angetenar

Hello all. I am looking for a good website to share photos, similar to Flickr. Do people still use Flickr? I hear that there's something about ads? Also I'm seeing discussion about 500px and SmugMug. Are they any good?

strickerj

I haven't been on Flickr in years (back when it was part of Yahoo!) but as far as I know, my dad still uses it and is satisfied with it. It's been owned by SmugMug since 2018 but remains a separate service. I recall some criticism some years back about some changes that some of their more professional users described as "making it another Instagram", but I don't know what came of that. I'm not familiar with 500x.

Other alternatives are Google Photos, Amazon Photos, and iCloud (if you're exclusively an Apple users). If you have an Amazon Prime subscription, you get unlimited cloud photo storage/sharing included, though only 5GB for video or any other files. I used both Google and Amazon for a while, and their web interfaces were decent, though TBH my favorite was Flickr before their 2013 redesign. Sorry for kind of rambling but hopefully some of this helps you find what you're looking for. I've found that reading every review article or forum post is still no substitute for trying them out yourself, which is a bit of a time commitment.

angetenar

Thank you. Indeed, it sounds like I really do just need to try one out.

DELee

Actually, the recommendation is to try a few to see what you a) really like, b) really hate, and c) what you can ultimately live with.

Unless you have more money than, say Elon Musk or other billionaire, and can then buy a photo sharing company and have it re-write its software to do exactly what you want it to do.

David

DYKWIA

I can recommend Google Photos. I've just spent a few days scanning old physical photos using Google's PhotoScan app. It's fantastic and integrates perfectly with Google Photos.

I also switched on the Face Recognition which was extremely accurate compared to last time I tried that out with Picassa (I think).

DELee

Personally not a fan of GPhotos - we have well over 100,000 images over 3 decades uploaded and none of the tags were kept when uploaded. Piss poor searching and grouping capabilities unless you like to scroll and scroll. Heaven help you if you click on an image from 1998 - you get tossed back to now when you page back.

David
David

allset2travel

+1.
Well said, Daivd.

Try out some of the "free" ones. If you can live with what they offer then you are all set.
There are hosts on subscription basis.
I happen to use Smugmug from a while back. So I really not up to date on all other hosts.

I like smugmug because I can customize my site. I can write Travel Journals (not a blog but share some similarity). My site also has e-Commerce just in case some one wants to buy. I pay an annual fee of $225 (it has been going up). No storage size limits. Smugmug has many "pre-baked" templates that can get you started, and later customize if one so wishes. They do offer cheaper service as well. Absolutely no Ads.

Now for additional fees, Smugmug also accepts more photo formats other than JPG. If you shoot RAW, you can upload them from the field (get another level of backup).

I think Smugmug might still offer a free trial.

If you click on the link on my signature (see below), you can have a look of my site as example. Hope this helps.

docbert

Flickr free accounts are now limited to 1,000 photos, with a maximum of 50 of them being non-public photos, and there are ads displayed when people are viewing your images. To avoid that you need to get a pro account which costs $6/month if paid annually (a little more of less if you pay monthly/2-yearly). These limits are NOT clearly communicated on their website, which is a level of scammyness that is enough of a reason that I couldn't recommend them to anyone...

As an example, I just turned off my ad-blocker and went to a photo of the Yosemite high-country in my Flickr photos. It had an advert for foot fungus on it - including a photo of it's own...

The only positive I can say for Flickr is that whilst they did say they were going to delete photos for anyone with >1000 photos, at least so far they haven't done it. If you're over the limit you can't upload any new photos - but they haven't (yet) purged existing accounts down to that limit. The exception to this was when they recently introduced the 50 non-public photo limit - at that point they DID deleted photos to get free accounts down to that limit.

SmugMug are the same company as Flickr (they bought Flickr from Yahoo several years ago).

lamphs

Any updated thoughts on this topic?

I've used Amazon successfully, but that service is ending on 12/31/23 and new uploading is not allowed now. I tried OneDrive recently, sent a link to just two people, and somehow both people were able to access some other files even those other files were clearly in a different 'private' folder - actually 3 levels up; so I can't trust OneDrive.

I'd like to be able to upload travel photos, add captions, and place the photos in the order I want to present, not in the order of when the pictures were taken. Simplicity for me as well as for those I am sharing with is important.

I am not sure I understand the difference between Flickr and SmugMug (other than cost). I also came across 500px which is about 1/2 the cost of Flickr.

Thanks!

88OUTATIME

How limited is Imgur?

FriendlySkies

I've been using SmugMug since 2010 and have been impressed ever since. Their customer service has been excellent the few times I've had to contact them (once I accidentally deleted a whole gallery of photos and they restored them almost immediately) and the ability to customize my gallery has also been great. There is a lot more I could do with it, though SmugMug works really well for all of my travel pics.

pudgym29

I believe the key to staying on top of your photographs is being organized.
The first aspect of this should be a text file (.txt) of which photos you have uploaded. A sentence in it should identify the filenames (and locations on your storage medium if it goes deeper into folders, etc...). This is essential if your photos go offline for any reason in order to restore them.
That text file should also have the BBCode for each photo - typically displaying a thumbnail [200x200 or smaller] which when clicked on, opens the full-sized image in another browser tab.
Once you do this, the world of free image hosts opens up to you. (I have a presence on Flickr, but it is there just to prevent somebody else from snatching my username and uploading content not even I would. I will never pay funds to Flickr.)
I use a bunch of free image hosts. Again, if one of them goes down, I can reupload the photos elsewhere, and it will not be that many.
I will spare you the potential outrage to merely scribe there are hosts which accept anonymous image uploads, and some of them accept NSFW images. I link to them on my adult-oriented bookmark pages, which are a further link from my regular bookmark page. {I did this a bunch of years ago because I did not want my regular bookmark page to wind up on censor lists, and not getting spidered by search engines.} The services which accept both classifications have a drop-down box to specify whether your content is for general or adult audiences.
When you upload photos to these W-WW sites, I have to believe you know how to copy the output from the result pages to paste into your text file. Once they're in that text file, it is again another step to copy that data into a forum post. That's really it. Just tonight, I restored photos originally posted here on FT in 2014.

pbiflyer

Is there one better for organization than others? This is our situation.
Family of four, two teens. We all have iPhones with 10s of thousands of pictures. We also have physical storage with probably 100k+ of pictures. We also have google photos and amazon photos. Not thrilled with either of these as a paid solution.
So lots of duplicates. Tons of folders.
What we would like would be a place where all of us can upload and access our own photos, kids probably want to be able to have an area where they can only access them (they are 18 & 19, so not a big deal). But we would like to be able to organize and sort and eliminate duplicates. Kind of dumping into a large bin and slowly copying/moving them based on some criteria (time or location) i.e. Europe Trip 2022.
Any suggestions, thoughts would be appreciated.