Best Digital Photo Organizer?

 What do you use?

The service is currently in beta and they offer 4 pricing options: Beta (free), Basic ($14.99 per year), Professional ($49.99 per year), and Business ($149.99 per year). You can also request a custom plan.

Quick initial review:

• I created a beta account and the process is quick and easy. A Windows-like (not they I know it too well) file manager is launched after you log in. If you are familiar with Windows File Manager then this should be a nice feature. I’m not, so I don’t like it that much.
• It’s easy to upload files.
• At the moment (not sure if this will change) you can only share your files with other Digitalbucket members. You can publish a photo by right-clicking on a file(s). Digitalbucket then generates a URL that you can share (e-mail) with others, however this is not the most friendly way to share you photos.
• It tried it with both Safari and Firefox on a Mac and it worked without any problems.
• And surprisingly they use Picnic and not Snipshot for the photo editing. It takes about 5-10 seconds to load the photo into Picnic. I also experienced a number of strange errors.

Summary: Powerful file handling capabilities, and Windows-like file manager interface make this less attractive for casual users. I don’t recommend this as a photo sharing site for most casual users.

• Google’s PicasaWeb,
• Flickr,
• Zoto,
• Zooomr,
• SmugMug,
• Photobucket,
• Facebook, and
• MySpace.

Here is his conclusion (also read the comments for more sites):

It’s very hard to pick a clear winner, so instead, I’ll award a few prizes here. Best of breed goes to SmugMug, and not by a little. SmugMug is everything a real photo hosting site should be, including a plethora of management and privacy tools. The cost is its only, but very legitimate, drawback.Most accessible goes to Picasa Web Albums. It’s just drop dead simple, but at the expense of features. Tags are really a non-starter, privacy is non-existent, and there is no community around it. But if you just want a simple app — internet accessible photo albums with photos within them — Picasa Web Albums may be for you.Lastly, the most powerful free experience is easily Flickr. At 200 photos, you’re barely able to show all of Aunt Mable’s 94th birthday, but with the huge, dedicated community there’s always “stuff to do,” and with an affordable yearly price-tag, Flickr may be the best choice for most of the tech-savvy, and even non-tech-savvy enthusiasts.

Do you use Picnik — what do you think of it?

TiVo announced today that they’ve partnered with Picasa and Photobucket to allow TiVo viewers to view their online photo albums on their TVs. Here is a part of the CNET article:

The digital video recorder manufacturer has partnered with two photo-sharing services–the Google-owned Picasa Web Albums and Fox Interactive Media-owned Photobucket–in order to enable users to surf through their photo albums as well as their friends’ and family members’, provided that their TiVo boxes are broadband-connected.

A release from the company emphasized the fact that photos are viewable in the highest resolution possible, which on the TiVo Series 3 and TiVo HD devices means full high definition.

Here is the Photobucket announcement.

Mashable also writes about this.

Is this a feature that you’ll use on TiVo?

• Shutterfly
• DotPhoto
• Photoworks
• Kodak EasyShare
• Fotki
• FotoTime
• twango.com
• Sony ImageStation – shutting down on Feb 1, 2008
• SmugMug.com
• Snapfish
• Photobucket
• and Flickr.

Do you have experience with one of these sites — please leave a comment.

Flickr is a very popular photo sharing website. You can find a lot of helpful information in Flickr’s own web-site, including this tour. This Newbie’s guide to Flickr is also a good start, as well as theappleofmyi.com, a UK blog post.

Wikipedia is always a good place to find information. This Flickr entry is a bit more technical in nature.

Do you have any good guides or tips that you can share with us?

I also use Google’s Picasa service. Most of these services give you a sizable amount of free storage and then you can buy additional storage.

What service do you use? Please rate it for us in your comment!

Here is a list of the more popular sites:

• Flickr.com – One of the most used and popular sites. Now part of Yahoo! You can open a free account or a Pro account, see Flickr pricing info.
• Picasa – Now part of Google. Also very popular. I use this service. 1GB of storage is free, then $20 per year for 10GB, etc. You can find the Google Picasa pricing info here if you have a Google account.
• Zooomr – Free account with unlimited storage and uploads. Pro account without ads is $19.95 per year.
• Smugmug – Looks a lot like Apple’s web galleries. The site is easy to navigate and the pages are beautiful. Fee-based starting @ $39.95 per year.
• Apple’s .Mac – You need a Mac. Pricing starts at $99.95 per year for 10GB of storage. This is much more than a photo sharing service.

There are many more sites and in the future I will list more sites and review each of one in depth.