Keeping Family Photos Organized

July 13, 2010, By Jonathan Wylie 3 comments

An online photo organizer is a great way to sort and share your family photos. However, with so many to choose from, how do you decide which one is right for you?

Flickr

A good place to start is Flickr.com. This online photo sharing site has grown to become something of a cult phenomenon, and it is one of the most used photo sites in the world. A free account will allow you 100Mb of photo uploads each month, and you can quickly and easily create online albums to organize your images. You can send photos to your Flickr account from your desktop, by e-mail, or via your cell phone. Privacy settings can be applied to your photos so that you can choose who has access to them, while geotagging will place your photos on a map and remind you and others where they were taken.

Zenfolio or SmugMug

If, however, you are looking for a slicker way to display your photos, and would prefer the look of your very own photo website, then check out Zenfolio or SmugMug. Both these sites offer website templates that have built in photo galleries for you to store and display your family photos. You can add albums to your website, tag your pictures, and organize them almost any way you want.

A standard Zenfolio account will cost around $25 a year and will give you 2Gb of online storage, plus an additional 1Gb for every year you renew your account. The standard SmugMug account is more expensive at $39.95, but it allows you an unlimited amount of space to upload and store your photos. Both of these sites also allow friends and family to order prints for themselves, and each will showcase your photos with a style that is hard to match. You can sign up for a free two-week trial to try either site before you commit to buy.

Photobucket

Photobucket is another popular online photo organizer. A free account affords you 500Mb of online space, but that still translates to around 5000 photos because of their compressed file size limit. However, $24.95 a year lifts the storage cap and allows high resolution images to be uploaded. Photos and videos can be sorted into albums in much the same way as with other sites, while extras include a built-in photo editor, hundreds of album themes and a photo gift store. But, Photobucket really stands out with its social network integration. It has easy one-click sharing for posting your photos to social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and more.

Picasa

Finally, Google's Picasa offers photographers the option of organizing their photos online, on their computer, or both. Picasa is a free download which will scan your computer and automatically sort your pictures into albums for you. It has a great free image editor, but is also capable of uploading your photos to Picasa's web albums. You can upload them as they are organized on your computer, or create new albums specifically for your online photos. There is 1Gb of online storage for free, but for only $5 a year you can boost this to hefty 20Gb.

At the end of the day, choosing an online photo organizer is often a matter of personal preference. All of the websites above are more than capable of organizing your images the way you want them, but some will appeal more to your sense of style than others. So, try some out and see which one suits you best, and before you know it you will wonder how you managed without one for so long.

Jonathan Wylie is a certified teacher and freelance writer. He is a contributor to Six Apart Media.