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22Apr

Free, easy ways for Mac users to share and backup their photos without having to pay for a .Mac account

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I’ve recently written some posts on storing and sharing tangible photographs (remember what those are?) Of course, more and more people are moving their photo sharing into the digital realm and as far as sharing photos on a Mac goes, .Mac bills itself as a seamless way to publish your pictures to a custom URL.

A .Mac account is fine and all, but instead of shelling out $99 a year for the ill-reputed service, there are a couple of free plugins that can get the job done instead. You won’t have to use additional programs so you can still manage your photos in iPhoto. Best of all, they’re free.

I’ll cover options for two major online photo services: Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr. (From what I can tell, there isn’t an iPhoto plugin for Photobucket.)

Picasa Web Albums Uploader
If you have a Google account (such as a Gmail account) you’re set to start uploading to Picasa. You can manually ad photos through your web browser or, more simply, use iPhoto. Select the photos you want, click Share -> Export -> Picasa, and then title your new album. Hit publish and you’re done. I don’t think this is any more complicated than publishing through .Mac. To get a feel for how easy this is, check out the following video:

You can download Picasa Web Albums Uploader by clicking here.
FFXporter (Flickr)
For Flickr fans (and I know there are some die-hard fans out there) FFXporter may be for you. It’s a free plugin that “provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data.”

While you can’t add descriptions directly from iPhoto, after you’re done uploading it will take you to a Flickr page where you can add them. I haven’t personally used the Flickr plugin (I use Picasa more often), TUAW (The Unoffical Apple Weblog) endorsed it here.

You can download FFXporter directly from the developer’s site.

It’s true that these options don’t have some of the eye candy a web gallery through .Mac provides, but the functionality there – and it’s free. I’d definitely recommend checking out these as options before plunking down a hundred bucks on a .Mac account.

Also, I would imagine similar plugins/programs are available for Windows machines. Would any Windows users be so kind as to share their findings in the comments?

Overall, I hope you find that these tools help make sharing your photos a little easier and save you a little money too. Are there any other alternatives to .Mac you’d suggest? Do you use either of these plugins? Please let everyone know in the comments.

LivSimpl


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Categories: Tech

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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