Put On a Picture Show for the Holidays

You can still create and share online photo albums for free, but which sites will stick around?

Liane M. Gouthro, special to PCWorld.com

Want to connect with friends and family who live far away this holiday season? You can--and it won't cost big bucks or require waiting in that long line at the post office.

Several online services, such as Yahoo Photos, AOL's You've Got Pictures, Shutterfly, Ofoto, Kodak, and Picturetrail.com, to name a few, give you a convenient alternative. They let you can create your own online photo album and show it off for free instead of sending impersonal cards or buying bulky gifts.

Though these sites can be a boon at holiday time, take care when you choose which site to use. It's been a tumultuous year for Internet businesses, and there have been a number of changes, both good and bad.

"This industry has grown tremendously, and we've seen little tolerance for redundancy," says Betty Yeh, an Internet analyst with Neilsen/NetRatings. That's good news: Many of the photo sites have beefed up their offerings. It's also bad news: That site that you've grown so fond of could disappear in a flash. And it's also caused some sites to start charging for their services.

Free or Fee

"We used to see sites offering one of two distinct services: Either they let you build online albums for free or they were geared toward processing and developing film, usually for a fee," Yeh says. "But now we're seeing a lot of consolidation. Sites are merging these two services together."

Some sites that were operating for free are now charging a fee, but not all of them. Yahoo Photos, Webshots, PictureTrail, Shutterfly, and Ofoto are among those that will still let you upload and share photos for free. Most sites will limit your storage to between 25MB and 50MB, but that's plenty of room to create an album. If you want to order prints or photo gifts (think of your smiling face on a mug for mom), that's when you'll pay.

Typically, you upload photos from your PC (or from another Web site if that's where you store them), and organize them into albums that your visitors can click through. Many of the sites will let you add captions and graphic backgrounds. At PictureTrail.com, you can even add music to play along with your album. You simply send out a URL and your user name to friends and they can peek at your pictures.

Disappearing Act

Some sites have switched over to a paid service, but you don't always get what you pay for. Photopoint.com, for example, started charging for its service in July. Last week, the site unexpectedly went down and hasn't been seen since.

"Customers were given no explanation, and it doesn't look like anyone can get in touch with the people at Photopoint or at Pantellic Software, their parent company," Yeh says. "People don't know if they'll ever be able to access the photos they had stored there."

But don't swear off online photo sites altogether. Zing.com went out of business earlier this year but gave its customers time to move their photos to Ofoto.com. And you needn't assume that a site is going under, even if its parent company is in trouble.

Webshots, a photo-sharing site that was acquired by Excite@Home, will still be standing after its parent company's bankruptcy proceedings are complete--at least if Andy Laakman, who founded Webshots and has worked at Excite@Home since it acquired the site, has anything to say about it. He currently has a bid in to buy back the company's assets, which, if accepted, should let him regain control of the site. (Court proceedings are in early January.) If his bid goes through, he says that customers should expect no interruptions in service. And the vast majority of the site's offerings will continue to be free to consumers, he adds.

PictureTrail.com also continues to offer a free service and plans to do so for the foreseeable future, says Val d'Souza, the company's president. The company is considering adding premium services, with more features and storage space, for a fee, he says.

So, yes, there still are some freebies on the Internet. They may not last for long, so you'll want to take advantage of them while you can. And to prepare for the day when they may disappear, keep backups of the pictures that are the most important to you.