by Michael Muchmore, pcmag.comDigital cameras just get better and better, delivering sharper images and better video quality for less money. But this also means that sharing your digital imagery via e-mail is no longer a tenable option. True, photo-management and sharing sites have been around a while, but now they have to do more, like support video, and offer more storage to compete.
I've had a chance recently to take a close look at three more photo-sharing and mananagement sites. The first, Photobucket, is the leading photo hosting site in terms of Web traffic—after Facebook, which turns out to be the leading site for photo sharing, in terms of total number of images hosted. Facebook, however, isn't a full-fledged service like the dedicated hosting sites Picasa or Flickr.
There's sharing photos with family and friends, which all these sites are decent at, but another use for them is simply to get an image onto your craigslist or eBay listing. Both Fotki and Webshots, the other two photo-sharing sites I've reviewed recently, are good choices for this. With Fotki, you can post an image on craigslist without even having to sign up for an account at the site.
But those two sites, while good at storing and sharing your pictures, offer little or, in the case of Fotki, nothing, in terms of fixing the images themselves. For that, you're still best served by our Editors' Choice, Picasa, a potent off-line/online combination. Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery isn't far behind in this category, though it lacks a couple of whiz-bang capabilities you'll find in Picasa, such as face recognition—note, that's not just face detection, but the ability to actually find pictures of the same person from all your hundreds of uploaded photos.
