ONLINE PHOTO STORAGE & SHARING SITES

The growth of photo sharing sites has been another phenomena over the last few years, with the Internet, take up of broadband, the evolution of digital camera technology and the boom in consumer generated content and social networking sites creating a natural synergy.

These days, nearly everyone has a digital camera or camera phone. The move to loading, storing and viewing photos online as well as collaborating and sharing photos with others has been a natural one enabling users to share their pictures, post them to blogs, or tag or comment on others' photos.

Commonly, photo sharing sites offer the user a range of options:

• Users can upload, store and organise photos in albums.
• Users can use their camera phones to post photos automatically to their blogs.
• Users can post tags, comments and descriptions on any public photo. (By tagging photos, anyone can create groups of photos that share common tags, such as "Skiing" or "Concerts". Those groups can then be designated public or private.
• Users can find photos on the service by searching for tags.

Many sites also offer a printing service, for some that is the core service on which their business model is based.

This is a rapidly evolving area with major changes in ownership announced very recently. Firstly, Yahoo announced in early May 2007 it's decision to shut down Yahoo Photos and ask its users to move instead to its Web 2.0 photo sharing site, Flickr (bought by Yahoo in 2005).

Having purchased Flickr Yahoo continued to support both Yahoo Photos and Flick for two years because of the different audiences using the two sites' Yahoo Photos is a more conventional photo-finishing site, full of family snapshots, while Flickr has attracted a passionate fan base of amateur and professional photographers who use the site to share digital photos online, and for whom printing is largely an afterthought.

The decision by Yahoo to move tens of millions of registered users from Yahoo Photos risked losing thousands of unhappy members but, according to Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Yahoo promised to provide as much support as possible with various options for upgrading to Flickr or to various outside-photo storage sites, including helping consumers to load their photos on competing sites.

Such competing sites include PhotoBucket which has experienced explosive growth, from a quarter of the market a year ago to around 40 percent in April 2007, according to Hitwise data. In the same period, Yahoo Photos' share was been cut two- to three times over to around 5.8 percent of the US market. Flickr, meanwhile, grew to 4.5 percent, up from 3.7 percent, according to Hitwise.

Yahoo Photos counted 30 million registered users, who had uploaded 2 billion photos as of June 2006. By contrast, PhotoBucket rose to 32 million users in 2006 from 12 million users in 2005. (It is set to grow to around 62 million users by the end of 2007, PhotoBucket Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Welch said in a recent interview.)

Certainly Photobucket is the most popular online photo sharing service among users of social network sites like News Corp's MySpace. (Based in California (USA), PhotoBucket acts as a digital version of a warehousing and shipping service, storing and transmitting photos and helping Web users post their photos on other social networking sites, instead of trying to keep the users locked up on its own site.) Other competitors include more conventional photo printing and storage sites such as Kodak Gallery or Snapfish.

Yahoo's dramatic decision to move Yahoo Photo members to Flickr and consolidate it's Photo storage and sharing service was fully justified a few days after Yahoo's announcement with the news on 9 May 2007 that MySpace had reached a preliminary deal to acquire Photobucket for around £125 million pounds.

Besides MySpace, Photobucket is popular on sites such as Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga for providing free, online storage tools for multimedia self-expression, from photos to videos to digital slideshows with many site builders turning to it for images to decorate their sites.

Given that Photobucket's growth has been largely symbiotic with that of MySpace, functioning as a kind of outsourced provider of photo services to MySpace users, the decision to buy it by News Corp is not surprising. Nearly 60 percent of Photobucket site traffic comes from users leaving MySpace properties and Photobucket is the third most popular destination for MySpace users after Google and Yahoo.

However the relationship has been strained at times. In April 2007 MySpace blocked traffic from its site to Photobucket after a dispute over technical issues led MySpace to accuse Photobucket of violating the social network site's service terms. On April 10, Photobucket posted a statement on its blog that attacked MySpace for limiting the freedom of its users to connect to outside sites such as Photobucket. "By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit," the Photobucket statement said. Two weeks later, on April 23, Photobucket said the situation had been resolved. As it turns out, the resolution has proved more positive for Photobucket's founders than perhaps any of them predicted!

Some of the most popular photo storage and sharing sites on the web include:

FLICKR - has two main goals:

• They want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them. To do this, they want to get photos into and out of the Flickr system in as many ways as possible: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their photos. And they want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways they haven't thought of yet (Smart refrigerators anyone?!)
• They want to enable new ways of organising photos. Flickr believe that once people make the switch to digital it is all too easy for them to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos they take. Flickr want to move on from the "album" concept to make the process of organising photos collaborative. Flickr users can give their friends, family, and other contacts permission to organise their photos - not just to add comments, but also notes and tags, and to make all this info searchable.

Flickr continues to evolve in myriad ways, the Flickr Blog keeps people apprised of the latest developments.

