Digital Photo Sharing Online

By Jake Harpin on September 16th, 2006

Photo Sharing means to publish a collection of digital photos and organized fashion. It simply applies to online photo galleries like photopblogs and weblogs where journal entries are centered round original images.

Cameraphones added live photograph with the journal entry while Moblog and Photoblogging provided another method online thru mobile phone. Photo log engines, provide another means of descriptive text for the photo as well as comments by other users.

Some photo sharing sites provide personal image group, minimal web-based image manipulation, categorization “tags”, licensing indication, image research, images in multiple sizes and online organization tools.

Revenue models: There are 2 groups of photosharing. One is free and the other charge consumers directly to host and share photos. The free sites are advertising-supported media plays, like Flicker, Fotolog, Albumtown, Glowfoto, Ringo, Fotopic, Zoomonga, MyPhotoAlbum, Zoomr, Webshots, Photobloggers.net, Shutterfly, Ofoto  and ImageStation, where merchandises are sold.

Paid sites offer subscription-based services to consumers with advertisements and some goods for sale. ThumbnailCafe,  SmugMug and Fotk are paid sites but have limited free version. Smaller site like atpic has unlimited free version. Consumers can share their photos from home through peer-to-peer photosharing with Koffeephoto, piciasa, Pixvillage Onext and Pixpo. Other site like Strikeapoze let you post your pictures online during special projection events.

Media Plays have large number of albums and are open to public viewing and facilities to tag images across registered users and a number of 3rd party interests. Some allows famous photos to be displayed.
Online photo finishing can be expensive and time consuming if you print them yourself, so Shutterfly creates quality prints from digital photos on traditional photographic paper. The customer uploads and orders prints as gifts which are then delivered by mail. These sites offer limited form of photo sharing. The idea is to sell back to consumer back their digital information as prints and gifts but without allowing you to download the full size original images. You buy the prints and gifts, but the photosharing is free.

Subscription-based photo sharing
Those who are weary of advertisements, rather pay for the photosharing. It’s a form of subscription revenue to the photo sharing company, like Fotki, Webshots, Thumbnailcafe, Phanfare and Smugmug. This benefits guarantees to download the full-size originals.

Peer-to-peer photosharing reduced hosting costs and central service still remains. The downsides are that the consumer does not get the benefit of offsite backup, ISPs stops content and contract by network filtering, but there are few quality guarantees for recipients. Provided consumer has high speed connection to the computer with no extra cost after the initial software purchased, with free Koffeephoto, PixVillage. Picasa, FotoSwap and Onext.

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