Sharing your Photos over the Web

For more than ten years I’ve been taking photos of airplanes and trains. As you can imagine, over this time period I’ve accumulated quite a large collection. In fact, these photos now number in the tens of thousands.

Not long after I became interested in these subjects, I knew that one of my goals was to share these photos with others. I looked for an inexpensive and easy way to share them online and discovered a software package called Gallery. Gallery isn’t for everyone. In fact, you’ll need a good deal of technical knowledge and your own web server to use it. I won’t go into the details other than to say that we’ve been using Gallery trouble-free for years to share several hundred photos.

You can see our large collection of aircraft, trains and celebrities at the Abacus Gallery. For more information about Gallery please go to Menalto.

If you have decent computer skills with installing software on a server and some familiarity with database management, you’ll get first class way to share your photos with Gallery. But for the less technically inclined I’ve listed several other ways to share your photos. Kodak is semi-free – there’s a minimum annual purchase requirement. Picasa is free for 1GB of storage and additional charge if you need more storage. Smug Mug is for more advanced sharing.

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Beside Gallery, a second way to share your photos is to open a Kodak Gallery account. Kodak gives you unlimited space to upload and store your photos. There’s a slight catch: within one year you must purchase either a) $4.99 of photos or accessories if you use 2GB of space or less or b) $19.99 of photos or accessories if you use more than 2GB of space. Kodak makes it easy for you to order prints, photobooks, t-shirts, mugs, etc. from your photos and the minimum order requirement is quite reasonable. Kodak also makes it easy to share your photos with family and friends and also lets them print your photos at their own expense. I have used Kodak to make several photobooks. The quality of the finished product was excellent and the service extremely fast. You can see our Kodak hosted gallery at Kodak / Stay Focused. For more information see Kodak Gallery.

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A third way to share your photos is to download, install and open a Picasa account from Google. The Picasa software helps you organize your photos on your PC or Mac and also share these via the web. Some users rely on Picasa to edit all of their photos. Since it’s free, the price is hard to beat. For sharing, Picasa gives you 1GB of storage at no charge. You can purchase additional storage in 20GB increments for $5 per year; quite a reasonable charge. And like Kodak, Picasa gives you a variety of ways to share you photos with family and friends. You can see our Picasa hosted gallery at Picasa / Stay Focused. For more information see Picasa.

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Smug Mug is a sharing site for advanced and professional photographers. The site is especially tailored to photographers who sell photos to clients for example for weddings, portrait or events. Smug Mug has no limit to the number of photos that you can upload. There are three price levels: Basic $40/year; Power $60/year and Pro $150/year. The main difference between these are the amount of customization that you can do do change the look and feel of your gallery. You can see our Smug Mug hosted gallery at Smug Mug / Stay Focused. For more information see Smug Mug.

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Since I’ve used all of these products, I’m comfortable mentioning these four ways to share your photos. Whichever one you choose I think you’ll have an easy time getting your photos in front of family and friends.

 
Written by Arnie Lee

 

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