When you take a picture, you want to capture the moment and share it with others. But how do you share your photos online? There are a few ways to do this, but the best way is to use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Share your photos on Facebook: Start by sharing a photo of yourself and your friends in your Facebook profile. Then post a link to the photo on your page. This will help others see what you’ve captured and share it with their friends as well.
- Share your photos on Twitter: Tweet a photo of yourself or someone else and include the hashtag #photooftheday. This will help other users find your photo and share it with their followers.
- Share your photos on Instagram: Use Instagram to post photos of yourself or someone else in different poses or situations. Include hashtags such as #photooftheday or #bestdayever to help others find similar shots from around the world.
Image available as wallpaper here.
By far the most popular method of photo sharing was to upload the pictures to cloud-based storage. Many readers took advantage of sizable SkyDrive accounts. Dragonbite writes:
Even users who had shifted away from using Skydrive were still tempted to return to it. Jer writes:
I have another (desktop) computer where all of the pictures are stored from mine and my wife’s camera’s imports so if I need to free up some space on SkyDrive or my Windows 7 laptop, I double-check they are in the desktop computer before deleting them from my laptop (and thus from SkyDrive as well). I wish SkyDrive enabled some features like rotate, or searching by Tagged person.
If Google Drive could come up with some similar solution of having imported pictures go to Picasa Web (with all of its features) instead of Google Drive AND enables not having it automatically shared in Google+ then I could switch back. Right now to upload to Picasa Web it is another process completely independent of Google Drive (I could do the same thing with my current SkyDrive storage and place them in both with no extra steps).
If I had a larger space available for Dropbox (2GB vs 25GB is a no-brainer) there is the import feature for Dropbox as well and I would be tempted to use that. But with 14 GB in my SkyDrive it obviously would not fit in Dropbox.
In Ubuntu I would do something similar with Ubuntu One except their web interface doesn’t do anything for gallery viewing.
Shinigamibob uses a blend of cloud-based and personal server storage:
Cons: I really don’t like how Google is slowly stripping Picasa and absorbing it into Google+. If Google changes things too much, I’ll be using my Skydrive. Way to go Google, drive me to Microsoft. Hear me Google?!
Dropbox has made a few attempts to gather the pic sharing crowd. I may begin trying their new services.
Also debating SmugMug for my pro-shots, not food for family pic sharing, but excellent for pro-level stuff sharing.
For more tips and tricks, hit up the original comment thread here.
For larger exports, I use the LR plugins to upload to G+ and Flickr. For insta-sharing, a couple select shots go to Facebook – but those are always copies of whats on G+. The LR plugins really make it easy to keep even the newest edits to my published photos in sync – it’ll update any old photos on G+ and Flickr with the latest edits I make.
The majority of my exports however, go directly to my webserver at home which is running Gallery3 (http://gallery.menalto.com/). From there I can make specific albums and sharing sets. I send family specific links to well.. my family. Keeping the most private photos at home gives me the greatest peace of mind knowing that all my data is safe at home. I don’t have to bother with handing them over to a 3rd party.
Sending single photos to random people is usually via the public folder in my Dropbox. Drag ‘n drop, copy the shortened URL, email it and delete it 2 weeks later.
The ones that ARE hosted on a 3rd party service are always the more generic photos.
