Photobucket may not have quite the name recognition of Flickr, but it's been around since 2003, one year longer than Flickr. The site has more than 55 million users and hosts over 7 billion images. Picasa, Windows Live Photos, and Webshots offer stiff competition, but only Facebook offers more shared photos. Photobucket offers lots of free storage, as well as integration with a number of Web services, such as Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, and MySpace. But a byproduct of this largess is an ad-cluttered interface. And Photobucket's photo-editing, video-editing, and presentation tools fall short of Picasa's.

The sign-up process for the photo-sharing service is straightforward, well designed, and responsive. In addition to the usual sign-up information, you can add a mobile number. Whether you do this or not, you can upload photos from your phone if it can send e-mails with attachments. Once you've finished the process, you're sent through one or more pages of "Special Offers for Your Name." As I mentioned, it's an ad-supported site.

The home page is much busier with display ads than Flickr's: Photobucket gets more of its revenue from advertising than from paid accounts. Photobucket does offer a lot that's free, including the ability to upload as many photos and videos as will fit into 1GB. Compare this with Flickr's two-video-a-month and 100MB limit. On the other hand, Flickr charges less for paid accounts ($24.95 yearly versus $39.95), and the paid accounts have no limits.

Uploading and Sharing

To get your images, you can either use the simple File Open dialog or install a Java-based bulk uploader. If you choose to do it manually, clicking on a thumbnail adds the represented photo to the upload list. Unlike many competitors, Photobucket doesn't support drag-and-drop for this process, which is a real negative, in my book. The Java-based bulk uploader is a handy way to get pics uploaded more quickly, but it automatically downsizes images to 800 pixels wide, so it's not something 'you'd want to use for every image. If you upload manually, on the other hand, you can set the storage size for images at up to 1MB per image for free accounts, 5MB for Pro subscribers. In any case, loading a large folder with hundreds of pictures takes a while, even over our fast corporate network.

You can also upload photos via Web URLs, mobile phones, e-mail, or an Ask.com toolbar. The Web URL option works with direct links to image files—not just to any page with a photo. Mobile options abound: You can upload via e-mail or WAP, automatically with several wireless carriers, and using apps for iPhone and Sidekick. Thanks to Photobucket's open API, there are even third-party uploading apps from folks like Pixelpipe. By default, everything you upload to Photobucket is public, though you can change this to private with password protection if you like.

Once you've transferred photos to the site, you enter titles, descriptions, and tags for each. But Photobucket offers no geotagging or face recognition, as Picasa does. A company rep explained that members hadn't requested either. Both are useful and fun features, however. Users may not know to ask for them, but once they hear about them, they may switch to services that have them.—Next: Organizing and Editing

Organizing and Editing

Your uploaded Photobucket files appear in your general "Newest uploads" area for later categorization. Flickr takes the same approach, whereas in Picasa you choose an album before uploading, which I prefer. The Mac's iPhoto creates albums based on time of photo shoot, which is helpful, though it sometimes produces more (or fewer) albums than you might want. The Photobucket "album organizer" brings up a Flash-based page with thumbnails of your photos. You can multiselect these and drop them into an album. That's fine, but I wish you could create a new album directly on this page, rather than having to go to Edit Albums.

Album themes give you MySpace-like personalization with colors for interface elements and background patterns. Some of the selections, including those for holidays and hobbies, are well designed and make for an improvement over the default white background. Flickr and Picasa offer nothing similar.

Photobucket uses the Web-based FotoFlexer.com image editor, which works right within the site. Flickr takes much the same approach with its use of the very similar Picnik. Both give you basic tools such as crop, contrast, red-eye correction, rotation, and auto-fix. The Photobucket editor adds blemish and wrinkle fixers that work quite well. With Picnik, only the premium version supplies a comparable tool, and Picasa doesn't have one.

