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Photo sharing is the publishing or transfer of a user's digital photos online, thus enabling the user to share them with others (whether publicly or privately). This functionality is provided through both websites and applications that facilitate the upload and display of images. The term can also be loosely applied to the use of online photo galleries that are setup and managed by individual users, including photoblogs.

The first photo sharing sites originated during the mid to late 1990s primarily from service providing online ordering of prints (photo-finishing), but many more came into being during the mid-2000s with the goal of providing permanent and centralised access to a user's photos, and in some cases video clips too. This has resulted in different approaches to revenue generation and functionality amongst providers.

Whilst photoblogs 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 comments. Some photo sharing sites provide complete online organisation tools equivalent to desktop photo-management applications.

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 photo 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 cameraphones, using applications that can automatically transfer photos as you take them, to photo sharing sites and photoblogs, either directly or via MMS. Some cameras now come equipped with wireless networking and similar sharing functionality themselves.

Contents 1 Revenue models 2 Online photo finishing 3 Subscription-based photo sharing 4 Peer-to-peer photosharing 5 Web photo album generators 6 Photos classification 7 References 8 See also

Photosharing sites can be broadly broken up into two groups: sites that offer photosharing for free and sites that charge consumers directly to host and share photos.

Of the sites that offer free photosharing, most can be broken up into advertising-supported media plays, such as vMix, AlbumTown, Flickr, Twango, Euro Photo Club, Fotki, Fotolog, Fotopic, Ringo, Webshots, Zooomr, Photobucket, Box.net, pix01.com, ComBoost and online photo finishing sites, such as ImageStation, Ofoto and Shutterfly, where photo sharing is a vehicle to sell prints or other merchandise.

Paid sites typically offer subscription-based services directly to consumers and dispense with advertisements and sometimes the sale of other goods. Examples of paid sites are Fotki, Phanfare and SmugMug.

These designations are not hard and fast and some subscription sites have a limited free version. A new example of a limited, free version is My Photos Made Famous, which organizes photos by calendar date. Some smaller sites like Atpic offer a non limited free version. Consumers can share their photos directly from their home computers over high speed connections through peer-to-peer photosharing using applications such as KoffeePhoto, Pixpo, Picasa and Qnext. Peer-to-peer photosharing often carries a small one-time cost for the software. Some sites allow you to post your pictures online and they will then project the image onto famous buildings during special events, while other sites let you insert photos into digital postcards, slide shows and photo albums and send them to others.

Because printing at home for consumers is potentially time consuming, costly, or low quality, a number of providers such as ImageStation, Kodak EasyShare Gallery and Shutterfly offer the ability to create high quality prints from digital photos, printed digitally on photographic paper. Typically the customer uploads their digital photos to the site and then orders prints and gifts which are then delivered by mail. To facilitate the sale of prints and gifts to family and friends, these sites typically offer a limited form of photo sharing. Because the primary revenue model is to sell the consumer back their digital information in the form of prints and gifts, the online albums typically do not allow friends and family to download the full size original images, and the images may be deleted if no purchases are made. Nevertheless, because the primary revenue model of the printing sites is to sell prints and gifts, the photo sharing service is free and hence attractive to many consumers.

For consumers who want photo sharing without the distraction of advertisements or the promotion of prints and gifts to cover the costs of running the service, subscription based photo sharing services are the solution. The primary revenue model for these services is the subscription revenue from account holders. Such services include Phanfare,Fotki, Smugmug, Box.net and Webshots, all of whom have operated on this basis for at least several years. Notably Smugmug is one of the few services that offers no free service, whereas most services also offer a free account supported by advertising. The benefits of paid sharing to consumers are that the company may offer greater guarantees about keeping the photos online and allow friends and family to download the full-size original files. They are also a great way to backup your pictures as many photographers are finding that they have lost many years of digital pictures because they forget to back up their computers continously. Typically no ads are allowed on paid accounts since their presence would remove one of their main distinguishing characteristics. In addition, some of these sites, most notably Phanfare are now integrating video sharing as well.

With the introduction of high speed connections directly to homes (broadband), it is feasible to share pictures and movies without going through a central service. The advantages to peer-to-peer sharing are reduced hosting costs and no loss of control to a central service. The downsides are that the consumer does not get the benefit of offsite backup, consumer ISPs often prohibit the serving of content both by contract and through the implementation of network filtering, and there are few quality guarantees for recipients. However, there are typically no direct consumer costs beyond the purchase of the initial software, provided the consumer already has a computer with the photos at home on a high speed connection. Examples of free private P2P photo sharing include KoffeePhoto, Qnext, PiXPO, and FotoSwap.

Software can be found on the internet to generate your own photo albums usually to share photos on the web, using a home web server. This is in general for advanced users that want to have a better control over the look and feel of their web albums, and the actual servers they are going to run on. Examples of free software include Umibozu, Picasa, and jAlbum.

Photo sharing sites usually propose several ways to classify images. Most sites propose at least a taxonomy where images can be grouped within a directory-like structure in so-called "galleries". Some sites also allow users to classify images using tags to build a folksonomy. Depending on the restrictions on the set of users allowed to tag a single document and the set of tags available to describe the document, one speaks about narrow and broad folksonomies^[1]. A folksonomy is broad when there is no restriction on the set of taggers and available tags. When there are limitations, the folksonomy is called narrow. An example of narrow folksonomy is Flickr. An example of broad folksonomy is Atpic. Atpic introduces also a mechanism coupling taxonomy and folksonomy where tags associated to galleries and artists are cascadated to the galleries and artist's pictures. Broad taxonomies have interesting properties like the power law.^[2]

1. ^  Vanderwal, T. (2005). "Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies."
2. ^  Pietro Speroni (2005). "On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws ."

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