Free Image Hosting Forever!  Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket which one?

Digital Camera's are getting cheaper, despite inflation. The camera, because of smartphones has reached to almost everyone's pocket and enthusiasts are going to buy DSLRs. People love Photography. When the time to share photographs comes, why not to get worldwide exposure in photo blogs and photo sharing sites?

Also, read:

We are going to talk about the three most popular image hosting solutions. These three are very reputed image solutions and serve the different purposes. We also compare them in the end.
         

20 MB of image upto 1000 MB upload is allowed in the free picasaweb account. However, you can pay for more space. (People open several accounts which is a violation of terms)
Picasa is more SEO friendly, I will talk about that in my next blog.

 1. Flickr

If you upload an image in your blog, then you must host the same to flickr also and put a back link as the description of your image. Which will definitely help you drive more traffic to your website :) You can upload upto 100 MB per month. If it's not enough you can pay for the PRO account in flickr.
People can also directly comment on the photos selecting any part and tag it. It is visible only when the mouse is hovered over the image. That makes active conversation with your friends.




Well as usual at this site you can see  comparison of search volume index among these sites. It's clearly visible that photobucket had been being searched most in the past three years, now picasaweb is leading the market.





Comparison

Photo bucket has been one of the most popular services in the previous year but nowadays Flickr and Picasa are dominating in the market. One side where Flickr makes the images more searchable in the top search engines. It's widely used by professional photographers who prefer it for online exhibition instead of regulars. While Picasa is faster and all the images which are uploaded from Blogger.com are directly saved in Picasa.

Picasa and Flickr both have a good uploading client. They provide the additional touch up to the images before publishing. Flickr upload client is not very efficient. Picasa has a very good uploading client which can be used for bulk uploading, scheduled uploading, and nice editing features.
Geotagging -Both Picasa and Flickr allow to geotag the images on the map.
If you want your pictures to appear on Google Earth then visit Panoramio.com. Upload images up to 2GB and geotag them. Then they will be visible to all Google Earth users :)

This blog will help newbies. I will write my next post for bloggers. So what's your favorite Image Solution? If you have any other, please mention in the comment field.

Shekhar Sahu