aaron evans

Sharing photos online has gotten a lot easier in the past few years due to the appearance of many photo sharing sites. My camera has grown old (Digital Elph s200) and I stopped putting photos online about two years ago. I used to use Apple’s .Mac which worked pretty nicely with iPhoto. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t really done much with the photo sharing portion of .Mac since I became a member at its inception over 4 years ago. Over this time, many sites have sprouted up to facilitate photo sharing and they the services offer slightly different sets of features catering to particular audiences.

I had largely ignored these differences until my wife got a new camera (new Elph). I just got married so now we have wedding and honeymoon photos to share. Here’s what I was looking for in a sharing site:

1. decent mac support: I refuse to upload images one at a time via some crummy web interface.
2. sale of high-quality prints: If I make an album, I’d like to allow anyone to buy prints at an affordable price.
3. support for modern web features: rss is cool
4. pleasant web interface: I’m a stickler for style

So, here were the sites I checked out and my thoughts:

1. Flickr: Every nerd’s favorite photo sharing site, they have great support for modern web technologies and an iPhoto plugin is available. I like a bit more structured organization and I have doubts about ease of use for the non-technical. Moreover, how can I easily purchase a 4×6 print for all of the photos in a set? To be really usable, you have to spend $25/year which seems fair to me. One thing I don’t like is that you can’t download the original image, only a lower resolution copy. Conclusion: great site for electronic sharing of photos but not necessarily suitable for use by mom.
2. Shutterfly: It’s free to upload as many photos to Shutterfly as you like. We purchased a ‘Save the Date’ card via Shutterfly and were satisfied. Pictures are uploaded as albums and the organization is straightforward. The dark side of the “it’s free to upload as much as you want” policy is the “we can advertise and coerce you to buy as much crap as possible” side effect. As far as I can tell, there is no support for rss. The appearance of the site is fairly ugly and the mac support is mediocre. I’m not sure there is any attempt to facilitate electronic sharing of photos unless you send someone a link to a gallery where they can view your photos in a browser and buy shit. Conclusion: okay for buying stuff but not much more.
3. Smugmug: For $40/year you can upload as much as you want and have a download cap of 6GB. Collections of photos can be easily organized into galleries and the look of galleries is very nice and can be customized. There is a functional mac uploader app. Users can easily purchase prints as they browse and add prints in bulk from a gallery. RSS feeds are provided and you can easily download and link original (or scaled) images from the site. Conclusion: awesome if you want to spend $40/year.
4. Snapfish: (see Shutterfly)
5. Picassaweb: I’ve heard great things about the Windows app Picasa and Google is ramping up a photo sharing site picasaweb. For the moment, it seems very basic. No support for buying prints or tagging. This google service is still in ‘Test’ status. Maybe someday it will enter ‘Beta’ status and be a bit more full-featured. Conclusion: promising but lacks the ability to buy prints, tag photos, or share and find photos from other users.

I forked over $40 and became a smugmug member. More galleries to come.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 8:37 am and is filed under Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.