This post was created because of
an email I received from my girlfriend Andrea Hein.

Dear Lois,

We just returned from our trip to
Machu Picchu with my brother and sister-in-law. I think you should do a post about what to do with the photos in a digital camera. I know that may sound strange in this day and age but many seniors have misconceptions. Let me give you an example. Here is my conversation with them.

Me: “Can’t wait to see your pictures from our trip.”

Them: “Oh, we haven’t had the chance to get them printed yet.”

Me: “Can’t you just download them to a photo sharing site, like Picasa so I can look at them?

Them: “What’s that? We don’t have that and don’t know how to use it.”

Me: “If you had it, you could post them to a web album.”

Them: Total silence.

Andrea concluded, “I don’t know if I will ever get to see their pictures.”

I have to admit that many people over 50 are not really familiar with image and video sharing sites. So my first step is to list the best that are available and what they do. I basically cut-and-pasted (copied) the info from various sites to explain each one.

Once again I am offering the services of Julie Lesser and other techie experts who would be more than willing to teach you the process of downloading pictures to a hosting site – you’ll find it is very easy to do. They would also be more than willing to answer questions on the spot.

Take advantage of this opportunity and start experiencing the joy of sharing digital pictures. It is one thing to take a picture and view it yourself. It is a totally different and rewarding experience when you get the reaction of others.

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/

Flickr (stylized as flickr) is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.[2] Yahoo reported in June 2011 that Flickr had a total of 51 million registered members and 80 million unique visitors.[3] In August 2011 the site reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources.[4] Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need to register an account but an account must be made in order to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iOS,[5] Android, and Windows Phone 7 operating systems.[6]

Shutterfly
http://www.shutterfly.com

Shutterfly attempts to differentiate itself from other online photo services such as Flickr by allowing unlimited images at no cost. Shutterfly also claims that “they never delete a photo,”[1] although they have in the past deleted photos of customers obtained via acquisition, as with PhotoWorks.com. The service also keeps uploaded photos at their full resolution, rather than scaling down images or otherwise affecting the originals. But currently after uploading the full sized photo, there is no option to download it by any means; only downscaled photos are accessible even for the member. The only way to get the full resolution photos is to order on a CD. Like other socially-based online services, Shutterfly members can also visit a community section of the website to see others’ works and gain ideas and inspiration for new projects.

Snapfish
http://www.snapfish.com

Snapfish is a web-based photo sharing and photo printing service that is owned by Hewlett-Packard. Members can upload files for free, and are given unlimited photo storage.

Most Snapfish features are free. However, if members want to download high resolution or original copies of their own uploaded images, Snapfish charges a per-image fee for each download. From 26-Jan-2012 snapfish stopped charging the memeber for downloading their pictures.

Snapfish members can share photo albums, individual photos, animated Snapshows, Group Rooms or Snapfish products. Members can share via email, link URL, and to various other web services such as Facebook. Like Facebook and unlike Flickr, a Snapfish account is required to view shared photos. An invitation sent from a member to view their photos on Snapfish would require the recipient to create a Snapfish account before viewing.

Snapfish offers a service called Group rooms for sharing amongst many members.

Snapfish collects revenue from personalized photo products such as prints, photo books, cards and mugs. Snapfish members can personalize their products in several ways such as adding their photos and, in some cases, adding captions or designed templates. Depending on the product, Snapfish USA supports retail pickup at Meijer, Walgreens, Duane Reade and Walmart

Picasa
http://picasa.google.com

Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is a photo sharing web site from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites.

It allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of large photos for free. Storage is unlimited for photos 2048×2048 pixels or smaller for Google+ users, and for photos 800×800 for everyone else. Videos less than 15 minutes long also don’t count towards the limit. After the limit is reached, photos are automatically resized.[17]

Users may upload pictures through a variety of ways: via the PWA web interface on supported browsers,[18] Picasa 2.5 or later[19] on Microsoft Windows, using the Exporter for iPhoto, the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums plug-in, Uploader on Mac OS X,[20] F-Spot on Linux, or through WAManager in the Amiga-like OS MorphOS. In both free and paid accounts, the actual resolution of the photo is maintained, even though a smaller resolution photo may be displayed by the web interface.

In Picasa 3 versions of the software, using the ‘original size’ upload option, pixel size remains the same, but JPEG compression is increased significantly during upload to PWA. As JPEG is a “lossy” format, some picture information (and quality) is lost. Picasa 3.6 added an option to preserve original JPEG quality.[21]

PWA uses an “unlisted number” approach for URLs for private photo albums. This enables a user to email a private album’s URL to anyone, and the recipient can view the album without having to create a user account. This is done via an “authentication key” that must be appended to the URL for the album to be shown. The Picasa Help files say that private albums are not searchable by anyone except the user. Another visibility option named “sign-in required to view” is available. This makes the album viewable only to those with whom the album is explicitly shared.

Ads are shown on the free Picasa Web Albums accounts. The Terms of Service[22] permit Google to use the uploaded photos to display on their website or via RSS feeds, and also for promoting Google services royalty-free. Additionally, the terms permit Google to allow other companies with which they are affiliated to use the uploaded pictures to provide syndicated services. This allowance is perpetual and cannot be revoked by the owner of the photos.

Picasa Web Albums was first leaked on June 6, 2006.[23] When introduced, it came with 250 MB free space. On March 7, 2007, that was upgraded to 1 GB. As stated above, storage is now unlimited for small and resized photos. Users can also rent additional storage space (shared between Google services such as Gmail, Google Drive and Picasa Web Albums) from 25 GB to 16 TB.[24]