Some people are worried about free photo hosting so they go down that paid route. One concern is that a free photo hosting company could go under and the photos would be lost. That’s an understandable concern when so much time and money go into getting the right photos you don’t want to put them at risk. Some friends on mine use their business web hosting accounts to add their photos to. One of them installed a Coppermine Photo Gallery in a subdirectory of this website so he can share his photos with others. This makes for a low cost solution as most web hosting companies only charge a small monthly fee.

Shutterfly offers a number of different services under free memberships as well as items that you pay for.  To access the service, you must sign up for a free membership. The membership will enable you to upload your photos and create a gallery of albums.

Your albums are the key to Shutterfly, and you control who has access to each album.  Shutterfly makes it very convenient to take images from your albums and turn them into prints.

The pricing for prints and gifts is very affordable and you can choose from standard print sizes or specialty gift items.  If you’d like to create a mug or note card from one of your images it is effortless to do so.

If your goal is to create prints and gifts from your photos, rather than looking for ways to embed your images into blogs or websites, than you’ll find Shutterfly advantageous.

Shutterfly provides you with plenty of tools to keep your images private as well.  After creating galleries you can password protect them.  Shutterfly is designed more as a way to sell your photos by turning them into items, than a site designed for easy viewing and distributing your photos across the Internet free of charge.  Professional photographers will find that by using Shutterfly they can easily and simply sell their photos.

However, these services are not included in the free membership.  To take access of the Pro Gallery and to begin selling your work through Shutterfly, you will need to sign up for a Pro or Premier account.  A Pro account will provide you with 5 gigabytes of space to host your photos and costs $99.00 a year.  The Premier account has unlimited hosting space and costs $199.00 a year.

The Shutterfly Pro and Premier galleries are perfect for the photographer who wants to open his or her online store, but isn’t ready to handle the technical aspect that comes with that endeavor.  Shutterfly will handle all financial transactions, and will also take care of shipping and customer service.

The photographer never needs to deal with these issues on a personal basis.  Also, you will get your own website address where customers can come and browse through your store.  Shutterfly provides a convenient and effortless way to host your own shop online.

One of the best features regarding Shutterfly, is that they ensure that viewers of your photo gallery store will not be able to right click and save any of your images.  Protecting the photographer’s copyrights to his or her images is of the utmost importance, and the Internet has made it easy for many to take images that do not rightfully belong to them.

Shutterfly understands the needs of photographers and encourages all to copyright protect the back of their photos.  Additionally, they have taken necessary steps to ensure that all photos are protected from unlawful use while in galleries.  Visitors will not be able to print screen or right click, copy and paste your images.

For users of Picasa, staying up to date on new features is an important aspect of using the program.  Picasa is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.

To begin using Picasa you’ll have to start by creating a Google Account.  If you already have a Gmail or Google Adsense account, you can use the same login information for Picasa.  After your account is set up, you’ll download the Picasa software.

Picasa will scan your computer and find all of your photos.  After Picasa locates your files, you can create web albums.  In addition to finding the pictures on your computer, you can also use the Picasa program to import photos directly into your web albums from your digital camera.

If you have a lot of photos on your computer, and would like a fast, easy way to import them to the web, then you’ll definitely like Picasa.

The secret behind Picasa’s photo sharing is the web albums.  You will automatically get up to 1 gigabyte of free hosting, to store your photos in.  One gigabyte is roughly the size of four thousand photos.  However, if you feel you need more storage, you can purchase more.

Picasa Web Albums also provide additional benefits.  When viewing other people photos, you can tag them with specific keywords, making it easy to identify and group people you know.

When all of your photos have been scanned and organized, you can select the Picasa tab, “Sync to Web’.  This option enables you to put your folders online easily and quickly.

Once your folders are established, you can determine if you would like to keep them public, where anyone can view them, or if you’d like to make them private.  Once you log into your web album, you‘ll see a series of choices under different tabs.  These include your photos, favorites, explore, and upload.  The import feature is one of the major elements of Picasa, and what separates Picasa from other photo hosting websites, is that you actually have a program installed on your computer.