Unfortunately, one important capability is missing in Photobucket—straightening crooked photos. Picasa and Flickr (through Picnik) both offer tools for this task. And while Photobucket does red-eye correction, it can't match Picasa's tool (which finds all eyes in a picture and makes needed fixes in one pop), or even Picnik's.

I like the Photobucket's editor's full-screen option as well as the ability you get to choose between saving a copy and replacing the original. Picasa and Flickr both edit nondestructively. A paid account in Flickr gets you the ability to overwrite your original.

Photobucket offers some crazy effects—twirl, bulge, and squish, for example. In addition, you get a bevy of filters, including grayscale, neon, duo-tone, heat map, and color sketch—more than Picasa offers, and unlike those in Picnik, all free. These tools can be a lot of fun.

One annoyance: The Photobucket Web app slowed occasionally and stopped responding at one point while I was applying an effect. For such CPU-intensive operations as photo editing, locally installed software, which Picasa offers, makes a lot of sense.—Next: Video and Sharing

Video

Photobucket offers unlimited video uploads in free accounts as long as you stay within your 1GB storage allowance. In addition, the videos can be up to 5 minutes (10 minutes for Pro accounts), compared with 90 seconds in Flickr. The latter does have a larger file-size limit for individual videos, though—150MB versus 100MB.

The process for uploading videos in Photobucket is the same as for photos, and the content displays in the same albums. From the "remix this video" choice at the top of the video player, you get basic capabilities for video cutting, creating transitions between clips and photos, and adding audio tracks. This is similar to what Picasa offers, though that app adds rotating and resizing. The well-designed Adobe Premier Express powers these functions in Photobucket, and it's surprisingly responsive for a Web-based app. The text overlay feature is particularly well done, letting you resize, rotate, and choose from nine clever font styles. Flickr, by contrast, has no video editing or remixing.

Photobucket accepts video uploads in many popular file formats, such as ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPG, and WMV, but converts them all to Flash FLV. You can upload HD video, but display resolution on the site is below HD. Flickr and Picasa upload video much faster and display it in HD, though not immediately after upload (due to processing delays). Flickr also lets you view video full screen. Photobucket offers neither option. A "Full Size" button just pops up a window playing the video at the same small size.

Sharing

One of Photobucket's real strengths is the ease with which it lets you share photos and videos. As with Picasa, you can easily share albums via e-mail. If the album is private, the invitation automatically includes the password. Posting to your social network account or blog couldn't be easier. Choices include MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, LiveJournal, e-mail, and a "more" link that leads to choices of 11 more social networks. If none of those suits you, a wide variety of embed codes lets you easily add the picture to most any site or service. Photobucket lags in terms of offering native social-networking features, however. You won't see your friends' profile thumbnails on your Photobucket page, for example. Flickr and Picasa pages do this, and the latter also shows your friends' most recently updated albums.

Group albums are a collaborative way to share. Multiple people can add to one topic-based album, and members can subscribe to e-mail notifications for new uploads—a capability Flickr and Picasa also offer. Albums can be private or public, and you can search for popular topics. Photobucket, Flickr, and Picasa all offer RSS feeds for your album updates, too. You can also go beyond sharing individual photos and albums. A cool new feature, Live Slideshows, lets you add a slideshow to your social-network or blog page, and the slides update as you add images.

Photobucket has a couple of nice photo-presentation offerings at extra cost. For $19.99, you can get a 27-inch square "photowall" decal ($34.99 for one that's 27 by 51 inches). And, as with other services, you can buy prints, cards, and scrapbooks, but Photobucket adds a Scrapblog online version of these. You won't find Picasa's excellent collage maker, however, which lets you print some striking photo arrangements for yourself, nor an equivalent to its screensaver creator.

Photobucket offers a lot that's free, including abundant storage, good photo-editing tools, good integration with the social-networking sites, and plenty of ways to share your images. But Picasa—Google's tool—is much better, and wins our Editors' Choice award, thanks to a cleaner, ad-free interface, more powerful editing tools, and advanced features like geotagging and facial recognition.

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