Pictures worth more than a thousand words on upgraded photo sites

LOS ANGELES - Would you pay $40 to $60 a year to ensure that all your digital photographs are safely backed up online and that you can access them from anywhere? What if you could also share these pictures on the Internet, without bugging your friends to buy prints, in a beautiful display?

That's the offer from SmugMug and Phanfare, two photo sites with significant new upgrades. If the only photo-sharing you're familiar with is via Kodak EasyShare Gallery, Snapfish or another mainstream service whose aim is to sell you lots of products, these sites are definitely worth a look.
Tabblo is a free photo-sharing site, which looks nothing like its mainstream competitors. Tabblo lets you create snazzy, book-style online layouts of your pictures and share them at the Tabblo site, your blog and other photo sites, including Yahoo's Flickr.
Here's a look at each:
•SmugMug:
Great display. SmugMug, which has been around since 2002, has 120,000 paying customers who like the endless controls father and son co-founders Don and Chris MacAskill offer.
For instance, you don't have to present your pictures in the usual visual of a white background and 15 thumbnails. SmugMug offers more than 30 templates - including Travel, Halloween, Christmas and old-fashioned photo album - with multiple colors and the ability to present the pictures really large.
Take a visit to a commercial photo site such as Kodak EasyShare Gallery (kodakgallery.com), and you'll see the difference. Pictures are presented smaller, and there are frequent pitches to buy prints.
SmugMug's upgrade offers pictures that upload faster and have larger displays. Also, SmugMug can figure out how big your computer monitor is and adjust the images on the screen accordingly.
Someone with a 15-inch monitor might see one large image and 15 thumbnails to the side. On a 20-inch monitor, 20 thumbnails would be there, to make use of the extra space.
The visuals are the good news. Figuring your way around SmugMug can entail a steep learning curve, and while SmugMug boasts of responsive customer service, it's only via e-mail and often not specific. Phone support isn't offered.
•Phanfare:
Photos and video. Phanfare will speak to its customers via a toll-free number, and while its pages aren't as visually stunning as SmugMug's, they do look awfully nice.
Phanfare also lets subscribers display pictures and videos without ads or clutter and has a cool slide-show feature that, at the click of a button, shows your work in sequence with music in the background.
Getting images onto Phanfare is fast and easy to manage. Rather than uploading photos directly to the site yourself, you dump your pictures into a Phanfare desktop application, edit and move things around, and then Phanfare uploads the pictures to the Web in the background.
Even for those of us with fast connections, it's a lot easier to work on the desktop with a group of photos than to wait to get a big group onto the Web. I much prefer working with the Phanfare method for getting pictures online.
Phanfare and SmugMug are similar in theory to Flickr. That service also appeals to those who want more control of photos, but the screen space is shared with Yahoo ads and product pitches. While Flickr is nominally free, you can upload only 100 megabytes of photos monthly. That amounts to about 40 pictures on today's 6- to 8-megapixel cameras. Flickr Pro accounts with unlimited storage are $24.95 yearly.
Pictures on Flickr look great, but it's more of a place to show photos and have others discuss them in a social-networking fashion.
•Tabblo:
Nice blend of tools. Throw in one part social networking, such as Flickr, add blogging tools such as Google's Blogger and the visuals of a coffee-table art book, and you've got Tabblo.
There are no ads. And like SmugMug and Phanfare, Tabblo has unlimited storage.
The idea isn't just to dump a bunch of pictures into a gallery, but to turn it into an online portfolio of your work. And it looks really cool.
But be warned: Spend some time there, and you'll forget to get your chores done. It takes a good deal of time to work your way through the system. You need a really fast connection and patience.
Once there, you're sure to love the result.
All in all
The bottom line on these three services: Pictures look better than anywhere else, and I love the idea of unlimited storage/backup. Because I take so many pictures, I'm always running out of room on external hard drives and buying new ones every year.
These Web services are cheaper than buying extra drives as an archive. Having everything backed up outside of the home in case of a disaster is just about perfect.

creadits: Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-02-07-photo-sharing-sites_x.htm

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