5 Photo Sharing Sites That Are Free Alternatives to Flickr

Flickr is an excellent photo-sharing site and, without a doubt, one of the largest photo-sharing communities on the web. However, free Flickr accounts are severely restricted, limiting its usefulness as a photo-sharing service for amateur and amateur photographers. Only the last 200 photos will be displayed, for example, and you only get 100MB of bandwidth per month for uploading.

Therefore, I decided to compile a list of alternatives to Flickr and here are the top 5 on my list:

1) drop of life

Lifeblob is a photo service that allows you to share your photos with friends and discover related photos of friends. In effect, this means that if you upload a photo of your college session, Lifeblob discovers the session photos that your friends have uploaded and displays them next to yours. This feature, plus the fact that there is no limit on the photos you can upload, makes Lifeblob stand out from the crowd.

You can start by getting your photos from your existing Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or Facebook accounts and then start uploading the rest of your photos directly. You can also email your photos to Lifeblob or use a Picasa desktop extension to upload your photos.

2) Picasa Web Albums

Picasa is Google’s photo sharing service. The free option gives you 1 GB of space for your photos, and you can purchase additional space and add it to your account.

The best thing about Picasa is the desktop app that you can install and use to easily post-process and add special effects to your photos. In fact, the Picasa desktop app even allows other services to integrate with it, and services like Lifeblob offer buttons you can install on your Picasa desktop app to integrate with their services.

3) photo cubes

Photobucket is another popular photography site, but the free version is very similar to the free Flickr. People normally use it to share small images on social networks, but you can certainly use it to store all your photos there. The free version has a 500MB limit on storage space, which is still somewhat restrictive.

4) Zoom

The name Zooomr is very easy to misspell, but the site is well done and geared towards social sharing of your photos. There are no feature limitations in the free account and a paid account will prevent you from seeing ads and will also show some usage statistics on your photos. There is a page called Zipline that shows the latest photos and activity of your contacts.

5) 23HQ

This is another well built site that works very similar to Flickr and has a nice looking interface. The free account lets you upload 30 photos a month, which is a bit too restrictive, but you can pay $20 a year to remove that restriction.

So choose between these depending on your needs, but by far it seems that Lifeblob is way ahead of the others as the best free photo sharing alternative to Flickr.