The Benefits of Using Photobucket for Photo and Video Storage

Photobucket.com has advantages for both a casual user and a user that requires more storage, whether for personal or business use. Basic accounts are free and the site has easy to use navigation.

Personal use:

For personal use, Photobucket.com offers a free service. This service provides up to 500 Megs of storage which should be more than sufficient for casual use. The free account also provides up to 10 Gigs of bandwidth per month. Bandwidth is number of views that the account or individual pictures and video streams have received.

Users can create multiple albums and sub-albums in their account and add identifying tags to their pictures for reference. You may share you individual photos with friends or share complete albums. You are also given the option of having all or some of your content private.

Business or large use:

For the business or larger storage user, Photobucket.com offers a Pro account at a charge of $24.95 per year. This account provides unlimited bandwidth for photo and video viewing. Storage is also unlimited for non-commercial use. Photobucket does allow for a reasonable amount of business type use for image hosting on personal sales sites or sites like eBay and others, that would charge you for the additional image hosting.

Along with larger storage and bandwidth the Pro user has greater access to use statistics. You are able to see the number of times each photo has been viewed and the website the view came from. This helps you if you need to determine how well particular web pages are performing and the number of visitors a particular photo has attracted.

Benefits for both types of users:

Both free and Pro accounts allow you to resize and edit your photos while they are stored on Photobucket. A full array of editing options are available including auto fix, red eye reduction and contrast. You may even add animation and layers to your photos.

Photobucket.com also offers you the ability to purchase prints of your photos. In addition to standard prints you can order specialty merchandise like photo mugs, cards, t-shirts and digital frames. By ordering through Photobucket you are able to edit your pictures yourself saving you the cost of having a sales site make the changes for you.

When sharing or posting your pictures you can choose to use a direct link, a HTML code or IMG code. You can also use direct link buttons for posting on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and several other sites. This feature makes posting photos much easier than other methods and prevents errors in coding.

The biggest benefit to a Photobucket.com account comes from being able to store your valuable or sentimental photos and videos in a safe location. You do not need to worry about losing important photos if your computer crashes. You do not need to worry about losing or damaging a SD card or other storage device. Your pictures are securely stored and easy to access whenever you want or need.