Digital Photo Printing

Free Digital Photo Galleries

April 3rd, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user’s digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others, as free digital photo galleries or public ones. This functionality is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images, thus enabling lots of free digital photo galleries.

The term can also be loosely applied to the use of online photo galleries that are setup and managed by individual users, including photo blogs.

The first free digital photo galleries sharing sites originated during the mid to late 1990s primarily from services providing online ordering of prints, known as photo-finishing, but many more came into being during the middle of 2000 with the goal of providing permanent and centralized access to a user’s free digital photo galleries, and in some cases, video clips too.

This has resulted in different approaches to revenue generation and functionality amongst providers.

Whilst photo blogs tend only to display a chronological view of user selected medium sized photos, most photo sharing sites provide multiple views, such as thumbnails, and slideshows, the ability to classify photos into albums, as well as add annotations, such as captions or tags, and also comments. Some free digital photo galleries sharing sites provide complete online organization tools, equivalent to desktop photo-management applications.

Many desktop photo management applications may include their own photo sharing features or integration with sites for uploading images to them. There are also desktop applications whose sole function is sharing photos, generally using peer to peer networking.

Basic free digital photo galleries sharing functionality can be found in applications that allow you to email photos, for example, by dragging and dropping them into pre-designed templates.

Photo sharing is not confined to the web and personal computers but is also possible from portable devices such as camera phones, using applications that can automatically transfer photos as you take them, to photo sharing sites and photo blogs, either directly or via the MMS service. Today, some cameras now come equipped with wireless networking and similar sharing functionality incorporated. Photo sharing sites can be categorized into two groups: sites that offer photo sharing for free and sites that charge consumers directly to host and share photos. For consumers who want high quality photo sharing without the distraction of advertisements or the necessity of selling prints and gifts to pay for the sharing, subscription based photo sharing is the natural answer.