In the SF tech bubble that I live in, most of the talk about photo sites has been centered on Flickr. In fact, you could get the impression from most people I meet that Flickr is the ONLY site at which you can share and store photos.

Why Use a Photo Sharing Service?

Photo sharing services make organizing, storing and sharing digital photos convenient, easy, safe and most importantly–fun. Through online photo albums, friends and family can join by sharing pictures of important events, good times and special occasions.
There are three main competitors in the online Photo Sharing:

* Imageshack
      ImageShack offers free, unlimited storage, but has a 100 MB per hour bandwidth limit for each image. This sounds like a lot, but do the math: that's 1.66 MB per minute, or about 28 KB per second. And the larger your image is, the faster you'll burn through that meager allotment. But it's incredibly easy to use-- you don't even have to sign up-- and according to their common questions page, anything goes as long as it's not illegal.

* Flickr
      Flickr offers a free basic account with limited upload bandwidth and limited storage. Download bandwidth is unlimited. Upgrading to a paid Pro account for $25/year removes all upload and storage restrictions. However, Flickr's terms of use warn that "professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited", and all external images require a link back to Flickr.

* Photobucket
      Photobucket's free account has a storage limit and a download bandwidth limit of 10 GB per month (that works out to a little over 14 MB per hour). Upgrading to a paid Pro account for $25/year removes the bandwidth limit. I couldn't find any relevant restrictions in their terms of service.

Now let's compare sites in Alexa.

The daily reach percent.


Daily page views percent.


Imageshack is on the first place when it comes for the reach.. and  there's a close battle between Flickr and Photobucket for the second place.

I tend to believe that this graph is not that relevant because Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, they get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

What kind of users have this toolbar installed? Webmasters. What webmasters prefer? Imageshack.

When it comes to the number of pageviews Flickr is on first place, Photobucket on second and just under it comes Imageshack.

Conclusions:
If you're a webmaster it is easier and faster to upload an image with Imageshack.
The thing to note about flickr is that the quality of the photos is much higher than most other photo sites.
The growth of Photobucket go hand in hand the growth of consumer generated content and social networking sites.
So what's your favorite?

written by Florin C.