Every time you open Picasa, it will scan your computer’s hard drive for new images.

Since Picasa is a program installed on your computer, it is very user-friendly.  The user can control the files easily, adding tags and organizing their images in a manner they choose.

The sync to web and share features allows users to easily upload and distribute their folders or images from their own computer desktops.

Due to the fact that Picasa is very easy to use and provides a number of automatic functions, once the program is initiated, it has become one of the top photo hosting sites and programs available.

You can easily set the program to handle the image formats you prefer, or even disable automatic imports through the tools and option functions.

Picasa continues to lead the way when it comes to implementing the latest in technology with digital photo sharing and hosting.

Owned by Yahoo, Flickr is one of the premier photo hosting sites available.  Owned by Yahoo, it is very simple to get a Flickr account as those who have a Yahoo account can use the same information.  You can have a free account that will provide you with numerous benefits, but if you prefer you can upgrade to the premium service.  The upgrades version costs $24.95 per year and enables you to have greater storage capacities.  In fact, with an upgraded account, you get unlimited access to uploads, bandwidth, storage, and for creating sets.  Also, ads will be removed with an upgraded account.

Yahoo governs the terms of service for Flickr, and if you are accustomed to Yahoo Groups or GeoCities, chances are you are already familiar with the majority of Flickr’s terms of services.  However, it is always a wise idea to read through the terms, as they can change at any given time.  Violating Flickr’s terms of service can mean the permanent end of your account, so always act accordingly.

Flickr has undergone scrutiny, and a bit of controversy, regarding their policies towards moderating and filtering out explicit images.  They recommend that you only upload images that you own full copyrights to, and images that you have created yourself.  The images should be appropriate for children to see.  In fact, they suggest that you ask yourself before uploading any images, videos, or avatars if it would be appropriate for a young child to view, if not, then don’t upload it.  Due to these restrictions and the encouragement to rate images and videos, some find that Flickr provides too many restrictions.  They will moderate your images to ensure that you are following their terms of service and uploading appropriate content.

Since Flickr has strong rules regarding the types of images you post, you should be familiar with their rating terms.  It is your responsibility to rate your image appropriately, abiding b Flickr’s terms of service.  The ratings include safe, restricted, and moderate.  There are only two ratings used to describe and classify videos.  These are both safe and moderate. If you are using Flickr in a country other than the United States, you will need to carefully read through Flickr’s rules and regulations. Certain countries restrict viewer access to restricted content and you would be unable to see a number of images.

It is very important to remember that services that are offered for free depend upon links back to the site to ensure that they remain free.  When using photos from Flickr, you should never altar any codes or fail to provide a link back to Flickr.

Flickr is a great site for hosting, sharing, and displaying your digital photos and videos.  Flickr also offers printing services.  This enables you to instantly transform your digital photos into a number of different products and gifts.  Flickr has networked with numerous companies that you can select from.  Creating books, imprinting images on credit cards, and turning your photos into notebooks and posters are just a few of the projects you can choose.  Despite its controversial moderating methods, Flickr continues to lead the way as one of the premier photo hosting sites.

When comparing the top photo hosting websites, there is no doubt that ImageShack has made its way to the list.  Unlike some of the other popular photo hosting sites, ImageShack allows for the upload of flash movie files.  The service ensures that all uploaded content can be easily distributed throughout the Internet and shared with friends and family.  Free services are always popular, and though many photo sharing and hosting sites offer both free and paid services, ImageShack differs in the fact that most users will not need to upgrade their subscriptions.  However, the option is available if they choose.

With the free subscription, you are allowed to upload images that are up to 1.5 megabytes in size.  The paid subscription increases that limit to 3 megabytes.  Additionally, you will be given unlimited bandwidth and the ability to upload .swf or flash files.   Other premium features include increased download speeds and special tools to make uploading your images and videos simpler and easier.

