We’re kicking off another blog series — this one’s on web apps, or applications that you run inside a web browser, like Firefox or Chrome, rather than as a standalone application. We’re focusing on ways that web apps can act as replacements for separate apps, in order to save you money, time, and most importantly, performance!  Photos are places where memories are stored. This is why moments are best captured in photos. Printing them into helps preserve the images. Printed Memories is one of the best places to get your photos printed into a book format. But before that, we should learn how to mange our photo files. Today we show you how to upload and share photos online without the hassles:

Photos. Cloud. Bucket. Get it?

WEB APPS #3:
How to Upload and Share Photos Online

Photo organizing applications can be expensive and very CPU intensive. It’s very difficult to upload and organize many photos on a netbook, for example, because the video capabilities of such a machine just can’t handle an app like Photoshop. Plus, the photo organizing software included in your PC by the manufacturer may not work well at all.

There are some terrific photo organizing and sharing apps out there that help you upload and share photos quickly and easily. The one I use the most is Photobucket. It’s free and gives you 10 gigabytes of bandwidth, another name for Internet usage. If you don’t have a lot of people looking at your photos, then you’ll never use up your 10 GB and the free account becomes quite a deal. If one of the photos you upload somehow becomes very popular, then you may go over your limit. There’s a paid account for people like that. Of course, you can always make your photo albums private and share them only with close friends and family.

Uploading is very simple, and you can upload an entire folder’s worth of photos in one go. Then, name, tag and sort your photos with ease.

Photobucket has pretty strict content standards, so if there’s anything at all objectionable in any of the photos, there’s a good chance Photobucket will remove it automatically.

The other nice thing about Photobucket is the Photobucket Uploader plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It lets you right-click any photo on the Web and instantly upload it to your Photobucket album, for instant sharing with others. This is a great workaround when you want to share a photo on the Web, but the site doesn’t allow hotlinking (another name for posting the address of an image elsewhere).

Other web browsers don’t have this plug-in, so if you use Google Chrome, for example, you’ll have to upload your found images on an individual basis, which takes a lot longer.

Photobucket has several competitors out there that also work very well. Google’s is called Picasa. There’s also ImageShack, which a lot of people like, and Facebook itself has a built-in photo uploader which is used by many, many people — and has the benefit of easy sharing with your fellow Facebookers.