Free Photo Hosting Site?

Tech, TV, Mobile, Internet and Geek Corner
1
I am looking for a free Internet photo hosting site I could use to post photos along with a several line text description with each photo. The idea is to post some photos of items that I would like to sell and the details of each item. I would then give the link to the photo page. I would like the photos to be bigger than just thumbnails (or at least clickable to larger size).

I have not been able to find anything on EF with the search function (unless I am missing the key words). I have looked at Flickr but I find it too "busy" and not really adapted to adding several lines of text (from the examples that I have seen). So, ideally it would be something simple, clean and adapted to a photo with associated text.

Any suggestions and/or examples would be most appreciated.

2
Picasa or Photobucket are the first two that come to mind after Flickr, although if you find Flickr too busy you might struggle - I find it one of the cleaner ones out there.

I'm sure other people will have some better options...

3
I use a few. Probably in most cases for sharing trips away, etc., is Picasaweb < http://picasaweb.google.com/ > and their tool, Picasa--which allows easy display, simple modification and upload of photos.

4
Check out Zenfolio .

5
As with anything "for free" you do give away some rights to anything you post up on the services ... even if you delete it they are entitled to keep a "backup" ...

Not a problem for just selling things but when it comes to personal pictures you may well think differently. You retain copyright and ownership but in most cases you will grant a perpetual license to the service and it's affiliates to use anything you post as they so wish.

I guess it is the usual balance of business and privacy, so make sure you read the "Terms and conditions" before blindly agreeing.

The choice, as they say, is yours ...

6
http://www.bebo.com

Allows users to share photos with music, and blogs, and draw on members' White Boards.

7
I use www.snapfish.com and am happy with the service.

8
Deal All,

Thank you very much for your ideas. I will do some exploring today. Given that I am looking for someplace where I can send someone to look at pictures of things I need to sell (with the descriptive text, price etc.) I was a bit worried about Flickr since someone who is not used to this format might "get lost" and not look at all the photos.

The more I think about it, I might need more of a file hosting service such as Google where I can leave a multipage PDF that I would make from a Word document combining the photos and the text. Then the person just scrolls down to see all of the items.

I will report back once I have a solution to my specific situation.

9
http://photobucket.com/

10
Don't know whether you're a PC or a Mac user but I know Aperture for Mac (and I assume Lightroom also for Mac and PC) allows you to assemble a display web page within the program, which you can then host. I've not looked into it in any depth, but it might produce a similar result to what you mention above, but with fewer steps. Of course if you're not using that software already then it becomes a bit pointless. Depends on your set up.

11
Creating PDFs, etc with text may be more hassle than it's worth in the long run. I can see you running out of steam after you've done it a few times or after long trips in which you've taken many pictures. The user also has to download large documents before they even get to see the images.

Photosharing sites normally have a caption facility and on upload and automatically resize pictures to provide the end user with the ability to choose the quality of image they wish to view--in most cases speeding up the time for viewing the image and then allowing them to download a more high quality image for themselves.

Personally I use Flickr for sharing specific pictures (categorising them based on place, type, etc.), Facebook for sharing events with my friends and Picasa for family, etc. who don't use Facebook. Even though I don't use it very often, in my opinion Picassa does a good job especially with its tool for uploading images--best of all it's free. If you have a Mac you might want to consider buying the MobileMe service and using the Gallery function within that--fully integrates with iPhoto (obviously), allows video and looks good. I'm sure other sites suggested here are equally as good.

12
There is also a picasaweb upload tool for Apple's iPhoto software, which works quite well for me (though not as good as using Picasa under WinXP).