KODAK EASYSHARE GALLERY - formerly known as "Ofoto", the Kodak Easyshare Gallery is one of the leading online digital photo developing services. The site provides Kodak customers with a secure and easy way to view, store and share their photos with friends and family and get real Kodak prints of their pictures. The site also provides free editing and creative tools and speciality photo products. (Ofoto was founded in July 1999 in Califronia (USA) which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company in June 2001, renamed in March 2005 when the company name was changed to Kodak Imaging Network, Inc.)

Kodak offers users the opportunity to:

• View and edit photos - organise (secure online albums for storing digital photos, the ability to create original photo titles and album names for reference - the site automatically determines what type of upload method is best for the user's computer and guides them accordingly), edit (crop, add borders etc), create (tile a mug, canvas a picture, make a tote bag etc).
• Share - instead of bulky email attachments users can send a link to an online slideshow instead.
• Community - friends can leave comments on shared photos, and vice versa.
• Prints - users and friends can order prints, photo books, mugs etc.

PHOTOBUCKET - is the web's most popular creative hub, linking billions of personal photos, graphics, slideshows and videos daily to hundreds of thousands of web sites, including: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, eBay, Craigslist, Blogger and Xanga. In addition to linking, Photobucket users share their personal digital media by email, instant messaging, and mobile devices.

The company, now owned by MySpace (News Corp) aims to provide the easiest and most reliable web site for sharing and linking all the media for its users' online lives. Photobucket pioneered the concept of "linking" media from one web site - Photobucket - to multiple online sites outside Photobucket. Now, our users link to well over 300,000 different sites on the Internet. Its users rely on Photobucket as the one place to store all their media for free - their photos, images and their videos. Plus, their enormous library of great user generated content make the site a rich place to find and discover new content. Photobucket users conduct well over 25 million searches a day, looking for the latest images to enhance their web sites, blogs, profiles, and discussion boards. Take a look at today's most popular content.

Photobucket is also investing in new services to enhance its users' creativity: their web-based photo and video editing remix service launched in February 2007, and powered by Adobe, Inc., allows users to "mashup" photos, images, videos and music. They also offer dozens of slideshow styles for displaying photo and image content, and in March 2007 they launched a new Video Uploader with built-in webcam support.

Founded 2003 by Alex Welch & Darren Crystal

• 17.6+ Million unique site visitors/month
• 500,000+ different sites with image links from Photobucket
• 41+ Million registered users (up from 32 million at the end of 2006 and 2 million in 2004)
• 2.8+ billion images on the site
• 80,000+ new registered users daily
• 3+ billion media clips served daily
• 7+ million images uploaded daily
• 40+ thousand videos uploaded daily
• 22nd most visited US site overall in early May 2007

SLIDE - Slide helps users publish and discover personalised Slide Shows of photos and other digital content. Launched in 2005 by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Slide aims to dramatically change the way people express themselves and communicate with others. Slide can be embedded onto any website, viewed on a desktop or shared with friends or fans enabling users personalise and share their latest photos, add "visual bling" to their profiles or blogs, add music to their Slide Shows, get notified of new messages from friends, stay on top of news, celebrity gossip and other information, window shop their favorite items from a variety of online retailers. Slide is used by millions of people around the world and is growing rapidly.

SMUGMUG - charges for its service in return for unlimited photo storage, quick e-mail support and no ads. It offers members 26 different print sizes on three types of finishes. It has a full set of collaborative features. The service's subscribers can create public galleries with their photos, or make their galleries private or password-protected. (Smugmug co-founder Chris MacAskill has been quoted as saying that 98 percent of the galleries on the service are public.)

Smugmug lets users tag photos, and anyone, even non members, can search images on the service by typing in keywords. Its tools allow members to tag as many as 100 photos at once. MacAskill has said he thinks approximately half of Smugmug's users tag others' photos. Smugmug members can also use its tools to design a personalized, customized homepage. Finally, Smugmug members can post photos from camera phones to their galleries or to blogs.

SNAPFISH - aims to overcome all the frustrations of dealing with and sharing "real" images - sorting through negatives, making several trips to the photo store, separating out copies for friends and family and making yet another trip to the Post Office etc. Snapfish gives users the opportunity to instantly share photos with friends and family worldwide, enhancing the experience of photography, whether you using a digital or film camera. (Snapfish is a division of Hewlett-Packard, a well respected and established digital imaging company.)

WEBSHOTS - with 7.2 Million* monthly visitors and more than 400 million photos to explore, Webshots is one of the largest photo- and video-sharing sites. It aims to provide its users with a variety of ways to enjoy photos and videos, users can:

• Share photos, videos and slideshows on Webshots and their personal website(s).
• Download professional photos in Webshots Pro Shots.
• Access Webshots on the go with Webshots Mobile.
• Easily manage online photos with the free Webshots Desktop.
• Order prints and make custom photos gifts etc.

Webshots offers two types of membership - Free and Premium - the latter gives higher storage capacity, larger storage capacity for videos, no adverts.

[This section is currently being updated - please check back soon.]