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By Hiawatha Bray Globe Columnist
It’s mid-July, prime photo-taking season, and by now your digital cameras and cellphones probably need a break. Time to offload those snapshots to an Internet site that will let you look at them any time, and share them with family and friends.
For most of us, the first choice is Facebook. According to an Associated Press-CNBC poll, more than 40 percent of US adults log onto Facebook at least once a week, so it’s the most accessible photo album around.
Yet there are plenty of other options. Some have features Facebook can’t match, including old favorites like Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr, Google Inc.’s Picasa Web Albums, and Photobucket, as well as newer challengers like 1000memories.com, offering good value and sophisticated new capabilities.
For now, Flickr leads the pack. A free account at Flickr.com lets you upload an unlimited number of images, but you can only post 300 megabytes of photo files and a couple of video clips each month. That’s plenty of capacity for the casual shooter, since a typical smartphone photo takes up about two megabytes, but prolific photographers could run out of space fast. Also, only 200 of your photos are visible to you and your friends at any given time. Pay $24.95 for a Pro account, and these limits come off.
Google’s Picasa Web Albums takes a different tack. There’s no monthly upload limit, but you get just one gigabyte of storage. When that’s full, you can either start deleting stuff or pay for more space. An extra 25 gigabytes cost $2.49 a month.