Best websites to store photo albums online

The Internet has made sharing and storing photo albums extremely easy. You don’t even have to buy web space to upload them either. Many photo hosting sites even offer to send you prints, gifts and other freebies if you put up your albums with them.

Most photo uploading sites are free and they also allow you to put coordinating pages with text too. This is not like blogging but sharing your photos in greater details. Several social networking sites also have photo album storage capabilities but usually sites offering exclusive photo album sharing have more features. Here are some of the top photo album hosting and sharing sites that you can use:

• Ofoto: lets you create albums according to occasion categories. Photo hosting on this Ofoto is free and prints can be obtained for low price. You can even send them your film or upload directly from your digicam.

• Amiglia.com Family Tree helps you have eight family members set up albums of 1 GB each every year. You can draw out a family tree also. For additional members and features, however, you have to buy space

• Fotolog lets you set up a photo-blog and though it’s free, you can only put up one photo per day. You can write about the photo on the free space alongside too. For uploading six photos a day you will have to check out a fee-based membership plan.

• Beanpix lets you password protect your photos for individual users and the drag and drop photo uploading feature makes it one of the easiest photo-sharing site to use.

• Flickr is one of the most popular photo sites on the Internet with password protection, camera phone photo-uploading capabilities for a basic free account. You can edit photos and add notes to them also.

• Funtigo lets you design the text, add backgrounds to your photos, edit them on the page with their tools though it is a paid site.

• OnClickPix allows you to upload 1,000 photos and about ten documents for $10 per year. If you pay extra you get unlimited storage space. Their photo editor is one of the most advanced for these kinds of sites.

• Phanfare lets you link your photos to any other place on the Internet and you can order prints too.

• Photo Bucket gives you about 1 GB of storage for both photos and videos and you can link to your social networking page.

• Webshots lets you download a small software and helps you create slideshows, wallpapers and even screensavers. You can also check out people who download photos from your albums!

• dotPhoto also sends you prints and is one of the easiest to operate photo storing sites on the Internet.

• eBoard is used a lot by teachers in classrooms as you can post texts, links, photos and documents too.

Other sites offering similar services include PhotoSite, PhotoWorks, Rangeela (for Indians specially and for sending photo prints to India), Shutterfly (also accepts a film roll), ShutterPost (for videos they charge an annual fee), and Smugmug and Snapfish (accept film rolls).

Tags: flickr, internet photo sharing, online photo albums, photo albums online