Sharing Photos Online

As many of you know, I'm a bit of a photo nut. I love photography and especially enjoy taking photos of my nephews. My sister jokes that I'm her private paparazzi. But she neglects to mention is that thanks to my photo efforts, distant relatives and friends are able to see the boys doing various activities throughout the year.

One of the downsides to emailing photos is file size. With today's digital cameras, photos often range from 1-3 mb in size. With file sizes like these, you don't want to email more than 4 or 5 photos per email. So if you have more photos than this to share, you'll want to send multiple emails to make it easier for the receiver to download them.

Another downside is when you email photos one day, and then decide to email more to somebody else the next. Needless to say, this can be time consuming and a bit of a hassle creating the messages and attaching the photos every time you decide to email photos.

Photo sharing sites are an excellent alternative to emailing photos. Common photo sharing sites include Kodak Gallery, Webshots, Snap Fish, SmugMug, etc. There are too many sites to name.

While some of my friends use Snap Fish and others, I've been using Webshots the last couple of years. Webshots has both free and paid subscriptions and is very easy to use. The free account limits you to a 1,000 photos whereas the paid subscription lets you upload unlimited photos and until recently, was free of advertising. However, webshots recently changed hands and since then, even the paid accounts hit you with advertising - which is one of the reasons I've since closed my account (there are others).

My new favorite photo sharing site is SmugMug. They're a little more expensive, but they are totally free of advertising and extremely easy to use. They offer three levels of subscriptions (ranging from $40/yr to $150/yr) to meet various needs. I could go on and on about how great smugmug is, but here are some benefits worth considering:

• You get unlimited photo storage
  
• Because your photos are stored online, you don't have to worry about losing them if your computer crashes!
• Friends and family can easily view the photos from all over the world (which means you don't have to deal with the headaches of emailing photos anymore!
• Friends and family can easily order prints if they like and other cool photo gifts (mugs, calendars, etc.).

I've been using SmugMug now for a few months and really like them. I have a LOT more control over my account and photos now than I ever did at Webshots. If you like, you can check out my smugmug account by clicking here.

SmugMug offers a 14 day free trial too so you can easily test drive the site before you buy.
And if you use the coupon code (mlw5t8QahAChE), you'll get $5 off if you decide to buy.

The safe and secure photo sharing alone is reason enough to get a SmugMug account, not to mention the easiest way to share photos with family and friends.

Need Unlimited photo storage- FREE Trial of Smugmug