Sharing Photos but not with the Whole World

There are absolutely loads of photo hosting sites on the net - mainly free (Picasa, Flickr etc) or cheap (SmugMug etc). Or there's all the web hosting services as well (and lets not forget Amazon S3). And the actual photo sharing sites like Flickr give you nice galleries, printing options, and so on.

But if you want to share photos with, say, family, for free, using a nice gallery, but not share them with the rest of the World, your options are more limited. Most free sites that offer private galleries are effectively social networks, like Multiply, that require your photo recipients to have a userid and be logged in. And frankly, for most people that's just too much hassle to bother.

So I was well pleased recently to discover Photoshelter, which is kind've like Flickr but aimed more at "pros". It's mainly a pay site, but you can get a fully featured account for free, limited only by 50MB storage space. And its huge benefit in the current context is that you can password protect galleries, so that anyone can log in even if they're not a registered user, as long as you've sent them the URL and the password. This fits the bill exactly!

I know Picasa has "private" galleries, but they're not password protected, it's just the old discredited "security by obscurity" thing. I suspect SmugMug may do the feature properly, but then it's not free. So Photoshelter gets my vote.

There's a review of it here.

Sipgate Update

I've been using Sipgate for my VOIP telehone service for a few months now, and they are really very good. Good features, local phone number for free, no line rental, excellent call quality, have never had service unavailable, and still dirt cheap. Definitely a "recommend".