Photo hosting: A problem of choice

A great site, unbelievably popular, powered by Yahoo!

This is a really useful and comfortable photo hosting and sharing service. You can link to the photo albums of your friends and family so you will have their photos linked from your album.

You can upload your photos easily, either directly with the browser or using special software (there are programs for Windows, Mac and Linux). You can upload your photos with your camera phone too.

Pros

Upload using camera phones, digital cameras or upload tools
Part of Yahoo so signing up is easy if you have a Yahoo username
A basic account is free.
Password protected "private" album
Share with your friends and/or family and let them post comments
Huge commmunity around the world

Cons

Free account is limited to 200 images, up to 3 galleries and monthly traffic of 20 MB
Pro accounts cost US$24.95/year
You need a Yahoo! account to place your photos even when only using a basic account

Common features:

People can leave comments on your photos and notes directly on an image.
Photos are available in different sizes with permanent links.
Upload photos from your camera phone.
Use a different privacy, copyright and comment level on each photo.
Notes, tags and comments are all searchable.
Organize your photos into photo sets.
Special utility "Organizr" for easy drag-and-drop working with your images (really useful and comfortable tool, but not with dialup).
RSS-feeds for groups and private galleries.

2. SmugMug

The site offers excellent ways to share your pics with other subscribers or just with family and friends, and it even lets you browse other people's collections by keyword, as Flickr does.

Unlike Flickr, smugmug offers photo printing, making it an online service. Nice idea, but for users from the USA and Canada only, because of shipping charges and shipping time.

Smugmug offers four different options for uploading your photos: Windows Drag & Drop, batch uploading for IE (Win/Mac), batch uploading for OS 9 & OS X, and batch uploading for other systems including Linux.

Pros

Upload using camera phones, digital cameras or upload tools
No ads
Unlimitted traffic and storage space
Tags (keywords)
Own 3-level domain name
Photo printing service
Password-protected galleries
User-defined gallery styles

Cons

Trial account for 7 days only
Standard account costs US$39,95/year, Power User - $59,95, Professional - $149,95

Common features:

GeoTagging to see photos on Google maps
Uploading from computers or camera phones
Post photos in blogs & forums
RSS feeds

Good choice for experienced photographers with ambitions. In my opinion the price doesn't correspond with the services.

3. Zoto

The site looks really nice when you first get in there, and there are some nice tools to help you. I like the uploader application, which helps you batch-upload pics to the site. Zoto has some excellent ideas, but the site needs to improve its features to compete with Smugmug or Flickr.

Bloggers will appreciate Zoto, because it ties in to many blogging platforms (including Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress), letting them write their entries directly from Zoto and host photos for their blogs.

Zoto has a powerful gallery feature, where you can even choose the URL for your gallery. You can add photos to it, and you can invite other people to contribute to the gallery. You can choose different templates for your gallery. But there's a problem.

The gallery templates all show thumbnails, which is good. But the thumbnails are resized to 106 pixels on the SHORT side, and then cropped to 106x106. Well, a very strange idea... I prefer non-cropped thumbnails.

Pros