Link: MSNBC - Photos for the Masses .

An article featured on slashdot a couple of days ago talking about online photo-sharing sites. Photo sharing sites have been around for a couple of years. In the past, I’ve tried to use dotmac and
typepad to fulfill my need for publishing photos online. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with either of those two solutions. The limited amount of space that they give you (~200MB) made you think about what you had to delete. Not good especially if you link to your photos off a weblog. That’s what appealed to me about flickr.

1) They don’t cap my storage space. Only your upload bandwidth is capped. With the pro account I purchased, my cap is at a gig. For me that’s an infinite amount of space for a month. I might hit that limit when I’m on vacation and have lots of photos taken but most of the time “no way!”

2) They don’t delete photos if I choose not to continue as a pro subscriber (with a slight catch). From their FAQ:

Imagine you have uploaded 350 photos in a free trial Pro Account frenzy! Your Pro Account expires…now you (and other viewers of your photostream) will only see the most recent 100 photos you published, even though all 350 of those photos will remain on our servers.

If you save the URLs of your previously-uploaded (before 100) photos and your extra photosets, you will be able to have access to these by plugging in the URL into your browser. The catch is that you need to login every 45 days.

Oh well free is free.

3) The photo viewing app is one of the best flash applications out there. It justifies the existence of flash. If you don’t have flash enabled on your browser, you get a normal photo. But enabling flash on the browser is worth it for flickr.

The MSNBC article mentions some of the alternatives to flickr and try them if you’re interested. I think flickr is the best one out there but don’t take my word for it.

My flickr page is here.