Here’s the short version: Free photo sites have limits. If you shoot and share lots of photographs, you’ll hit those limits sooner than you might think. When you reach those limits you have two choices: upgrade to a paid plan on that same site – which saves you from having to upload your pictures to another site – or look for a better deal somewhere else.
Some people like charts, so for you folks there’s a chart below. Following that, I’ve itemized the free plans and paid upgrade options for 3 popular photo sharing sites: Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Photobucket, and I’ve thrown in what you could get with a pay-only site.
The pay-only site I will use as an example is Smugmug, a site that serves both amateur and professional photographers. There may be other sites with offerings similar to Smugmug, but this one example of Smugmug is hopefully enough to support the conclusion that you should consider starting with a pay-only site even if you choose a site other than Smugmug.
As both a testimonial and disclosure, I can personally recommend Smugmug, because I am a very happy Smugmuger.
Here is a table summarizing the terms of these free and paid plans:
| Plan | Free | Paid | Notes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| storage | traffic | storage | traffic | $ yearly | notes… | |
| Flickr | Unlimited, but originals not accessable unless you upgrade to paid plan | unlimited, but 100 mb monthly upload limit | unlimited | unlimited | $ 24.95 | Free Plan: If your free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it will be deleted. Only 200 most recent photos will be displayed, Advertisments while browsing, 3 photoset limit Paid Plan: 60 group pools, views and referrer stats, no advertising |
| Picasa Web Albums | 1 gb | unlimited | see notes | unlimited | see notes | 10 gb: $20 yearly 40 gb: $75 yearly 150 gb: $250 yearly 400 gb: $500 yearly. |
| Photobucket | 1 gb | 25 gb | 10 gb | unlimited but see note | $ 39.95 | Free Plan: Image sized to max 1024×768 pixels Paid Plan: Photobucket reserves the right to disable direct linking on accounts that use excessive bandwidth or otherwise abuse the system, Image size limit 5MB or 2240 x 1680. |
| Smugmug Standard | n/a | n/a | unlimited | unlimited | $ 39.95 | no ads, multiple sizes, themes, prints, gifts, your url option, feeds, api, subcategories, more sizes, and more |
Flickr: What’s most noticeable with Flickr’s free plan is that you can only see the 200 latest photos, and your photos will disappear if your account is inactive for 90 days. For many if not most people, this is very restrictive. The paid plan offers unlimited storage and unlimited traffic, and is only $24.95 yearly.
Picasa: Picasa’s free plan offers a storage limit of 1 gigabyte (1000 megabytes) and unlimited bandwidth. The paid plan depends on the amount of storage you buy. For $20 a year you get 10 gigabytes. If you exceed the 10 gigabytes, the next higher plan is a whopping $70 a year.
Photobucket: Photobucket’s free plan also provides a gigabyte of storage, but restricts traffic to 25 gigabytes a month. Like Picasa, the paid plan is $39.95 yearly for 10 gigabyes of storage. But unlike Picasa, they don’t seem to offer anything beyond 10 gigabytes of storage. Even on a paid plan, they reserve the right to restrict your bandwitdh.
Well…
You may be thinking you will never need more than 10 gigabyes of storage. But image size is growing with each generation of cameras, bandwidth is getting faster and cheaper, and people are taking more pictures because it’s just so easy with digital cameras. If you think of all the birthdays, soccer games, and holidays each year, it may not take long to exceed 10 gibabytes. So although Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket all provide reliable photo sharing for free, you’re likely to outgrow those limits soon. Picasa’s paid plan can get expensive if you exceed 10 gigabytes, and Photobucket’s doesn’t seem to offer a plan that lets you exceed 10 gigabytes. Flickr’s paid plan, on the other hand, offers unlimited storage and bandwidth for $24.95 a year.
Flickr definitely offers the best free-to-paid service cost assumption but…if you start with a paid plan that offers better features, you won’t be bothered with trying to move tons of data to the better site, or be stuck with the headache of managing your photos across multiple sites. And if you happened to have started with Picasa, you may save BIG money in the long run by switching to another site.
Smugmug’s standard plan is $39.95 a year, which is only $15 a year more than the both the Flickr plan and Picasa’s starting rate, and is the same price as Photobucket’s. For this price, Smugmug provides unlimited storage and unlimited traffic – just like Flickr. What you get for the extra buck and a quarter a month is: a much more elegant website, courteous, prompt customer support from real people (who likes sifting through page after page of faq’s??) better presentation options – you can select from many themes, better tagging and organization. It’s easier to re-organize, has better privacy options, and some really nice printing and gifts. Smugmug boasts “more than 80% of customers who joined us in the last 5 years never left.” For a paid hosting site swimming in a sea of free service providers, that’s a pretty strong testament to their customer service!
I have used Flickr and Picasa in the past, and have been a happy Smugmug user for about 20 months. Smugmug’s service and support are second to none that I have encountered. If you are looking for a photo sharing site you won’t outgrow, consider Smugmug. You can try it free for 14 days, with no credit card required.
Tags: flickr, photobucket, picasa, smugmug
November 21st, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Something to think about. But you left out pbase and shutterfly.
November 21st, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I like kodak.
November 22nd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Sorry, wrong post