What’s your favorite way to share photos online?

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We’ve had a spectacular run of fall colors in Northern New Mexico. Yesterday, Judy and I decided to take advantage of the wonderful weekend weather to go up for a closer look and snap some pictures.

When I got home, I cropped, edited, and uploaded the best of them to both Facebook and Windows Live SkyDrive and was struck by the differences in how the two services display albums.

Here’s what the SkyDrive album is like, using the tools from the latest (2011) versions of Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer:

SkyDrive also offers some basic embedding code that you can copy and paste into a web page. The process is much quicker and doesn’t require any of the Windows Live programs. Here’s what the resulting embedded album looks like. It’s the same destination as the fancier album above, with a simpler presentation:

And then there’s Facebook, which allows me to share a link to the album, so you can visit my Facebook page in your web browser, but doesn’t include any obvious way to embed an album in a blog post. To its credit, Facebook makes it easy to send a link in e-mail or to post it to your Facebook profile, which is what I presume they see as the primary sharing mechanism. If you want to see the Facebook album page, click here.

Update: I’ve also created a Flickr album with the same photos. You can see it here.

How do you share photos with friends and family? I’m planning to write some tutorials for the Windows Live products—anything you want me to cover?

Published by Ed Bott

Published

14 thoughts on “What’s your favorite way to share photos online?”

  1. Two downsides to the SkyDrive web album:

    1) It seems to require Silverlight. (Or maybe it detected I had Silverlight installed in Firefox but then ran into problems with Flashblock — which also blocks Silverlight these days — and still didn’t work even after clicking the “enable” button.)

    2) It does that annoying Live login stuff. (It’s a pest in Firefox due to the warning dialog it pops up. Whoever’s fault it actually is, Microsoft’s Live-auth’d websites are the only ones I know of which trigger it. Unfortunately, that’s a hell of a lot of sites now so it’s a constant annoyance.)

    Lately, I just throw my personal photos up on Facebook or Flickr, but I don’t take many or care much about them.

    At the moment I’m making a website of photos for a big group of people — pictures over the years of a friend who recently passed away, to go online for a wide range of family & friends — and for that I’m going to make my own simple site.

    I want something accessible from any browser/device, where I control the quality (and can offer the set in a zip for offline/keeping) and how everything looks, with the ability to include some non-image data… The family also requested password protection. Some sites meet some criteria but to get all of them it seemed easier to just make something simple up myself.

  3. I’d love to support my own company with SkyDrive but having advertisements (especially those featuring Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino associated with my pictures is beyond the pale. Facebook is simply too random for my tastes — why is there a Recommended Pages section?

    From a pure photography standpoint, Flickr is the way to go. Clean and simple and the photographs take center stage.

  4. The SilverLight installation prompt on SkyDrive is irritating, but I could view the pictures without installing SilverLight.

    The pictures on SkyDrive were fuzzy compared to those on Flickr.

    Nice pictures.

  5. I normally use Flikr or FB for long term sharing. Dropbox shared folders for family only shots and discovered this weekend the simplicity of Dropbox’s Photos default gallery view. Simple, drop a folder of pictures into the Dropbox Photos folder, then right click, share gallery, and email that, or drop into a website, I’ve never seen this easier.

  6. I like to keep my photos private and only share with people I want to share with. Eliminates facebook, because you never know 🙂

    I have a flickr pro account and now that WLPG allows me to upload pics AND videos to flickr, it is my best option. They have also improved the slideshow as well as the photo browsing options and that is good. I wish the interface on flickr was a little more “un-geeky” but for the $25/yr unlimited storage, I can’t complain.

  7. Smugmug, the fourth largest photo hosting company…with no limits on total storage..up loads as big as 24mb per picture..HD video yes in 1080 glory (10min / 1000mb limit) Nice galleries, Support that is awesome, prints that are gorgeous.

  9. I’ve used Picasa for a long time. I also teach others how to use Picasa, focusing highly on privacy and public viewing etc etc.

    I was impressed by the simple and fast Live demo, thanks Ed. But I’ll probably continue with Picasa. I’m too entrenched there to move right now.

  10. Flickr. Although I am finding the Skydrive useful enough to not renew my Flickr Pro account this year. Picasa is nice too.

  11. I love flickr especially the new Slideshow. Your pictures look stunning Ed on there. I agree with Tim, the photos on SkyDrive are not as good, and its annoying that you need a Windows Live ID to be able to view them and have to be constantly signing in.
    Wonder what happened to the idea that once you had a Passport ID you could use it on any MS site without having to constantly be signing in all the time?
    I have your gorgeous photos in the Windows 7 theme. Thanks Richard.

  12. Very nice shots Ed. Windows Skydrive works OK for me despite the annoyances mentioned by Leo and others.

  14. Ed,
    Great shots. I downloaded the theme Richard made, looks great! I don’t do much photo sharing but I think the sky drive will work great for sharing photos. I just implemented the Live Calender for a group of accountants and they love it to share their schedule around.

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