support, while on pbase, it's other members who help more.

pbase also just added free very-easy access to statcounter.com ( see the BusinessWeek article this week at
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...717_028843.htm ) in which you enter your statcounter ID numbers to a couple of pbase account fields,, and then pbase makes sure all your galleries and image papes can pick up traffic data. You can see what regions of the countries your viewers are in and what websites sent them your way etc. No one is identified but you can see what region of the country they're in, with a map showing that also. statcounter's doing very well because the service is free. When you check your stats, showing you which images are most popular or disinteresting statcounter might have ads above your reports, paying for that service free to webpage owners.

Kodak Easyshare used to be Ofoto's from what I remember. I liked their printing but their display is not that good.

Flickr is owned by Yahoo now and is very popular with the younger set. More random in feel, more adventurous, maybe.

Thanks re some of my photos. I'd love to be able to take photos like that Clifton guy someone pointed us to. If you click on pbase.com's gallery or photo of the moment, you get a good idea of what's possible. You can usually get help at the forums for doing fancier things when you want, which is the draw of the place to some of us.

Good luck !

Jed

I use worldisround.com, which several people here do. I like Picasa for enhancing photos.

Ackislander

In general, the quality of friends' photos is less important to me than: 1. ease of access; do I have to establish an account in order to browse (if so, forget it).
2. captions that tell me what I am looking at

MikeBuckley

The $23 annual rate for pbase is for 500 megabytes of storage space. It really is a terrific value. In the more than 3 years that I have subscribed, the cost has remained unchanged and the storage space has increased dramatically.

A description of pricing options and services, including the 30-day free trial, can be viewed at http://www.pbase.com/pricing.html

I don't go to the effort of creating custom pages at pbase. Instead, I use only the templates they provide. For yet another example of a template, my travel gallery is at http://www.pbase.com/mike_buckley/travel

robjame

A couple of PBase questions - are all of your pictures automatically available to everyone or can you use it to simply store some images?
Can you restrict the availability of some of your galleries - only by invitation or password to family, friends?
Can you store on one account from more than one computer? or must each computer have its own account?
Do the template pages etc count in your alloted storage space?
Thanks.

toedtoes

There's another thread in the Lounge dated 7/10/07 that talks about this very subject (I couldn't get it to link correctly).

Before posting photos, read their TOC very carefully. Some of these sites claim rights to every photo you post for any purpose and forever.

While you might not think it's a big deal because your photos are just "snapshots", remember that this means they can sell them to anyone for any reason - your shot of a baby seal could be sold to advertise pro-seal clubbing, etc. Don't lose control of your images under any circumstances.

P.S. Always check the TOC of photo contests also - they do the same thing.

moolyn

andrys, yes, kodakeasyshare used to be ofoto. I’ve used it since way back then and haven’t run out of space for albums although I only use it for photos I want to share, not for storage. Whereas, I’ve discovered, picasa, flickr and worldisround all provide a limited amount of free space and then charge $24 or more a year to upgrade. So, after reading these comments and belatedly doing a search I’ve decided that there’s no good reason to change to one of the other free sites from kodakgallery.com.

However, I'm quite smitten with pbase, especially after seeing so many brilliant albums there. I prefer the clean look of pbase to smugmug although that extra customer support would be nice. Since I acquired a better digital camera, the Canon SD800, I’ve been taking photos on my morning walks around downtown Toronto. Inspired by Hokusai’s 100 views of Mount Fuji I’ve been working on 100 Views of the CN Tower. Pbase would be a great place to display them as well as my collections of travel photos. So I'm very seriously thinking of joining.

Mike, thanks for showing me that it isn’t necessary to be a layout wiz like andrys to produce attractive photo galleries with pbase. I like that you can simply click on a representative photo to enter a gallery.

toedtoes, I checked pbase and found that “any images uploaded by a user remain the property of that user or whatever party holds the copyright.” Thanks also for mentioning the other thread on this same topic. I found it at: http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=35020822 and then decided to do a search on this topic and found a few more helpful threads. Interestingly, the highest number of recommendations were for pbase and ofoto/kodak.

Jed and Ackislander, thanks for your input. I’ve noticed worldisround used here quite often so checked it out too. I think that all of the sites mentioned here and on the simillar thread meet Ackislander’s criteria.

Robjame, good questions, thanks! I’m interested to see the answers too. I suspect that you can access pbase from more than one computer as long as you use your password since you can do this with kodakeasyshare. Did you decide to take your new DSLR to France? If I had a DSLR and was going to be there for as long as you are I sure would take it with me.

