Photobucket Image Hosting

Author's product rating:   

Value for money	excelent value
Efficency & Reliabilty of service	super efficient
Customer service	good

Advantages:	Online Storage made easy .
Disadvantages:	None so far .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I opened an account with Photobucket.com in August of this year, because I needed a hosting service for my photographs.

Why ?

Well, unbeknown to me, I had not realised that simply right clicking an image and using it on a forum or site was actually not a good practice and was stealing bandspace.

Also I wanted to share images easily with friends and family and found that this imaging site was a lot easier to use than others that I have tried, such as Yahoo.

So what's it all about ?

Signing up for an account is simple and free for those who, like me, want minimal storage. There is a premium account for people who would want more from a web hosting service, though for the amount of photographs that I use, I find that the free service is sufficient, with 50 MB of storage space, as opposed to the paid premium account which allows 1 Gigibyte, and also gives you the benefit of not having adverts displayed on the page when you are using it.

If you are a person who has a serious need for space, then the package that this site provides is quite inexpensive at 25 dollars for a year's use, and offers more bandwidth and space than the free version, as well as being able to work with FTP uploads and XP Publishing.

For me a simple free account works well, and I have never had any problem uploading images to the site, though for those with less technical expertise, there is a very good tutorial section, explaining in easy steps how to upload photographs.

I really do like the speed of uploads, which compares very well with professional sites such as Ebay, and have experienced 100 per cent success in uploading and resizing photographs with very little former knowledge of photograph hosting sites, except a short experience with Yahoo which proved to be cumbersome and difficult to use.

Customer service is available to people using the site, although Premium account holders are given priority, which is understandable.

BLOG LINKS

If like many, you have started your own blog (or page that is personal to you and friends on the internet, linking the photographs to the blog is very simple on this site, and I would recommend it.

Deleting photographs or getting an HTML and IMG code makes use of the site interesting and it is very simple to transfer your pictures to other places on the internet when you want to with the codes generated, and URL, Tag or Image codes listed for each photograph.

Resizing the photographs is easy to do, and although the options are not enormous, they are adequate for my needs, and although I have not used this service, there is the availability of buying a CD with all your images stored in such a way that they can be seen in sequence on a DVD player at 20 dollars which I find pricey, or in storage form on a CD Rom for 10 dollars. These options do not really interest me, although they may interest those without the programs or expertise to make their own DVDs or storage CDs.

Editing is limited to re-sizing and rotation, or name changing although I have only used the resizing as I have had no need of the other options.

Although the site offers you the possibility of a slide show, this really is one of the poor points of the site, since the size of the photographs is so small that it doesn't really give the impression of being a slide show at all. Merely, a sequence of photos are shown at the top of the screen, and I can only assume this is used by people checking out their old pages of stored images.

This is a fast site, and I also like the fact that you can chose how many pictures you want to upload at the same time in JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIF, SWF files either from your own computer, or from urls, and here you simply put your curser on the photograph that you like, right click it, and take the curser down to properties to get the image address that you wish to upload.

Altogether, my experience of the site has been a good one, and I would recommend the site as user friendly, simple to use, and extremely helpful for even school children who want to gather images for a school project. Even though a free account does have advertising displayed, I have never seen advertising of an adult only nature, and the advertisements are discreet and do not get in the way of the enjoyment factor.

I really would give this site a thumbs up, because of its ease of use and reliability.

Rachel