I am looking at making some photo albums online and would like some advice from you all on what’s best and what offers the most for free.
Any suggestions?
I use Photobucket. There are some annoying limits on the free accounts (especially that pictures larger than 250kb are downsized), but they give you a fairly decent amount of space and functionality. The interface is simple and the pages aren’t as cluttered as those of some other photo-hosting sites I’ve seen. I just ran into my 25mb overall limit the other day after uploading about 135 or so pictures, so you can get some mileage out of just one account.
I like www.flickr.com. There are some interesting community aspects to it and there’s the opportunity for yourself and others to comment on/mark up the photos.
The downside is that the free accounts only allow for 10 Mb of uploads per month, but other than that bandwidth restriction, there aren’t any limitations on space. Except that you can only display 100 photos in your “photostream.”
So perhaps it’s not for you after all.
Imagestation has always worked just fine for me. It’s pretty straightforward and you can upload multiple pictures at once into a photo album which comes in handy if you have a lot of pictures. Plus it is free and has no problem uploading larger files. I don’t know if it has limits on how many pictures you can upload because I don’t put that many pictures on it. You could try it and see if you like it I suppose.
www.imageshack.us also came to mind. I used them until I got a flickr account, but it’s a slight pain in the ass to upload (only one at a time unless you use your “Credits” to upload batches and then you’ll have to buy more). There’s no limit for hosting, but they do put evermore intrusive text by their images which you are to use through the TOS.
I haven’t tried their gallery function, but it might be worth looking into.