DH got a digital camera for his birthday over four years ago and in that time we've taken thousands of pictures of every event in our lives! Our families are spreading further and further apart and sharing every moment is getting harder. We're looking at an online photo sharing service but want to get reccomendations before we dive into something blindly. I know there are at least a few people out there that use SmugMug, and I currently keep some graphics on Photo Bucket, but I'm open to all suggestions.

I'm looking for something that's not too expensive, but I also realize that you get what you pay for, so free might not always be what's best.

Ease of use: I have thousands of images on two computers and some images are multiples. I also have two kids with a third coming soon! Time is something I don't have endless quantities of. I want to post my photos and be done with it!

Security: These are the most precious moments from my son's first roll to playdates at Disneyland and everything in between! The last thing I need is for some server to crash and there go all the pictures of the last dinner we shared with my Papa. Also, I want to be able to control who sees the pics of my kids and who doesn't. We all know how precious our children are and how unscrupulous predators are.

Sharability: Is that a word? The right word? I have family and friends spread around the world. Some are more computer savvy than Bill Gates, some are totally computer illiterate, but all want to see our pics.

Space: Thousands of pictures and for the most part they're all the best of the best. Dispite having several large memory cards for the camera, I delete as I go. But that still hasn't kept me from accumulating so many images. I started with Google Photos, but even that 1 GB is filling up fast with just the pics from DL this year!

Thanks in advance for all the input! I really appreciate everyone's opinion here!

Liz :cool:

As far as sharing and ease of use I really like Shutterfly. You can create different albums for different occasions and if any friends or family want to buy any of the photos they are very reasonably priced. I love the slide show option. I am not the most computer savvy person and for me shutterlfy is very easy to navigate.

As far as security goes, I don't know. I have never had a problem but I honestly don't know if they have ever had a problem. My husband purchased and external hard drive to keep all of our photos and music on, so even if anything happened to the shutterfly site, we have a back up.

They offer a ton of promotions. I just got a set of 20 note cards that have my boys with mickey for free ( $1.50 for shipping). It was just a one day promo they had going. I have also received a lot of free photos when anyone I send the album to has made a purchase.

Good luck with your choice.

I like Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/). It uses your Google login and integrates with the Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/) photo editor/indexer. They offer 1GB of photo storage for free and you can upgrade (http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=39567&ctx=sibling) to 7GB for $25/year.

Instead of trusting your photos to a service, consider storing them yourself:
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NVPlus

For those that don't know, raid is a multi-disk array that can be configured to survive a single disk failure. If a disk fails, simply remove it and install a new one. The NAS will rebuilt the volume on the fly.

If you want to start out cheap, get the unit and get a couple of drives. You can incrementally add drives and capacity one drive at a time.

I'm sure you'll get more ideas from the site, but once you have a secure central storage, you can use it for all kinds of things like music, common programs, etc...

Personal storage has the benefit that you don't have to worry if the picture is 'appropriate to share'.

As for sharing here is a free solution:
http://www.nikonnet.com/share.html

Thier implementation is to provide a client software you run on your PC. You use the application to 'send' the photos to whoever you want. Basically what it does is store them in a secure area and then send an email to your recipients. They use the client software to download the photos at their leisure.

You can share 50MB photos/week.

Smugmug is really nice for about $30 a year. You can upload as many pictures as you like and you are allowed a huge bandwidth to show your pictures off. You can hide galleries or password protect them. If you lose your computer you can always order a backup (at a cost) from smugmug. They also have the ability to perform photo corrections on your pictures after you upload them.

I use photobucket, it's free and easy, and you can create slideshows and upload videos. It's all good.