★ My Favorite Image Sharing / Hosting Services

I’ve been storing and sharing images on the web for a while. I think it started back in the day when I’d post photos on my LiveJournal blog around 1999-2001 and I was using my own web server. Those were truly the days and I still use my FTP server for image storage because I like having an extra backup of images. Lately, my system of storing & sharing images has grown and I admit that some simplification is in order but I’d like to share a bit about my work flow because it’s interesting.

It looks like I share about 25 items per day during the work day but they’re distributed across different services. Here are a list of services I use and I’ll try to briefly breakdown each one of them and their purpose.

• Flickr
• Zannel
• TwitPic
• Yoono
  
• Facebook
• TinyGrab

1. Flickr: The place where all of my “photos” go or a place where if I want a discussion around my photo to start. FriendFeed is good for this too but I find richer conversation around photos on Flickr. It’s also a place to put images that I want to keep around FOREVER. *OF NOTE* I used to dump EVERYTHING on Flickr but it devalued my stream and was a poor long term solution for sharing all of my screenshots, photos, images and captures. HERE is my Flickr Stream.

2. Zannel: This site is great for a single distribution point. Zannel is still “strictly photos” but I use it as a medium for distributing my photos taken by my mobile phone. I used to use Radar.net for this but found Zannel to be more powerful as it also supports video. Simply put, I take a photo or video with my iPhone and email it to Zannel. The content is “tweeted” automatically with a link to the Zannel.com page and people can view the photo or video and yes even iPhones can view the videos as it gives them a Quicktime version (not flash).

Then, Zannel takes the content and distributes it. Photos go to Facebook & Flickr. Videos go to Flickr, YouTube & Facebook. Zannel is a great middle ground where you could even disable Zannel twitter notifications and only use it to distribute content everywhere. Yes Ping.FM does this but Zannel is a solid, quick and reliable tool for media distribution. HERE is my Zannel Stream.

3. TwitPic: TwitPic is my mobile & sometimes desktop screenshot sharing system. Basically, if I screen grab something on my iPhone, Mac or PC I just drop it in an email message or upload directly to TwitPic using services like Tweetie. HERE is my TwitPic Stream.

4. Yoono: Yoono is an add-on for FireFox and I use it to share parts of web-pages. Sure I can take a screen grab and upload it to TwitPic but sometimes I want to share a link to an image & the image w/ some video or text. Yoono’s share feature is great for this. Let’s say you want to share an Amazon.com Book listing with your friends. Yoono let’s you select some text, the image & video on the page including the price and then generates a Yoono.com page with all of the selected items. It makes it easy to share what you want and auto-shares it with Facebook, FriendFeed & Twitter. Here’s an example of a Yoono.com share page.

5. Facebook: Ya know, Facebook has some great comments from real friends but I don’t find myself ever posting items to it manually. In short, the only reason you see me using Facebook is because Zannel auto-posts photos to it effortlessly so it’s just kind of around and yeah I get some good comments. There’s nothing that I’d post to Facebook exclusively that didn’t also go to Twitter in some way.

6. TinyGrab: My new crush. TinyGrab, the company, and I started off to a rocky start but their new product is blowing me away. It does a few things exceptionally well and is the best screen grab tool I’ve ever used.

• It’s a Desktop based app
• It uploads your photos automatically to their servers as soon as you take a screen grab
• it also replicates those screen grabs to your FTP server (peace of mind for me)
• It auto shortens a link and puts it in your clip-board
• It’s freemium (pay for more features)
• It’s a reliable and easy to use service

Here’s the awesome workflow of TinyGrab.

• I select a piece of my screen using Apple+Shift+4 on my keyboard
• The TinyGrab icon in my menu bar turns orange as it uploads the photo to their servers & my personal FTP server
• All I do once the icon turns green (within 1.5 seconds) is hit Apple+V on my keyboard and a tiny link has been placed into my clipboard. Here’s an example of one http://grab.by/3aY

TinyGrab is great for people like me who don’t need comments on TwitPic and doesn’t need a photo to be easily viewable forever (like Flickr) or needs a title. I just snap and paste the link into Twitter, a word document or email and the recipient gets a quick-clickable photo link. It’s nothing short of AWESOME for sharing screenshots.

You can signup for TinyGrab HERE.

——–

So that’s my list of favorite image sharing / hosting services. Yes I need to simplify and i Know it can be confusing but it’s how I get by now. Any questions or recommendations just let me know!