- Basic Membership is free
- Premium Membership is $19.99 per year
- Online photo sharing community for photography enthusiasts
- Create online albums to share with your friends and family
- Upload 500 photos and 50 videos each month (Premium membership)
- Send eCards customized with photos from the website
- Free desktop upload software
- Create slideshows from your favourite snaps
- Exclusive pro shots to download and use (Premium membership)
- Order prints and gifts at great prices
- Subscribe to RSS feeds to get updates on your favourite members' posts
- Unlimited access to high quality widescreen shots (Premium membership)
- View stats on all of your albums
- Create a profile and leave messages for other members
- Share photos based on topics with like minded people
- Free basic membership
- Works on almost any device that can run a web browser
Webshots is a widely used online community for amateur photographers to share photos. It has the added benefit of allowing you to order prints and gifts of your favourite snaps. Premium membership goes even further and provides a bunch of extra features for a very reasonable annual charge. While it is not perhaps the absolute best photo sharing site around, it does have some nice features and is worth a look if you are a budding photographer.
One fairly major drawback Webshots suffers from is that its upload process isn't as slick and polished as it could be. You really have only two options. These are either to use the desktop based client, which is only available for PCs, or to use the website directly, which should work with most browsers. The desktop option is slightly more preferable, but the software is certainly not the best we have seen and could do with some polishing. The web method is slightly clunky, especially for uploading multiple photos, because it doesn't make use of any enhancing technologies such as Flash. However, it is still easy enough to get a few photos uploaded to your account.
Once you have some photos uploaded, you have a few different options as to what do with them. Probably the most useful things to do if you want them to be noticed by other people is to tag them to a subject. This lets the Webshots site do its work and organize photos into categories which are easily searchable. You can also create slideshows and share them with your friends and family. These don't even just have to be made from your own photos - it is also possible to borrow photos that other members have made public. This seems to form a major part of the site's philosophy in sharing photos. You are allowed, and encouraged, to look at other people's photos and even use them as your own desktop backgrounds. However, that's all you can do with them due to copyright restrictions. It seems to defeat the purpose if there is no system in place to allow you to use other people's photos for a small payment.
As well as the sharing features on offer, Webshots allows you to order prints and gifts made from your photos. There is a decent selection on offer, and at decent prices, so it's easy to pick up a couple of personalized gifts for your family. One thing we did appreciate was that the gifts and prints aren't constantly shoved in your face like many other sites in this category. On the downside, if you don't go for a premium membership there are quite a few third party ads dotted around the site.
Webshots is a decent service, but with what we consider to be a fundamentally flawed philosophy. If all you want to do is compare shots with like-minded people then Webshots provides a decent forum. However, if you have grander designs then it might feel a bit limiting. Membership is free though and premium membership is very reasonably priced so we would recommend checking it out if you are interested.
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