4 Ways To Share Your New Photos With Your Friends

Posted by David Peterson on 27 May 2010 as Tips

There are more ways to share information today than there has been in the history of mankind. As a photographer, your options are practically limitless. You can hop on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, Photobucket, and plenty of others. They all allow you to upload your favorite photos and share them with your friends. So much of this is going on that it seems as though a new way to share pictures gets invented and released to the public every week. Considering this, I think it’s a much more fruitful endeavor to tell you about some of my favorites instead of going over all of your options.

Flickr Is Essential. No More Questions.

If you are a photographer and you don’t have a Flickr account, drop everything you are doing and sign up for one right now. Flickr is one of the most well known online photo publishing and sharing platforms available. It excels in quality, allowing you to upload your best photos at the original size and file settings from your camera. If you want to, you can allow your friends, family, or any random Internet surfer to view, download, and print any of your full size photos.

There is another benefit to having a Flickr account. Flickr is syndicated throughout the entire internet. You can easily integrate your Flickr account with your Facebook, Twitter, or your blog. That way, you won’t have to go through the trouble of posting your photos to multiple social media accounts. You can simply post them to Flickr, and they will automatically appear on everything else.

Facebook For All Of Your Other Friends

Facebook is the next best way to share your photos with your friends. It’s great because you don’t have to tell everyone that you just put up a new set of photos. You simply upload them and they appear in your news feed. You can even tag your friends in your photos. Once you do this (it only takes a few minutes), Facebook will send an email to everyone you tagged so they can see themselves in your photos.

This is a bit of a digression, but you’ll know your friends love your photography when they consistently use your photos as their profile pictures. It’s yet another way to get more exposure as a photographer. Almost everyone has a Facebook profile these days.

There is only one downside to posting your photos on Facebook. Because so many people post tons of photos to Facebook, the site has to impose quality restrictions. The typical Facebook photo is only 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall with 72 dots per inch. This is a very limited resolution when you want to show off the fine details in your photos. As is always the case, you need to weigh the pros and cons of using Facebook. I like to quickly upload my photos just after a shoot so my friends know what I’ve been up to. The ones who are really interested in my photography will go look at my photos on Flickr anyway.

The Paid Alternatives

Flickr is great because it’s free. However, there are a number of other places online that give you more storage and more control over your photos. They’re not free, but as they allow me to upload my original full-size photo to their site, I also use them as one of my backups.

I personally use Smug Mug, but there are others like Photo Bucket and MyPhotoAlbum

About Printing

Of course, you’re going to want to print your photos as well. There are a ton options for doing this, especially if you have a Flickr account or a Mac. Those of you who have an Apple machine can use iPhoto to order all kinds of prints through your iTunes account. You can order calendars, photo books, and coffee mugs.

Flickr users can do the same with their photos. While you are viewing a photo, there is an option to purchase prints through Snapfish. Click on it, and you’ll be taken to an online store where you can order more than what is currently available through Apple’s iPhoto. Some of these options will really showcase your work. You can get a canvas print of your favorite photo, a photo skin for your laptop, a custom cutting board, and much more. The options are nearly endless for Flickr users. That’s why you need to get a Flickr account right now!

Making Money

Another option is to make money from others using your photos. There are dozens of sites that help you with this as well. I go into my recommended options in my Camera Fortune series.

I haven’t even gone into all of the other ways to share your photos. Apple just released the iPad, a portable device that makes photo presentations extremely easy. You just hand it over to your friends, and they can swipe their fingers across your pictures to browse through them. It’s just like giving them a printed photo album.

What is your favorite photo sharing method? If you have a new one, I’d love to know about it. I’m continually amazed by all of the options photographers have these days.

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8 Responses

Bucketry says:

June 12, 2010 at 12:47 am

I mainly use Picasa because of the few, yet very useful, options available.
I use this as a tertiary backup as extra storage is very reasonably priced.
I do wish Picasa had more options for vieving sizes when browsing galleries.

I’ve recently started using http://www.mejuba.com which is completely free, unlimited storage and no restrictions. However, its a new site and there are a few quirks under the hood, but overall recommendable.

Flickr is too “messy” for my needs.
dale says:

June 4, 2010 at 4:02 am

Having a lot of problems e mailing/sharing picctures with Picassa.
Anybody else had this robelm too and if so what did you do about it.
thanx
Dev says:

May 31, 2010 at 3:54 pm

I personally like picassa, where I can upload full resolution photos & more importantly can download in full size. It works as an online backup for my images. Many of us will be amazed of me recommending picassa for full resolution photos as it gives only 1 gb of storage. But u can upgrade your storage at much lesser amount compared to other online storages.
Dev
Aldis says:

May 29, 2010 at 11:25 pm

Well… One cannot avoid someone else using his/her images put up on the Internet. Period. But, if the image is small enough, no-one can use it for any serious purpose. So you won’t lose your money (the one you could earn) while getting the opportunity to publicise yourself.

But as to opportunities for image sharing – I use ipernity. It does not have that exposure level as flickr, does not offer the downloadable software as Picasa, but it is basically free: the free account is only limited to 200 MB / month. No other ways to force money out of you, no 200 image limit, for example. No imposed size limit, while the user has the option to choose whether any visitor can see a full sized image. I have more than 1,000 up there without paying a penny. And I like it.
KathyinNH says:

May 28, 2010 at 11:54 pm

I thought about joining Flicker but am concerned about people stealing my photos. So many people have had their photos pirated that is my biggest concern.

How many of you have had their photos pirated?
Mike says:

May 28, 2010 at 8:39 pm

Like Nageh I use Picasa, I think it’s great particularly because you can tick to keep your photos private rather than go public. If you share with your friends downloading is easy and the quality is consistent.
Nagesh says:

May 28, 2010 at 6:13 pm

I personally use Picasa. Picasa is free to download, and Picasa Web Albums provides 1 gigabyte of free storage — that’s enough space for 4,000 wallpaper-size photos.

Sincerely,
Nagesh
John Rocha says:

May 28, 2010 at 3:14 pm

Hi David

Of course sharing photos is quite a big things these days but I think a word of caution is advisable.

Lots of people simply tick on the box that says “accept terms and conditions”.

If you actually read them you may find that you have signed a lot of rights to your photos away.

Of course this may not matter if they are all Creative Commons but photographers who have concerns about their rights should be very careful.

That’s my opinion anyway!

John