Managing images: online photo management services

Online photo management sites are web sites that allow users to upload and store their images online, providing an easy way to share images as well as being a useful backup facility. Popular sites include Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums, but there are many more.

Once uploaded, users can add descriptive data to their images, assign keywords (or 'tags'), and organise them into sets or albums so that it is easier to browse through your image collection. In addition, images can be shared with others: either with everyone, restricted to just your friends, or kept completely private.

JISC Digital Media has written an advice document on Using Flickr which contains a lot of very useful information about its use as an image management tool.

However, there are several things to watch out for when using online photo management web sites:

• Although it is possible to have a free account, these are usually restrictions on the facilities that are provided, including the amount of storage space available and whether you have access to all the images you upload (with the free Flickr account, you can only access the last 200 images uploaded). If you want the full range of features, you will usually have to pay a small subscription.
• If you add metadata to an image, it is likely to be difficult to export it if you want to move the images to another service at a later date.
• If you make your images publicly available, you do not have any control over who has access to them or what they subsequently do with them.
• As the images are stored online, you are dependent on Internet access to view them.
• There may be restrictions on whether you or others can access your original photos at full size, or if you are limited to the automatically resized image that the service creates on upload.
• There are usually limits on the amount of storage space that you are allocated on these sites, so it is a good idea to resize any very large image files before uploading them (for example, some cameras produce very large file sizes). Look at  Understanding digital images and Editing images for more help with this.