You have photos. You want people to see them. However, picking the right online service on which to store your photos can be trickier than it looks. Here’s a guide walking through the pros and cons of various websites that will hold on to your photos for you.

• Social Networking Websites- We’re talking about Facebook, Myspace, Ning communities, Orkut, Friendster, etc. These sites were created and maintained solely to keep track of, tag, and export your photos. Anything you are uploading to these sites will be pretty tricky to get back in a quick manner.

• Ease of Storing – 6 out of 10
• Ability as a Backup Tool – 2 out of 10
• Tagging Abilities – 4 out of 10
• Ability to Retrieve your Photo Collection Easily – 1 out of 10
• Sharing Capabilities – 5 out of 10
• Ease of Maintaining – 7 out of 10
• Ease of Setup – 8 out of 10

• Photo Sharing Websites- There’s a host of options here. From webshots to flickr, and photobucket to smugmug. These sites are much easier for uploading large amounts of photos and more complex photo data. Some even allow you to sell your photography.

• Ease of Storing – 8 out of 10
• Ability as a Backup Tool – 4 out of 10
• Tagging Abilities – 8 out of 10
• Ability to Retrieve your Photo Collection Easily – 6 out of 10
• Sharing Capabilities – 7 out of 10
• Ease of Maintaining – 8 out of 10
• Ease of Setup – 9 out of 10

• Hosting your own Photography- When you host your own photography, you win. This solution can be trickier to get up and running, but once you do, you’re able to have a REAL backup option for all of your photos and can retrieve your whole collection very quickly. I’d recommend using an inexpensive hosting company for storage such as GoDaddy or Bluehost and then at a very basic level you can simply upload all of your photos using an FTP tool like Coreftp or Filezilla. For easy creation of a photo gallery try using WordPress combined with a gallery plugin (PhotoQ, PhotoSmash, NextGEN, etc)  … or go for a standalone solution such as Plogger, Qdig, or AutoViewer. You will need at least a basic understanding of databases and PHP code. Don’t know how? Ask a friend you know to help you out. In many cases, something basic can be set up for you in 3 or 4 hours.

• Ease of Storing – 9 out of 10
• Ability as a Backup Tool – 9 out of 10
• Tagging Abilities – 8 out of 10
• Ability to Retrieve your Photo Collection Easily – 10 out of 10
• Sharing Capabilities – 3 out of 10
• Ease of Maintaining – 7 out of 10
• Ease of Setup – 2 out of 10