New Site Announcement: Online Image Hosting Review

You’ve got a bazillion photos clogging up your hard drive; you want to share them with friends and family, but you don’t want to start sending out mass emails with enormous attachments (seriously, do not do that, no one wants those emails). What to do? Have someone else host your images for you. Online image hosting sites are a popular way to share your photos with the world, and they offer you a cheap (read: free) way to share your images with a few people or with everyone.

Here’s the thing: there are a gajillion online image hosting sites out there claiming to be the best place for your bazillion photos. So how are you supposed to know which one is best? That’s where TopTenREVIEWS comes in. We’ve compared and ranked the best sites in our Online Image Hosting Review. We’ve made it easy o compare sites side-by-side and see which has better features. While all the sites have a free hosting option, we’ve also provided information on which sites have additional features available for a monthly fee. These “Pro” accounts add extra features that allow you to do everything from edit your photos to promote them to other users. The average user will probably only need the free version, but if you’re looking for additional functionality, we can tell you which sites provide what.

There were a few key features we looked for when comparing online image hosting sites. First, we compared the appeal and flexibility of each site, namely what kind of users would benefit from the features provided and how amenable the site is to different needs. Next we considered the ease of uploading and file compatibility. The site needs to be able to handle more than JPEGs, and we like to see batch uploading and tagging options. That naturally leads to a comparison of the multimedia features the site provides. That includes everything from printing options, to scrapbooking tools, to social network and blog site integration, to burning your own CD or DVD. We looked especially carefully at the printing options, because many sites offer easy options for printing to local stores and making paper craft and gift cards. Finally, we compared the tech support options, in case you run into problems with your account or just have questions.

That’s a lot to keep track of, but after wrangling a lot of data, we started to see some clear winners come to the top of the pile. We’ve ranked them all and now you can see which image hosting sites are best.

The absolute best image hosting site we could find was Photobucket, which is owned by Fox Interactive Media, Inc. It won the TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award in this review because it was a well rounded, fully featured and easy-to-use site. It should come as no surprise because millions of people are using the service regularly. We found Photobucket to be so easy to use that we didn’t need tutorials to learn how the site works. And the customization and sharing features are exceptional too. This is the place to go if you want to showcase your photos for everyone and promote them to other people. Photobucket also has useful photo editing features built into the site so you don’t necessarily need to do your own editing before uploading. Photobucket offers a Pro account for $3.95/month or $39.95/year. Read the full Photobucket review.

The TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award went to Picasa, an image hosting site run by Google. The massive search giant also deals in massive amounts of data hosting, so it’s no surprise to see they did a good job with an image hosting site like Picasa. Picasa is so much more than just a website because there are many offline offerings available through the downloadable program. Picasa allows you to upload all the images and video on your computer quickly and then make changes to them, even if you’re offline, which are synced with the online versions the next time you log on. Picasa is fully featured, including photo editing options, and all of that is offered for free. To top it all off, Picasa also offers excellent customer service and support, should you run into problems. Read the full Picasa review.

Piczo received the TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award, falling just behind Picasa despite having a wide variety of features. Piczo fell to number 3 partly because of the limited printing options and some limited service options. But that doesn’t mean Piczo isn’t worth using. On the contrary, Piczo has some outstanding features that let you customize the look and feel of your online albums. If you want to really make your online images into a statement about yourself, this is one of the best places to do it. Piczo also focuses heavily on social networking within the site, so people can network over their images and form friendships with people whose images they like. Read the full Piczo review.

For more information, see the full Online Image Hosting Review site where you can compare services from 10 of the best image hosting sites on the internet.