Photobucket Review

Full review

Photobucket is built for people to share images and videos by creating profiles and photo collections online. While not as techy and stylish as some other photo sharing websites, Photobucket does all it needs to do to get your images out into the world. We’ve had a look at Photobucket to tell you all about its best features.

Sign up

Signing up to Photobucket is simple and takes a few seconds. Sign up with a username and password and email address, or sign up from your Facebook account, and you’re ready to upload your first photos. Access to the site is free. If you want to sign up for the Pro account, it costs US$24.95 per year.

Community

The beauty of Photobucket is the way you can interact with other users in a social networking context, using tags and following other users to keep up-to-date on their new photo posts. Follow people to track their new uploads, follow searches to track new results, and follow group albums to track new uploads. Your profile is your photo collection and you can share individual photos, slideshows or entire albums with the community. Post your works of art on the site as well as link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, your blog and your website. Use Photobucket to host images of the items you sell on eBay or Craigslist. Photobucket welcomes a wide community of photographers. When you’re in a social mood, search through the billions of images stored on Photobucket by other users. You can also create group albums to share with other Photobucket users. Enter competitions with your images, win prizes and vote on your favorite photos on Photobucket.

Features

The free Photobucket account gives you 10GB bandwidth a month and allows you to upload photos up to a maximum 5MB per photo. You have unlimited storage space and can display up to 500 videos, each up to 10 minutes in length. The Pro account stores high resolution images and you gain unlimited bandwidth. With Pro you get no ads and you can store and you can retrieve your original photos. You can retrieve statistics on unlimited pictures and videos - with the standard service you get this service for five a month.

In both free and premium accounts create albums for every occasion and event. Each album displays an album cover and you can create sub-albums. Your albums have custom URLs so you don’t have to send a long address to friends and family. In the free account, this only applies to the root album whereas with the Pro account all sub-albums also have custom URLs. You can create slideshows of up to 100 photos and send them to family and friends and send images to your phone to use as custom wallpaper. Adjust the settings on your album by changing the theme. Themes are collections of colors and backgrounds that give your pictures a little extra decoration without going overboard. Edit your photos using a variety of effects like shapes, colors, captions and more.

Photobucket is a good site for buying all your prints and photo products – any way you want to display your picture, Photobucket can do it for you. Create custom photobooks, cards, photo skins for your laptop and MP3 player, calendars, posters and stickers. You can also pay for backup CDs of your photos.

Ease of use

Some of the navigation is a little clunky but getting around Photobucket is generally easy. The basic tasks are easy to complete. Quickly upload an album, in the style of Facebook, by uploading your photos via the web, setting privacy settings to public or private and giving the album a name. You have the option of sharing your photos and videos on Facebook or Twitter at the point of upload and there's a bulk uploader to get multiple files on the site faster.

Help & support

When you’ve got a problem, there's a large number of questions and answers on the help section. You can search and print topics from this part of the site. If you have a Pro account you are eligible for premium email tech support, for a more personal answer to your queries.

Overall

This is a practical photo sharing website that allows you to share images and videos but it lacks the style of other sites. Use Photobucket if you’re looking for a simple means of editing, storing and showing your photos. The site has fewer features but it’s free and functional.