As a boy, my family and I took an annual vacation with my uncle’s family. No matter the destination, my mother always made sure to bring our photo album so she could show everyone what we had been up to over the past year.
Unfortunately, we no long take these yearly trips. However, thanks to the modern convenience of online photo-sharing websites, the Internet has made it easy for us to stay connected and share our photos. A number of photo-sharing sites have sprung up over the past few years. Today, we’re going to review one of the most popular – Webshots.
Overview
Webshots reports more than 23 million visitors a month and houses more than 624 million user photos. These figures make Webshots one of the biggest players in the online photo-sharing business. Like most of their competitors, the website serves as a portal for uploading and sharing photos with friends and family. Avenues for doing so include online photo albums, photo messages and ordering physical prints.
Webshots Features
Webshots users can choose from two account levels – free and paid. The free account provides ample features and should be adequate for most users. Some of these features include the ability to create public or private albums, batch photo uploads, mobile phone uploads, video uploads and the ability to create your own personal Web page. Other innovative features include the ability to create slideshows or screensavers and download customized desktop wallpaper.
Community features are also available, which allow you to link to the Webshots pages of your friends and family. Such features allow you to do things like download photos to your computer or cell phone, manage an address book, receive new photo alerts and monitor how many views and downloads your own photos have received.
For a reasonable $29.88 per year, users can upgrade to the premium account. Doing so results in a number of benefits, such as access to premium customer support, the ability to download entire pages in one click, more storage space and the ability to license your images. If you are professional photographer, or simply take a ton of photos, then this may be the account level for you.
Ease of Use
Webshots makes it easy to search through their vast database of photos. The search and filtering options are some of the most advanced available, allowing you browse photos by category, Most Popular, Most Recent, tags, keywords and more.
Uploading and downloading photos is also a cinch. Batch uploads allow you to post a number of photos with the click of the mouse. Simple photo editing features such as rotating and cropping are also available. Once uploaded, you can customize your photos by adding captions and titles.
A Few Drawbacks
While Webshots is one of the most recommended photo-sharing sites out there, a few drawbacks do exist. The largest complaint is that the site offers only a limited amount of storage space to each customer. Users with a free account can upload up to 1,000 photos, plus an additional hundred for each month of membership. Premium account holders can store and share up to 5,000 photos, plus an additional 500 per month of membership.
While this seems like a lot (and indeed won’t affect the majority of users), almost all other photo-sharing sites offer unlimited storage space at the premium account level. Some competitors, such as dotphoto, even offer unlimited storage at the free account level.
Another minor drawback is the necessity to download and install software onto your computer. While free to use, other photo-sharing sites do not require the installation of any software.
If technical support is a big concern for you, then Webshots may not be for you. While the site does offer a comprehensive FAQ and tech support via email, no phone support is available. If this is important to you, then dotphoto or Flickr may be a better option.
Conclusion
When all is said and done, Webshots is an excellent photo-sharing service. If you don’t mind the limited storage space and lack of phone support, then it’s definitely a site worth looking into.
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