When it comes to uploading and sharing images, ImageShack provides plenty of options.  To upload your images, you’ll click on the type of file you are uploading.  Choices include image, URL, and video.  Choose your preferred size and ImageShack will automatically resize your images for you.  You will need to install the specially designed ImageShack toolbar for uploading videos.  When your media has finished uploading, you’ll be provided with a variety of different linking options.  These ensure that you can upload and distribute your images simply and conveniently.

One feature that ImageShack provides that separates it from other photo hosting sites is the ability to download torrents.  With ImageShack you can download torrents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Downloading torrents is a very popular service, and many users of ImageShack readily try any of the subscriptions that will allow them to at least test out this service.  Both premium image hosting as well as the torrent subscription service are handled through Papal.   The services are automatically billed each month, however you can cancel these accounts at any time through.

For those who use ImageShack, adhering to the terms of service is vital to maintaining an active subscription.  Since you are uploading and sharing content, you’ll have to make certain that you never upload anything that is copyrighted and that you don’t have adequate permission to upload.  However, you must also make certain not to upload pornography or images that can construed as Spam or hateful.  You also give ImageShack the right to delete any images that they find violates their terms of service.

Another area of ImageShack’s terms of service that they take extremely serious is in regards to changing the linking code of the images.  If you change the link code, their site will lose linkbacks, and ultimately that will cost them in lost revenue from advertisers.  You must stay clear from posting images or videos that are designed solely for commercial profit.  Always ensure that you read through ImageShack’s terms of service thoroughly and follow them completely.

The images are easily transferred from your camera to the computer and are stored on your hard drive.  As long as nothing happens to your hard drive, you’re all set.  However, certain situations arise and you might want to share your photos with other people.  Photobucket is one of the top rated websites that will accomplish that task for you.

Photobucket will allow you to upload your photos in a manner that makes it easy to share and distribute your images.  In addition to photos, you can also upload and share videos as well.  You can upload your images to Photobucket and determine a size format for the photo while it uploads.

This provides a great advantage and makes it easy for the user to ensure that their images are the size he or she wants.  Once your images are uploaded, they will be available with instant html coding, enabling you to instantly and easily embed your photos online.

Users of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LiveJournal can then copy and paste the code directly into their sites.  Blog users also find that Photobucket is a great way for adding images to blogs.

Photobucket is owned by Fox Interactive Media, which owns plenty of top Internet sites.  In addition to Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media also owns MySpace, making it very easy to use Photobucket on MySpace.

MySpace users continually see advertising for Photobucket and the applications are linked together.  Those with MySpace accounts frequently use Photobucket for their image hosting needs.

Photobucket provides two types of services, these are free and pro accounts.

With a free account, you are given up to one gigabyte for hosting both videos and images.  Your monthly bandwidth limit is 25 gigabytes.

You can create slideshows of your images and you have the option of making your albums private or public.  With a free account, you can also set various levels for your albums.  One album might be set to private, while another is set to public.

A free Photobucket account let’s you create your own URL’s so that your friends and family members can go directly online and view your images.  There is also a printing solution, called Photobucket Goods, that lets you choose a variety of options for your images.

You can create books, posters, tee-shirts, and more items through Photobucket Goods.

With so many great features in a free account, you might wonder what the benefits are in a pro account.  Well, it won’t take long for the enthusiastic photographer to realize that he or she is filling up their hosting quickly.

Where the free account provides you with 1 gigabyte of storage, the pro account offers a whopping 10 gigabytes.  When it comes to bandwidth, the pro account can’t be matched.  The free account provides you with 25 gigabytes of bandwidth per month.

That means that once you exceed those limits, access to your images are gone until the next month.  With a pro account, there is no limit to your bandwidth. With all of the options available, it is no surprise that Photobucket continues to be one of the top photo hosting sites.