Thursday, October 8, 2009

Help A Girl Out!

For the past years and years I have hosted my photos at Kodak Gallery, and pay for their Gallery Premiere site, which provides me with a free photo site. What I love most about it is how userfriendly it is on both ends. Uploading and publishing are a snap, and for my friends and family checking out the photos it's just as easy.

These two things are very important to me. Many of the people visiting and looking at our photos are grandparents and other people who are not computer people at all. So a very easy to navigate site is important.

Here's my problem. Starting October 17 - Kodak will no longer be offering their Gallery Web sites. They have changed a lot of things on their site, and removing this option was one of them. I spent an hour on hold this morning to talk to someone about this, and voiced my opinion - but it seems like nothing is in the works to reinstate this service.

This leads me to the real point of this post - I am looking for a new site to host and share my photos. I am willing to pay a reasonable amount to do so. It needs to be user friendly on both ends, have lots of storage space (at least 25 GBs - as that's what I currently have at Kodak) and allow my friends and family to either download the photos or order them. I would like it to be easy to organize the pictures chronologically too, since that's the easiest way for people to see what's out there. Here is the link to my Kodak site so you can see how it looks - please share what you use - pros and cons, prices, links etc. I'll share what I learn with all of you when I figure it out!

5 comments:

  1. I use Shutterfly's free photo site. You can upload unlimited pictures and create as many share sites as you want. You can look at mine at www.piromsukfamily.shutterfly.com. You can do so much with it and they are always adding new functions all the time. Let me know if you have any questions!

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  2. Shutterfly has a good website, it's unlimited, and free. Can't beat that!

    Photoshop.com is $20/year for 20GB. I've only glanced at it briefly, but it has a pretty slick interface. Not sure how user-friendly it is, but it does have some print integration. I don't know with what services though. You can get a 2GB account for free to try it out.

    Another option is the Apple Gallery: http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/gallery.html My FIL uses it I think it's $100/year and you get 20GB. Not integrated with a printing service but you can allow full resolution downloads so people can print where ever they like. I think they offer a 60 day trial for free.

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  3. I use flickr. $25 a year or so, and endless space (probably not endless, but I've never reached the end!) and VERY easy to use. People don't have to "sign up" to look at your photos, which is actually an advantage over Kodak (if I remember correctly). And you can set things so that your family can easily download pix if they want them - in the original size, or any of a number of smaller sizes. And each photo has the photo info, so you can use it just like Photobucket to put pix into web sites, posts, etc. (not gif files though). And there is a slick little "order prints" button. A ton of photo groups you can join. You organize your photos into sets, and your sets into collections. You tag photos, too, so can organize in that way. I really like it!

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  4. Wow I have Kodak Gallery also & I wasn't aware they were getting rid of the Gallery view!!! I really don't like the changes they have made.

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  5. Also check into Picasa, I don't do a lot of photo sharing online, but I have used them before and I have liked it. I don't know much about it though!

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