Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. The biggest thing to keep in mind while reviewing our picks to think not about selecting the one with the absolute best features, but about picking the one that will be the easiest for your friends and family to use.
On the downside, the private account feature only works if everyone has an account, which means your whole band of friends and family have to sign up if you wish to keep your photos private. While your photos are uploaded to Instagram at full resolution, they are not displayed at full resolution, nor is there any built-in way for the viewer to save the photos at all—which might be an issue for grandparents hungry for physical photos to put on the fridge.
Instagram has been, and remains, a mobile app, and the only official way to upload photos to Instagram is via their mobile app. The desktop site is…lacking, to say the least. Best for: People who want a social media experience centered around photo sharing. A free Flickr account will get you 1TB of storage more than even most prolific shutterbugs could fill up in years of shooting as well as flexible privacy settings.
Photos are uploaded and stored at full resolution, and you can easily configure your account so the viewers are able to download the full resolution photos or at home printing or sending them off to a photo service. Your friends and family can either sign up for a free Flickr account and you can use their Flickr username to manage their access to your photos or you can share individual photos, albums, or even your entire photo stream through a guest user pass delivered to them via email.
Best for: Photography enthusiasts who want to mix hobby and family time—you get plenty of storage for both your hobby projects as well as sharing albums with family. Previously known as Picasa Web Albums, Google Photos is a pretty appealing option thanks to the unlimited storage for photos under 16 megapixels which make up the vast majority of snapshots taken by home photographers and ease of sharing.
Your photos are uploaded in their full resolution and once shared with friends and family via a mobile number or email address , they can be downloaded in the same resolution. Furthermore, you can give those same people upload rights to your album which makes it useful for gathering together all, say, the family Christmas party photos in one place from all the different photographers in the group.
Google Photos is one of the services we recommended in our guide to bulletproof photo backup thanks to the cost and how easily you can automate your mobile and desktop photo backups.
Amazon Photos includes competitively priced print ordering including photo products like photo books and holiday cards right through Amazon with free delivery. For readers who are most interested in sharing photos in a way that makes it dead simple for the recipients to order prints, Photobucket is a worthwhile option. What Photobucket lacks in terms of storage and extra features like albums multiple family members can contribute to , it absolutely makes up for in ease of use for physical prints.
Your family members will be able to not only easily download the original images without an account just using the shared link to your password protected album , but also order both prints and even photo products. We do have one strong word of caution about Photobucket, though.
Consider Shutterfly like Photobucket on steroids. First, Shutterfly offers unlimited photo storage—the promise to never delete a photo unless the customer deletes it is a prominent part of their business model. The only downside to the custom site route is that the only way to make it private is if all users have a Shutterfly account. The Best Tech Newsletter Anywhere. Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, comics, trivia, reviews, and more.
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