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How do you share photos?

There are tons of ways to share photos (and videos) on the web. I currently use three main sites to share my photos, each for different reasons.

  • Picasaweb – I’ve been using google’s photosharing the longest, largely because I didn’t want to deal with getting a yahoo id. Which isn’t that tough. I like the album nature of picasaweb, and put most of the photos that I take onto there, treating it like as a bit of a cross between a backup and a social network.

  • Flickr – I recently broke down and created a flickr account. It’s been pretty fun. There’s much more of a streaming nature to it, and Flickr seems great for highlights. I’ve been putting my favorites onto there, so it ends up having a lot less pics than my picasaweb. Here’s an example of a flickr photo.

  • Facebook – while Flickr is somewhat social, it’s not social like facebook. I’ve been putting fun pictures onto facebook. Pictures of people, events, stuff that I want to share with friends. This is more likely a facebook selection:

  • blog – However, if you look at either image it links back to my picasaweb. That may change in the future, at least for flickr pics, but for now it’s really easy to put picasaweb shots into my blog. My blog isn’t really a photo site, photoblog, or photostream. I don’t think of it that way. I use photos to augment stories (probably should do it more).

So each of the sites provides its own value. Picasaweb is a bit more encyclopedic. I’m using picasaweb to provide my blog pictures. Flickr is a bit more photo-centric, either looking at quality shots, quality subjects, or both, or whatever feels good. I guess in my case it’s the latter.

Facebook is more social. It is album-oriented like Picasaweb, but it puts photos in your friends’s and acquaintences’s faces. While I don’t mind people clicking around my public photos at will, I’ll be a bit more selective about what goes onto facebook. I’ll probably not put 500 photos of a mountain on there, for example. But I might do that on picasaweb.

I’m lazy with my picasaweb photos. Pretty much everything goes up there. I relatively few photos. While with flickr and facebook I choose what to upload, with picasaweb, I choose what not to upload. Sometimes. For example, this photo would never sneak through onto flickr or facebook.

There are other photo sites out there. Do you use something different? Why do you use the tools you use?

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