On my trek to California, I’ve been taking a lot of photos. Naturally, I want to share these photos with my friends and family back home, so I’ve been bouncing back and forth between a few different online photo sharing sites. My problem is that there isn’t a single one that meets all of my needs and requirements, which are:

  • Easy uploading of multiple photos. I don’t want to have to sit and select each photo from a file input box.
  • Shareability…but only to those I want to share with. And don’t make them sign up to your site just to see them.
  • Order prints. I don’t want to have to transfer the photos to a CD or memory card and then take them to a photo printing shop.

I had a Kodak Gallery account from a while back, so I logged on to check it out. Then I remembered why I don’t use it that often, the user interface is unintuitive. They do have a desktop app that helps you upload and manage multiple photos, but man, they gotta work on their user interface. At least you can share your photos to anyone without making them sign in.

Trying to be a company man, I took a look at Yahoo! Photos. I still have some old albums up there from many moons ago. They took a unique approach in Firefox, creating an image upload addin that allows you a much more user-friendly way of uploading multiple files. The problem comes with the sharing, which can be either private, public, or to certain people…but all of those certain people need to have a Yahoo! account. I love my friends, and I’m not going to make them sign up for a Yahoo! account just to see my photos, so my only other option is to make the album public…but then everyone can see it!

Flickr has a nice user interface and I really like everything about it, but the bandwidth limits make this less than ideal for sharing a bunch of photos at a time.

Anyone had any success with other photo sharing sites? For the moment I’m sticking with Kodak Gallery as the least of all evils, but I’d be willing to move to something else if it makes my life easier.

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.

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