Free Photo Sharing Website-Photobucket

I wanted to share with those of you who visit my blog about one of my favorite on line photo sharing websites-Photobucket. I started using Photobucket at the suggestion of friends from my Ebay groups community of sellers to upload pictures of items I wanted to sell on Ebay. I've had an account for about 3 yrs and stopped using it briefly when I didn't pay for my premium renewal of $25 (when I was not working). When you have a premium account you can upload tons of pictures no matter how large or small and that was the biggest plus in investing in a premium account. You can have a non-paying account, which is what my was reduced to but since I had a few thousand pictures already uploaded I had reached my limit. They didn't chop me down, but they did disallow me to continue uploading more pictures. I still had the ability to share but I couldn't upload anymore.

Well, a few months went by and low and behold, Photobucket changed their tune. It may have been because of the other online photo sharing communities like fotki, snapfish, flickr, picasa and others just to name a few who were catching on to the photo community craze and were giving away more bandwith for free accounts. Photobucket got smart and did just that, but with some restrictions. Check out all their features here.

• Free accounts automatically resize large pictures that are uploaded. No problem here.
• Your account can be private with a password or public, your choice. If it is private you can email friends and family through Photobucket and they send an email out with the password attached. Then recipients can view the album at leisure.
  
• Another great perk with Photobucket is they allow you to resize photos that actually need to be reduced in size for various reasons. For example if you have a blogger or fotki account and you want to post your picture in your profile, you can upload the picture into Photobucket reduce it 25%, 50%, or 75% and then use the html link for the blog or save the picture onto your desktop to upload later to whatever site you want to send it to.
• A major big plus with Photobucket is you can send pictures via the internet with Photobucket by copying the picutes you upload and preview. Tons of pictures are sent either in their original form or as thumbnails that can be clicked on and they only take up like 5kb in your recipient's inbox. No more sending folks pictures that take a long time to downloand and then a long time to send and then they have to download the pictures to see them. Nope, with Photobucket, the pictures can be seen instantly. The only bad part about it is if you as the owner move the picture around from one folder to another, you will lose the direct link. Other than that, you have a feature that allows folks to save whatever pictures they want or just view them and that's all without clogging up their email with large files.
• They offer contests that you can win $2,500 for your best shot!
  
• You can post your pictures like Picasa to your blogs and myspace accounts.
• You can post "Bucket Stamps" which allows you to create a stamp with 4 or 9 picture max at a time. Like this one of my sister and me. I call it "Sisters".
  

Another feature is called Photo Strip. Here the photos are displayed horizontally but smaller. This feature allows you to create a strip with 5 or 10 picture max at a time. With the exception of the nappy sister, all the pics here are my creations from photo software.

Lastly, Photobucket has the Bucket Show. This is a slide show of pics. You can put up to 10 pictures at a time in the show.

There's no controling how fast the photos change, but it is continuous like the others. The only way these pictures would cease to display is if the owner moved a picture, closed the account, or Photobucket was experiencing technical difficulties. One cool thing about sharing your photos in this manner is it reduces the probability of sticky fingers taking your original photos. Plus it adds some pizzazz to your blogs. There's lots more photobucket has, but these are a few highlights. Check it out. It offers a lot for free accounts.

Opps! I forgot one more feature: The video upload!!!!!!!! Upload your own video and share it with friends. You can embed video into your blog without having to upload it to youtube, google video, or yahoo video, which folks then have the ability to leave unwanted comments of your video. You can do this even through a free account. Sweet!! This is Red, the steer. That's me screaming. I edited it and I was saying, "Ooooo, that's nasty!!" Ugh!!!