Photo sites are still influential on the web

Someday the Kodak moment might be called the moment "Facebook" or "Twitpic" but the management services of the old school pictures are still struggling to emerge in the image.

People have flocked to popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace to share pictures with friends and family, opening gaps with sites like Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, Shutterfly and Picasa.

However, with over 20,000 million photos uploaded to sites "traditional" exchange of pictures, they can not be ruled out. In particular with regard to printing and services, the photo-sharing site continue to have influence.

The photo-sharing sites let you create albums, calendars, cards, posters and mugs. At the same time they know that consumers want to share photos online.

The exchange of photos on Facebook, whose investors include Microsoft, is growing almost three times faster than the main sites of exchange of pictures, figures show the market researcher comScore.

Facebook has more than 250 million users, while Snapfish has 70 million and Flickr with 40 million registered users.

Still, the Toronto resident Kate Wienburg - Facebook user since 2006 - would prefer a site like Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing on the quality of the website and photos.

"I like Flickr because it has a huge community," he said. "There are hundreds of groups for everything from sporting events or people jumping to pies," he added.


With that in mind, most traditional companies sharing photos are now looking to incorporate social media tools and links to social networks.

The latest version of Picasa includes several tools that type. Other sites, such as Kodak, although still attached to their key sources of income, have added social media applications.

Shutterfly allows users to share photos uploaded to your site with blogs and social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Flickr, which is the air that has more social network for image sharing sites, has a community of active users.

Snapfish, Hewlett-Packard offers photo-sharing to Facebook, MySpace, Google's Blogger platform and Typepad, said Ben Nelson, Global CEO of Snapfish.

And some allow the web surfer to buy Facebook photo prints them up.

However, users are increasingly aware of the difference in quality. For example, Facebook photos are usually smaller, less resolution, making them poor for enlargements and posters.

"Their average size is 40 to 50 kilobytes, but our country is 1.5 megabytes. So we're talking about 30 times the size," said Victor Cho, CEO of software and internet services, Eastman Kodak, controlling Kodak Gallery.

No doubt the major attraction of social networking as consumers begin to treat the Web as an integral part of their lives and sharing of photos will be part of it.