Sharing vacation photos is as easy as aim, shoot and upload

My Kodak Brownie camera traveled everywhere with me in my youth. It would return from family vacations and summer camp loaded with pictures. Once home, I’d run to a family-owned drugstore and drop off the film to be developed, always eager to see the results.

Nowadays, that little Brownie has been replaced by an even smaller Nikon digital, film has been replaced by megapixels, and, thanks to the Internet, I can share with friends and family images from vacations that are not even over yet.

“Travel is maybe our biggest category,” says Chris MacAskill, co-founder and president of a pay-to-use photo-sharing website called Smugmug, www.smugmug.com.

Sites such as Smugmug allow users to upload digital photos from cameras or cellphones for online display. They are among the Web’s most popular sites.

There are dozens of photo-sharing websites. The top five in April, according to online media tracking service Nielsen/NetRatings: Webshots, at www.webshots.com; Yahoo!Photos, photos.yahoo.com; KodakEasy-Share Gallery, at www.kodakgallery.com; PhotoBucket, www.photobucket.com; and AOL You’ve Got Pictures. (AOL members click on Picture Center.)

All offer free photo-sharing albums and generate revenue through advertising and selling prints. Some allow public galleries, open for the world to see; others require users to invite viewers through e-mail. Some of the sites collect the e-mail addresses and use them to send solicitations.

Webshots is one of the pioneers in the field and has the largest photo-sharing website audience, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It claims to have more than 200 million photos.

Uploading photos onto a website from an Internet cafe is a good way to protect them from being lost or stolen while you’re traveling and to clear the memory card for more pictures.

I decided to test how intuitive these sites are to use and uploaded photos from a recent trip onto Webshots, Yahoo, KodakGallery, AOL and Smugmug.

I downloaded software off each site to allow easier uploads of my photos. Webshots was the most difficult of the bunch for uploading photos.

Most of the sites displayed photos in “thumbnail” galleries, and clicking on a photo enlarged it (except on AOL, which shows one larger photo at a time in a slide-show format).

AOL and Smugmug, both subscriber-based services, do not have ads in their galleries. Webshots had the most obtrusive ads. The site also notes that if your photos go unviewed for six months, they will be deleted.

Smugmug says it will never delete your photos, and I’ve had pictures on display at AOL for longer than I can remember.

My favorite site was Smugmug. It took me back to my youth and photo processing at that family-owned drugstore.

Smugmug, family owned and operated, was started in 2002 by MacAskill and his son Don. With seven full-time staffers, 62,000 members and 22.6 million photos on the site, it is dwarfed by the bigger players in the field.

“Photography has been a longtime passion for me and my family,” said Chris MacAskill. “Our customers love that we’re a family company, not just an afterthought of a big portal.”

So why pay for something you can get for free? Because, for about $30 per year, you won’t get ads cluttering your gallery, and the e-mail addresses of visitors to your photos are not collected.

And I like Smugmug’s layout of photos in the gallery, as well as the quality of the images on the screen and the large preview photo next to the smaller thumbnail layout.

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Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.