- A basic membership to Photobucket is completely free
- Pro Membership: $24.95 per year
- A pro membership can be obtained for free with TrialPay (see site for details)
- Well organised and easy to use completely free photo sharing site
- Share your photos and videos by email, instant message and mobile phone
- 500Mb of space allows you to store up to 5000 photos (depending on the size)
- Create slideshows that you can share on your website or blog
- Group albums to let you collaborate with family and friends
- Fully featured photo editor to allow you to fix photos and add cool effects
- Hundreds of album themes to personalize your pages
- Built in organizer to keep your files organized neatly
- Visitors don't need an account to view your photos
- Add music to your slideshows with the remix builder
- Scrapbook builder to build online and printed scrapbooks by dragging and dropping
- Selection of third party applications that link in with other web sites and software
- One click posting to most of the popular blogging and social networking systems
- Integrated search to find the latest and best photos from other users
- Upload photos from your mobile phone
- Order your photos printed onto cards, hoodies, mugs, calendars and more
- Pick up prints at your nearest Target store (US only)
- Developer API available for creating new applications
- No ads, unlimited bandwidth and 25Gb of storage with Pro membership
- Free membership available
- Works ony almost any device with a web browser
Photobucket is an excellent photo sharing web site and on some polls ranks number one as the most popular photo sharing site in the U.S. This is probably because it has one of the best free memberships around and the paid for memberships on offer are even better. If you want a fun and simple to use place for sharing photos with family and friends Photobucket will not disappoint.
Before we even started looking at Photobucket properly we realised we had spent a good half hour just browsing the photos other people have uploaded. The main page of Photobucket leads you into this without you noticing by displaying some of the highest rated photos on the site and we have to say there are some exceptionally gifted photographers using the site! The interface might not look as polished and glitzy as some of the other sites we have reviewed but everything is very quick to load and this makes for a very enjoyable browsing experience. With a basic membership there are quite a few ads dotted around the screen, which can be a bit distracting, but if you opt for a Pro membership these are removed.
There are a number of options for uploading your photos to Photobucket depending on what suits you best. The first time you do it you may have a lot to do all at once and this is where the Java based bulk uploader comes in handy. However, after that it's probably simpler just to use the straightforward web interface to upload with if you only have a few photos. It is also possible to upload photos directly from your mobile phone and if you sign up for a Pro membership, you get FTP access so that you can use your preferred FTP client to do the uploading. Regardless of which method you choose, the interfaces are well designed and make it very easy to start sharing your photos.
Once you have some photos uploaded Photobucket provides some useful tools for making use of them. There is an excellent web based image editor which lets you touch up your photos or add a range of effects to them. While it obviously doesn't have the power of something like Photoshop, it is a pretty useful tool, especially if you need to edit while on the move and don't have access to anything else. Photobucket also offers group albums which mean that you and your friends all have access to the same album. This means, for example, that everyone in the family could upload their own pictures of a wedding or birthday to the same album. Finally, on offer is a tool for building slideshows out of your favourite photos and videos. Again, this is very easy to use and you can easily link to a slideshow from your website or blog.
Like most photo sharing web sites Photobucket allows you to order prints of your favourite images or alternatively have them printed onto different merchandise. Customized mugs, hoodies, t-shirts and stickers are all available and can make great birthday or Christmas presents. If you live in the U.S you can also specify that you want to pick up your prints at your nearest Target store.
Photobucket offers pretty much everything you need from a photo sharing web site. A basic membership is free, but is supported with ads and has limited storage space. For this reason we highly recommend going for a Pro membership, which is very reasonably priced, gets rid of the ads and gives you loads more space to play with. Whichever you choose we are sure you won't be disappointed as there aren't many sites around that are as good as Photobucket.
Click the button below to check out PhotoBucket.com for yourself...
