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A great way that people connect with others and share the joys of their lives is through photo albums and pictures. As everyone knows, a picture is worth a thousand words and today, photos are an incredible way to express yourself. Anywhere you go on the Internet, people are communicating and connecting with each other through photos and images. What better way to express a first sonogram, first step, wedding joys, first home, or any other of the countless memories one makes in a lifetime. Because the Internet is so widely used as a means of connecting with others in your life across the miles, pictures and images are even more important today than ever before.

With the advent of digital technology to take pictures the computer is used as a tool for sharing these pictures. But how do you share your pictures without swamping your hard drive with file upon file. Image hosting has become the most convenient answer for this. With image hosting, you upload your pictures to a main website server. Here your website will automatically generate html coding for you to upload onto your website, use in a signature file, or add onto your blog. Creating and sharing images online has never been easier than it is through image hosting services.

History of Image Hosting

Image hosting in years past has involved the use of sites such as photobucket. How these sites have been used, and still are today, is through a simple upload process from your computer. You save onto your computer the files that you want to store on your image hosting site. Once you moved the pictures from your camera onto your computer, you then had to simply upload these pictures onto the image hosting site and your code would be generated fairly quickly.

These types of sites are still very popular and used today. While image hosting sites are certainly very effective, many people want more out of their image hosting service than just a place to store pictures. With the boom of social networking and blogging, many people are looking for more advanced means of image hosting and social networking.

Share and Store Images Simultaneously

Today there are sites that will allow you to not only upload your images for image hosting, but that will also allow you to join a community and share your photos directly online with others you wish to share them with. Sites such as Flickr have been created to combine both the social networking aspect of the Internet with picture sharing. Now the middle man has been eliminated, and you not only have a place online to store your pictures, but you can share them in the same place as well. Bloggers and social networkers and anyone that wishes to share pictures with their loved ones have taken great advantage of these websites.

But how do they work, and are they really secure?

How do Image Sharing Websites Work?

Flickr is probably the most commonly used photo sharing community today. This website functions by allowing you to sort your pictures through the use of keywords or tags. Facebook is another website that offers this same feature. This will allow anyone that is searching for images to use keywords to find a topic or subject. If you have an uncle looking for a picture of “Baby Boy Smith” that is how you would tag your photograph. He would simply have to enter those keywords and get a list of available pictures that match those tags.

Organizing Your Pictures on a Sharing Website

You can organize your pictures into albums or sets depending on what website you use. This way all of your pictures for one set or album can go in one organized place. You are not restricted to using one set for a specific picture. For example, you can have one set that is strictly wedding pictures, but if this album or set contains a picture of you and your siblings, you can also tag that picture in a Family Album set or album. Organizing your pictures on an image hosting website community has become a lot more flexible today than it has been in the past.

You Control Access on Image Hosting Websites

While it seems that using an image hosting website that is also connected to an online community may not be very safe, the exact opposite is the case. With all kinds of image hosting communities, you are able to control the access of your files. You decide who sees what and when. You can control whether your pictures are viewed publicly or privately. You can even control what groups of people can view your images, or even select individuals if that is what you prefer.

Privacy controls are installed on all major image hosting websites where you decide what the settings are and who can view them. Some sites will even allow you to send a guest pass to others you know that may not be a member of that community, but with whom you want to share your pictures. Image hosting websites allow you to enjoy the public venue of the community only when and if you decide to do so.