Railfan Technology > Photo sharing sites

I realize that this may not be exactly the right place to ask this question, but there seem to be a lot of very knowledgeable photographers posting on this forum I suspect I will get some very helpful feedback.

I would like to use a photo sharing web site to share photographs with family and friends and allow them to download the images. Is that possible and if so, which sites have that functionality?

Any information that you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

I use Flickr alot, as well as many of my railfan and non-railfan friends. You can set security to where only your "friends" (people who you have added as contacts) can see or download your pictures. Its very flexible in the way it can be completely open to the public or only open to your friends and anywhere in between. It also shows handy updates from your friends so you can stay up-to-date on what they're posting. It is run by Yahoo, so your yahoo ID will work, you just have to set a password and create an account!

www.flickr.com/photos/trainboy03

Erik

PBase is working for me, it has a Password option and I consider the price to be reasonable. Lots of TO folks on there, lots of other Photo interests on there as well.
http://www.pbase.com/
Check around the Galleries or use the Search function, ie Railroads or Trains, specific locations or RR's works pretty good as well. Seems to make sense to use their storage space so I can make use of it while traveling and also share with other folks. No maintainance issues either.

We've been using Smugmug for a few years and are pretty happy with it. There are several options available to make it as simple or complex as you like.

www.drotar.smugmug.com

"Webshots" is another one to look at.

Ed

Just a word of caution, many if not most non-retail/consumer entities (education, government, large business, enterprises, libraries) block sites such as flickr due to the wide range of readily avaiable undesired content on those type of sites.

Ditto on kudos for Smugmug. They profess a desire to be family-friendly and do not allow questionable content in directories not protected by a password. Photos are backed-up and storage is unlimited. Individual image are limited to 8 megabytes and 48 megapixels on the basic account and bandwidth is unlimited. There is no registration requirement for anyone to browse.

Normally very responsive in support, there are some compatibility problems with Safari in the latest Mac OS X 10.5.6 browser update that have not been resolved for several months.

No commercial connection, just a satisfied customer. An example of a 45 megapixel photo, UP1989:

http://bobsobol.smugmug.com/gallery/1671413_5c3Nd#173212032_ksfiT

All the best.

-riogrande491

Google will provide up to 1 gigabyte of free storage space per email account (doesn't have to be a Google email account) and they provide free software for editing and uploading photos to this space at http://picasa.google.com

The individual albums where you store the photos on the Google website can be fully open to the public, or you can make them "private" and only grant access to family and friends. The URL names that Google assigns to the web albums are rather long, so it is helpful to also use http://tinyurl.com to plug in these long names and make a "shortcut" name (you can make this name of your own text choice, or accept the one that tinyurl randomly assigns). Then give this shortcut name to your friends and family and they can view and download your photos to their heart's content.

I have a "power" smugmug account ($59.95/yr) and am very satisfied with the site. One of the main reasons that I preferred smugmug to webshots/google etc was that I was able to share the full size picture file with family members through the site, rather than scaled down as on snapfish, walmart, kodack etc. I find it easy to setup more formal and professional looking albums.

Scott