Leely

moolyn, I'm another pbase user; I find the galleries of others on the site extremely inspiring, even though I'm just a point-and-shooter (someday I hope to try harder and get better).

To answer some of robjames' questions:

are all of your pictures automatically available to everyone or can you use it to simply store some images?
You can restrict/use the site to privately store if that's what you like.

Can you restrict the availability of some of your galleries - only by invitation or password to family, friends?
YES, there are a couple of ways to do this. One of my galleries doesn't even show up to you people! > But you can also set up a password for family/friends.

Can you store on one account from more than one computer? or must each computer have its own account?
I haven't tried this, but I think it's possible.

Do the template pages etc count in your alloted storage space?
I'm not sure--haven't uploaded anything near to my allotted storage space so haven't investigated.

http://www.pbase.com/leelygoes

Leely

p.s. Moolyn, your lovely Dordogne photos would look even better set against a darker background (blue, black, dark green, etc.). And let's not even get into robjames' French food photos! I don't want to end up licking my computer screen.

TRSW

Another satisfied pbase customer here. And to answer robjames question. No the templates do not count towards your allowed space. I have almost 1400 pictures stored and am only using a little more than 20 % of my allowence.

Also, you don't need a seperate account for each computer. I upload from both my pc and my laptop.

Tom

www.pbase.com/trsw

lovesroses

bkmkg Thank you!

toedtoes

Moolyn - here's the thread where I checked out the TOCs of several of the recommended sites:
http://tinyurl.com/2hpdu3

With the pbase site, the one questionable thing is that they don't indicate what rights THEY claim on the photos.

All sites have to claim a minimum amount of rights to your photos in order to post them online, etc. Some take only the minimum (right to publish online only while you are a member) and some take it all (right to sell, manipulate, etc. for now and forever).

On pbase, there's no mention of the specific rights they claim for the operation of the site - just that you retain YOUR rights.

That's the only thing that bothers me a bit. Without stating what their rights are, there's no protection for you against their usage of your images. I believe the current owner of the site is OK, but if he decided to sell the site to some company, you could get screwed.

If I were to go with pbase (and I think it's a good site), I would simply send an email asking what rights they claim - even spell it out for them to make it easier - and ask them for confirmation that they claim no additional rights. I'd tuck that email and the response away for future reference if needed and then sign up and start posting.

andrys

moolyn, if you do join pbase, please contact me and I can watch, along with other members, for your questions at the forums. We all try to help one another.

Re any layout wizardry, the slideshow-text layout at the pbase.com/andrys/abtravels page I gave
is done with about 7 lines (which I posted to their forums). The rest is done by PBase.

The new slideshow feature means you can just type in "SLIDESHOW(gallery)" at your edit-gallery description-box between centering symbols and it just goes, and is really nice since you can choose between several sizes.

robjame, re your questions:
1. Access types for galleries there
-- Subgalleries can be public.
-- They can be non-public (my default setting), but if a person is given the exact link, they can see it, so it's a good way to keep a gallery for only friends without making them put in passwords.
-- Or they can be password-protected for more security
-- Or an image itself can be made totally Non-public, which means you're the only person that can see it, even if someone knows the link and the password to that subgallery.

2. Restricting availability - that's covered by the possibilities above...

3. Yes, you can access your account from any computer if you know the password. Important to log out after using another computer though, especially a public one. I often access from my photoshop classes at various schools.

Also of course anyone can see the photos from any computer, without registering, as long as you have your photos and subgalleries public or have given permission/rights.

4. The template pages don't count in the storage space -- only the photos you upload. We all recommend people upload no larger than 800x600, to fit 1024x768 screens that have browser and other program info and to keep loading time down AND to protect your larger version of your photos from being stolen. This is true anywhere.

Also, don't hesitate to download the free magazine done by members at pbase (not connected with management) at
http://www.pbase.com/magazine
There are several issues available and it is a top-notch resource, which is understating it. You don't have to be a member to download it and it's an inspiration for a number of us who are trying to improve our photography, how we see and how to get more out of what we get, etc.

- Andrys

robjame

Thank you all for answering all these OC questions,,,
- as amplification: "Yes, you can access your account from any computer" - this means I can upload from more than one computer?
- is it Vista compatible? (I suspect you would have heard if it weren't)

(Sounds like a go for me)

rkkwan

If one's willing to pay, also try zenfolio.com, which I use. Feature-wise, it's basically the same as pbase. The layout and presentation maybe a little different.

You can check out mine at:

rkkwan.zenfolio.com