- Basic membership is completely free
- Premium Account: $50 per year for 50Mb of space
- Extra 50Mb of space: $10 per year
- Colourful and fun easily customizable photo sharing service
- Email photos to your account from your mobile phone
- Order good quality prints in a range of sizes
- Lots of diferent gallery layout options
- Free downloadable desktop based image editor and uploader
- Add music to your photos and albums
- Wide range of slideshow designs for you to choose from
- Copy protection on your photos
- Password protect whole albums or single photos
- Reliable servers for image hosting for linking from other sites
- Join clubs to meet and share photos with people of similar interests
- Keep track of how many people are looking at your photos
- You and your visitors can send digital postcard of your photos
- Free account available
- Works with almost any device that can run a browser
PictureTrail is, on the surface, a fun and colourful site for sharing your photos with friends and family while ordering a few prints of your favourites at the same time. However, what initially seems like a good deal for a free account can soon turn very expensive if you want to upload a lot of photos to your account. Although PictureTrail offers some fun features and is fairly easy to use, we think there are better deals around in terms of the upload space available.
PictureTrail has a fairly standard interface for uploading photos to your account. You use a basic web form which can upload multiple photos at once, but this is a bit fiddly and we have seen better offerings elsewhere. You can also choose to use the downloadable desktop tool for uploading which makes things a bit easier and more reliable, but this is only available for Windows based PCs. As an added bonus though, it provides some basic editing features so you can prepare your photos for the world to see.
After you have some photos uploaded to your account you can begin to organize them into albums. The albums themselves are quite easily customizable and there is a wide choice of different designs and colours. It is also possible to create slideshows which, again, are easily customizable with what is, according to PictureTrail, the web's largest choice of designs. There are some useful privacy controls provided so that you can password protect your photos and albums and there is also a basic mechanism in place to stop people from copying your photos from the web site. However, anyone with some basic computer knowledge would probably be able to get around this.
So now on to what we think is the worst thing about PictureTrail. From the main page they keep very quiet about the costs of the service and how much space you get to upload your photos to; instead they constantly encourage you to sign up for a "free" account. However, a little further investigation shows that the free account is only a trial after which you get switched to a basic account - which to PictureTrail's credit is still free, but only offers a measly 20Mb of space to upload your photos to. Even if you sign up for a premium account, which charges an annual fee, you will still only get 50Mb of upload space. In today's world of expensive digital cameras and high resolution photos that simply isn't enough.
PictureTrail offers a decent service and a good range of features, but fails to offer enough storage space to make good use of them. This is unfortunate because the web site itself is reasonably well designed and easy to use. However, PictureTrail need to seriously rethink their pricing policies before they will be going anywhere near our top ten.
Click the button below to check out PictureTrail.com for yourself...
