Photo Sharing Sites

Photo sharing sites, are websites where a user can upload photos (or other images) to the website, to be displayed publicly online. Photo sharing sites differ from image hosting sites in that the latter would be used solely for embedding on other websites (and wouldn't be searchable from the hosting site). Most photo sharing sites could be used as an image hosting site (for embedding images onto websites).

Popular photo sharing sites

Flickr is a popular photo sharing site currently owned by Yahoo, and has been around since 2004. Photobucket is another popular photo sharing site which has been around since 2003. Despite these popular photo sharing sites already being well established, a new site, Instagram, came along in 2010 and has been a huge success. Instagram differed in that the accounts could be connected to social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter, for the instant posting of photos.

Some of the more popular photo sharing sites, have video sharing as a secondary function.

Warning: Photo sharing sites aren't guaranteed to last forever

Photo sharing sites have been known to close down with minimal warning. It is best that you save your photos on a variety of formats, rather than rely entirely on one giant service provider. A good example of this, is the website Webshots.

Despite being a popular photo sharing site which had been around (as a photo sharing site) since 1999, Webshots was sold, and its new owners decided to dump the photo sharing service entirely to turn the site into something else.

They gave a short notification to users, to save their photos or archive their photos by converting their account into a new 'Smile' account. Some users (especially users who didn't have their accounts connected to their main email address), didn't know until it was too late. Many users were upset that their photos had been deleted. Some of those users had saved baby photos of their children (as private photos), and understandably were very upset about losing those photos.

Fortunately the good people of Archive Team (an organisation dedicated to preserving historically significant websites and user generated content), raced to have webshots web scraped and the photos downloaded. They submitted the huge archive to Archive.org. Those who know their username, can go to the webshots archive and find their photos dumped in a folder by typing in their username.