Photo Albums That Display Your Way
PhotoSite AlbumBuilder, PiXPO, and Webshots Desktop let you share your digital images easily.New photo-sharing services help digital photographers show their work to the world by displaying their photos on the Web. You can fashion albums and invite others to view them, or allow authorized friends and family to access the latest shots stored on your PC's hard drive.
Homestead's PhotoSite AlbumBuilder lets you design your own online photo albums with backgrounds, mats, frames, and fonts.
How2Share Technologies' $30 PiXPO 1.01 gives you access through a peer-to-peer connection, or you can show your albums on the Web by invitation only. Homestead Technologies' PhotoSite AlbumBuilder and Webshots' Desktop 2 permit you to create different types of free online albums. I looked at shipping versions.
PiXPO 1.01 is a combined chat client and photo-sharing application. With it, you can create public or private albums stored on your hard drive, browse another PiXPO subscriber's album, search for public images on the PiXPO network by title or subject, or provide permission for others to view your private albums.
Adding images to a PiXPO album is simple--it took me about 4 minutes to find, integrate, and make thumbnails of 65 images. Although currently you can only crop and rotate your photographs, the company plans to add more image editing tools.
If you'd rather post quick, casual images on the Web, try Webshots. With its Desktop 2 software, I created three albums; the largest, with 79 hefty JPEGs, took about 20 minutes to upload and publish. At this site, you can view slide shows of others' albums and sign guest books or e-mail postcards to friends, inviting them to view your albums. If you prefer, designate your albums as viewable by invitation only. I used the ad-free Webshots Premium software, which lets you post up to 3000 photos and download high-resolution photos by professional photographers; the free ad-supported version allows you to store 240 photos.
Webshots Desktop 2 software allows you to post online albums of your digital photos quickly and easily, using basic modular templates.
With Webshots Desktop 2, you can zoom and rotate pictures, but there are no templates or design elements to enhance your photos. You also get access to tools for creating screen savers and slide shows, and may order prints. Ad-free Premium service is $4 per month or $30 per year.
Easy Elegance
Using Homestead's intuitive PhotoSite AlbumBuilder, I built a professional-looking, four-page Web site inside of 30 minutes, including time for experimenting with different layouts. The program offers modular templates: colorful, splashy designs to themed backgrounds, or understated, gallery-style showcases that I modified by choosing the color of my background, mats, frames, and fonts. Once I designed and created my photo album, publishing it to www.photosite.com took approximately 3 minutes. PhotoSite offers extra controls over access to your images, including password protection and album hiding.
At the Web site, you also can watch slide shows of others' albums and view and sign online guest books. I used PhotoSite Deluxe ($8 per month or $70 per year), with no ads, unlimited photo display, and a personal domain name. The Plus package ($5 per month or $40 per year) lets you store 1000 pictures at a time. You may store 150 images with the free version, but visitors view ads.
Webshots offers a popular online community of photo sharers, while PiXPO's peer-to-peer service is more intimate. Homestead's PhotoSite combines the best of both worlds, giving you privacy--if you want it--and a very attractive backdrop for your online photo albums.