When you go online with your computer and you want to view a web site, you enter the page address in your browser and the page opens. Wouldn’t be nice if you could put your photographs on a web page that your family and friends could view by typing in a web address! You can if you upload your photo to www.flickr.com.
Flickr is a photo sharing service that gives each member a unique web address. I store photos on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/eddieandlinda — type it into your web browser and you will link to a page of photos I took in New York City last May. Photos can be viewed as web pages or slide shows, with or without captions. You can choose to make your photos “public,” which means that they can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet, or you can make your photos private, sharing them only with people to whom you send invitations.
Flickr is part of the Yahoo family of web applications, and to use it, you need to create a free, Yahoo account. A basic Flickr account is also free, and unlike most of the other photo sharing services, photos are never deleted from the Flickr server. With the basic account you can upload 100 MB (megabytes) worth of photos per calendar month, individual photos cannot be larger than 5 MB, and a maximum of 200 photos can be shown on your web pages at one time. For the price of $24.95 a year, Flickr offers an upgraded Pro Account, which allows unlimited photo uploads, an unlimited number of photos on the web pages, unlimited photo storage, and a 10 MB maximum upload size for each individual photos. Until recently, Flickr was only a photo sharing service, but a new printing service has just been added to the web site.
Smilebox (www.smilebox.com) is an innovative web site that allows the creation of postcards and scrapbooks that include animation, music and artwork and can be emailed to family and friends. You begin by choosing a design, download it to your computer, drag and drop your photos onto the design, choose backgrounds and music, and save the design for Smilebox to send as an email. The designs are free and for one-time use and come with a catch — the Smilebox email will include advertising. To avoid advertising, designs can be purchased for $1 to $2, depending upon the design. Smilebox also offers Club Smilebox for $4.99 a month, which entitles users to unlimited use of all of the design templates.
To wrap up this series of columns I want to offer a storage solution for those of you who are serious photographers. While most of the photo sharing sites offer photo storage, they all limit the size and type of files that can be uploaded and stored. If you have a large collection of photo files that you want to store online, you might want to consider an online backup service. These services will backup selected files on your computer and store them at offsite data centers for a monthly fee — typically around $10 to $15 for 5 GB (gigabytes) of storage. If you are interested in this type of storage, do a Google search for “Online Photo Storage.” Listed with the photo-sharing services of Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShareGallery will be back-up services such as iBackup (//www.ibackup.com) and AT&T Online Vault (www.attonlinevault.com) which specialize in data storage.
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