Vacation Pictures
 

I recently returned from a two week trip to Bologna and Rome. I'm in the processing of uploading my photos to Shutterfly and wanted to create a Photo Album. I ran into some problems using their system - which I have successfully used in the past. At this moment, I am unhappy with Shutterfly and would like to consider other options. Tell me where you go to upload and save your vacation photos.

Thanks!

Picasa.

My wife and I love Blurb. It is easy to use and produces some beautiful coffee table size books. We have now made approximately 10 books using Photoshop to edit the pictures and Blurb to produce the books.

Flickr

Picasa

I really like Flickr. Not only is it well supported by a variety of software and smart phone apps, but the free account includes a full terabyte of storage! It is a bit complex at first (or, at least it was to me), but there are lots of options for organizing and presenting your photos, as well as sharing with others.

If you are a Windows user, Picassa is a great option, too. For Mac users, I like iPhoto and Flickr, or if you have a large library, it might be worth spending the money for Aperture.

I like Picasa, too, but Google seems to be trying to force me to switch to Google+, where sharing is not straightforward, and where the people you share with see your Google profile, which I don't want when I'm posting my photos on a public website.

When I open the web site of Picasa, it forwards me to Google+. If I hover with my cursor over a certain spot, I see an option to go to Picasa instead, but they're trying to make it difficult. I had found a way to force it to go directly to Picasa (with a "noredirect=1" at the end of the URL). This worked for a while, but not it redirects me anyway.

You might be able to avoid this if you don't have Google+, but if you've recently created a Google account, or if you chose to accept Google+ for some reason, there's really nothing you can do about it.

The bigger worry is that in some not-too-distant future, Google will cease to support Picasa altogether.

Dropbox has folders that can be publicly shared, but they don't have any photo editing capabilities, and they don't have huge amounts of free storage.

I still use shutterfly. They've enhanced the site a couple of years ago and now allow you to upload documents (Word, Excel) as well as photos. I create a shared site so I can create multiple albums and load my trip reports.

What problems are you having with shutterfly?

Thanks everyone for your feedback. Over the years I have made a photo book for each of our Italy vacations. This past trip I had about 1,500 pictures to upload. Not all pictures made it to my account at Shutterfly. Needless to say, I am unhappy that I have to go back through 1500 pictures to make sure every one get to Shutterfly.

When I started my Photo Book project this past Sunday, I transferred photos from an existing Shutterfly album to the project. Not all pictures made it to the project. Now I have to go back and start over because it would be too time consuming to figure out which pictures made it to the Photo Book project and which pictures didn't.

I spoke with Shutterfly's support department by phone this morning and they were helpful. I actually got a credit for one Photo Book album - that was nice of them. I just want "no hassles" when uploading photos - and making photo book albums.

I may look into the other sites mentioned above. Thanks for all of the information!

griz fan - What is a terabyte of storage? How many photos?

I use www.mypublisher.com and always have fabulous results...they always have sales going on so I wait for a good one and buy at that point.

bab706, the answer is "it depends" because the size of a picture can vary based on a lot of factors, but one is the megapixel count of the camera you are using, but also various things (the camera, your photo editor) compress the file to create a jpg so it can be very different.

That said, I'm currently using less than 2 gigabytes on picasa, and I have nearly 2000 pictures. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.

jamikins - Thanks - I will definitely look into mypublisher.

China cat - I guess a terabyte is LOTS AND LOTS of pictures! Thanks!

jamikins - Oh no - mypublisher is now linked with Shutterfly! I went their website and clicked on "about my publisher" and found this ...

MyPublisher has joined forces with Shutterfly!



MyPublisherShutterfly

We've joined Shutterfly to give you the best service for turning precious memories into lasting

keepsakes like photo books, personalized cards & stationery and photo gifts. To learn more, click here.

That's a recent thing, the software they use is the same as it always has been so far...

I have never had issues with things not uploading or making it into a book. You do all the work with the software on your computer them upload once it us complete. This takes a while due to the number of photos. But I have never had a problem and have ordered over 30 books. I haven't tried 1500 photos but certainly 750+

Hey!

There's a new photo sharing website that just started, www.TripKoala.com, you guys should have a look. It lets you post travel pictures from anywhere and people can vote on the best ones! It's really fun website!

I use smugmug, and love it, but it's not free.
No limit on how many pictures you can store, no limit on the size of the pictures, you can store any format (RAW too), videos, etc.

I've got 19,000 and counting pix up here and it is no trouble and extremely well organized:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/douglashoyt/sets/