Image Sharing

 

What Does Image Sharing Mean?

Taking pictures is easier than ever before. Many of us still remember the days when we would take pictures on a camera, wait for the roll to be filled, run it to the store and wait for it to be developed so we could see the pictures for the first time…and out of your 24 – 36 pictures, only 2 or 3 wouldn’t have red eyes or blurry people. Thankfully, technology has developed and we can now take thousands of pictures in the blink of an eye and pick and choose which pictures we like. In this digital age, we have the capability of editing and applying filters as well to make our pictures appear flawless and perfect, and all right from the palm of our hand.

So, what do we do with all of the amazing pictures that we have? We share them with other people of course. Image sharing is how we share our photos with the outside world and communicate with each other. Gone are the days of tediously writing a handwritten letter and waiting days or months for it to arrive in the mail. Nowadays, most people don’t even text actual words to each other since emojis, GIF, and pictures have replaced the written word in communicating our feelings and emotions. The big question is, what do we do with all of our pictures, to be able to share and store them, and, what is the easiest option to do so?

What Is Tinypic?

Tinypic.com was a free photo organization and sharing site that allowed its users to share their images through email and social media. It has since closed its operations, due to an inability to support a free digital service, when all of its revenue came through on-site ads that were constantly declined. This leaves a lot of people looking for alternatives. Here are some great alternatives that might work for you, no matter what your goals are!

Image Sharing For The Regular Person

There are plenty of options out there, to satisfy everyone; from a professional who sells their art for a living online, to a social media icon with thousands of followers who needs their pictures to be the highest quality, to the average person who just wants to share their pictures with their friends and family and save the pictures to look at them for years to come.

Instagram

For the average person who just wants to share their pictures with family and friends, Instagram is the best and most obvious choice. It’s free, it’s easy, and it has billions of users, with 500 million of those users logging in every day. All you need to share photos or videos on Instagram is to download the app on your phone, create an account, and you can begin uploading and sharing. You can upload as many as 10 photos per post, and write a little blurb about the pictures, as well as tag other people and even have the option to share your post to your Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr accounts. Instagram also has the ability to post pictures as a story that is only available for 24 hours, Snapchat-style, which bumps it to the top of the page, above the regular feed of pictures that are available forever. It is easily accessible since it is on your mobile phone, and allows you to post pictures from anywhere in the world.

The downside to Instagram however, is its focus is more on sharing photos through social media, than on storing your cherished photo memories in an easy to access platform. Since all of your posts are sorted chronologically, you are stuck with endless scrolling to find a picture from several years ago, since there is no option to filter by date or subject.

For The Artist

For the artist who is looking to show off their stuff and inspiration, there are many options to store your lovely photos, and potentially even be able to sell your work.

Imgur

Imgur is the perfect location to not only upload and share pictures, but also to upload and share GIFs. This free image hosting website is wonderful because it allows you to store as many pictures as you want, as well as crop and resize your photos right there on the site. Imgur allows you to quickly upload your pictures or GIFs, while not losing any of the quality or resolution, and then easily share them online or on social networking platforms. You do not need an account to upload photos to Imgur and it has the capability of sharing pictures with anyone, not just people using Imgur. With Imgur you can either upload and post the photos or GIFs directly to the Imgur site or phone app, or, they also give you a unique URL you can post to a different favorite social site. The max file size available on Imgur is 20 MB for all non-animated GIF images, and 200 MB for any uploaded animated GIF images. Imgur also includes a meme generator, and the ability to filter other user’s post by Most Viral to keep up to date on what is going on. You can also track your own images, to keep tabs of who is looking at your photos and when. The downside to Imgur is it does not support some uploading files such as PSDS, and only allows you to upload 50 images every hour. So, if you are trying to dump 3,000 pictures from your latest photoshoot or vacation, you will need to space out uploading all of your photos to be stored on their site. Overall though, Imgur is very easy to use and not only allows you to upload, store, and share photos and GIFs to your heart’s content, but you can also easily see what other people are posting by what is currently trending.

Flickr

Flickr claims to have the largest community of photographers online. They are one of the oldest and widely known social networks for sharing photos. This service died down for a bit when Facebook and Instagram made their appearances, but it is now making a comeback with more than 87 million users and more than 3.5 million new images uploaded daily. It allows you to host your images for free, as well as has wonderful editing tools and filters to touch up your photos before sharing them, as well as easily organizing and storing them in albums. Flickr has a ton of storage space, with up to 1,000 photos allowed on free accounts, and gives you unlimited storage for only $5.99 a month. It even allows you to view your images with a resolution up to 5K, and you have the ability to stream videos up to 10 minutes in length. If you are going to use Flickr as your photo storing and photo sharing hub, make sure you take advantage of the Flickr mobile app since it has by far the best features that Flickr offers.

