Where would image editing be without the ability to store your images on the internet in the first place? Uploading photos has seen a huge uptake since the widespread adoption of MySpace and Facebook, as social media sites are all about sharing your experiences as images, video and audio files. However, images are very much the main focus for most sites, and there are two competing sites when it comes to hosting photos – Photobucket and Flickr.
Photobucket was perhaps one of the first consumer focused Cloud computing tools to offer free mass storage. As a result, it has a rather old-fashioned interface that initially seems a little confusing to get to grips with. You'll find you can create separate albums for your photos, and even carry out basic editing tasks – not as sophisticated as with a dedicated program, but enough to crop and trim to size – as well as create slideshow presentations of your images.
Flickr, by complete contrast, has a far more user-friendly interface and is aimed at quickly getting your images online and shown off. You can build them into sets, so you can group specific days or events together, which makes scrolling through galleries a whole lot easier. If you're sharing sets with families via email, they just need to click one simple link to access your gallery. We like Flickr, as it's one of the easier tools to get to grips with and it makes uploading and sharing photos easy for all users.
An alternative to both of these is Snapfish, which is powered by HP and is essentially geared around storing your images online with a view to sharing and printing them out. This makes the service perfect for families looking to share memories around the world and as the older generation still prefers to have solid photos, they can be printed and delivered with ease.