ImageShack

ImageShack is the picture-perfect place -no pun intended- to store all of your high-resolution photos in a secure place, in the cloud. ImageShack is a great place to host your photos for your business, since it gives you the option to upload large amounts of pictures and opt to share a single photo, or, an entire album. And, if you don’t want anyone to see your photos just yet until they are perfect, there is also a privacy setting where you can upload the pictures and only you see them until you decide to share the photos. ImageShack’s interface is very similar to Pinterest, with the pictures being featured in a classic pinboard-style. They offer 10 GB of space per month for the free 30 day trial of the premium features, as well as for all non-premium users, with various storage sizes available depending on the package you choose for various fees per month.

Photobucket

With 90 million users worldwide Photobucket has many wonderful features. It has many editing tools that are not seen in many other places, such as a smart color brush, which can add color back into selective portions of a black and white photo. You can also add organizational tags to be able to easily find your pictures later. One of the unique features of Photobucket is the many options to print your cherished photos. You can buy individual prints, photo books -starting at $1.99-, or even fleece blankets or phone cases with your photos on them, to give the perfect gift to others. Photobucket also provides various storage options, with the free version offering storage space of up to 250 photos. The biggest downside to Photobucket’s free version is the intrusive ads, with so many pop-ups that you can’t even see your own pictures most of the time. The way to get around this though is to pay for one of the three different ad-free options, with the Beginner package offering 25 GB for $5.99 a month, the Intermediate service offering 250 GB for $7.99 a month, and the Expert plan offering unlimited storage for only $12.99 a month.

For The Professional Photographer

For the professional photographer who is trying to make a living off of their photography, there is one option that really stands out, SmugMug.

SmugMug

SmugMug offers unlimited photo storage, so you never have to pick and choose which photos to keep and which to toss. It also offers various privacy and security controls, to allow you to share your pictures only with the people that you want to. While it does not replace Photoshop’s editing tools, it does offer a good range of editing tools to fix the most common photography issues in a pinch. SmugMug also gives you the capability of creating custom homepages (such as ambers.smugmug.com) to display your photos, as well as they offer many different unique design templates. The feature that makes SmugMug stand out, in addition to the custom homepages and unique design templates, is the amount of storage space it provides. While SmugMug is a bit more expensive than other image sharing platforms, with the cheapest package costing $5.99 a month and the most expensive, the Pro plan costing $30 a month with access to professional features such as ecommerce tools, it is well worth the extra cost for the level of quality and unlimited storage space you receive.

For Organization

Whether you are just sharing images with family and friends on social media from your latest fun adventure, or if you are trying to sell your photography for your business, you want to be able to easily organize and store your photos in an easy to access location. 

Google Photos

Google Photos is by far the easiest way to have unlimited photo storage for free. You can also upload videos that are in 1080p HD to Google Photos. With your Google account you can automatically back up any photos you take on your phone and then easily upload them in large quantities to your computer. Or, if you have a free Google Photo app on your phone, you can set it up so it will automatically upload any photos you take with a device and it will be synced to your account and you can access the images from anywhere. One nice feature about Google Photos is the ability to organize your photos and then find them later using visual search. Just like with anything regarding Google, the more you use it, the more it learns about your habits and it will automatically work on organizing your photos for you by tagging them with a location and date, and will even identify and sort your pictures based on the people in them. There is also a Google Photo Assistant option that will automatically create photo books, movies, collages, and animations from your photos. Google Photos makes your photos and memories easy to share and look back on. 

Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage provider that is free up to 2 GB of space. One of the benefits of Dropbox is the ability to store all different kinds of file formats, in addition to photos. Once your images or files are uploaded, you can choose to receive a shareable link to a single photo file, or to the entire folder to share with others. There is even an option that allows you to click on the arrow that appears beside any file name and make it available to be viewed offline as well, even when you don’t have internet access. While it is easy to share images on Dropbox, its biggest downside is there is no editing, tagging, or printing option available within the application. So, while it is a good location for photographers to temporarily back up photos, it is not a great permanent option due to not being able to edit, as well as the small amount of storage, with only 2 GB available of free storage.

Conclusion: What Is The Easiest Photo Sharing Site?

As you can see, the question of what is the easiest image sharing site is a difficult question to answer. It really depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking to simply share your photos with family and friends on a social media platform, then Instagram or Flickr may be the way to go for you. If you are looking for something more professional, you will want to consider something like SmugMug, ImageShack, or Dropbox. If you are wanting something that easily stores your photos, while still making it easy to share them with others, then Google Photos is your best option. Regardless of what your image sharing goals are, in our wonderful modern world of technology, there is an option for everyone to edit, store, and share your images, connecting with those around you.