The big picture

Even though YouTube is rocking the online world with millions of daily views, the photo-sharing universe is probably larger, and growing bigger all the time.

A few years back, before Flickr.com became an enormous online parking lot for digital images, there were maybe three sites people went to find or share photos: KodakGallery, Snapfish and Shutterfly. Those three are still around, but the online photo-sharing world has gone through big changes.

Today there are dozens of sites, all offering something a bit different. Some are making money and others are just testing how far they can mix pictures with social networking, mapping and other tools.

“It’s actually boom times right now for photo-sharing companies,” says Chris MacAskill, CEO of Smugmug.com, one of the passel of businesses catering to photographers and the photo-sharing community.

Smugmug, which has become a favorite among dedicated digital photographers for its smart interface and organizational tools, is among the sites that are profitable, says MacAskill.

Flickr, one of the top three sites in total visits, was sold last year to Yahoo.

Another of the most popular sites is Photobucket.com. Since it is also among a handful of sites employed by MySpace users to host images, Photobucket probably has more daily visits by online users than Flickr does, according to some online Web studies. The folks who run Photobucket say they have about 23 million users worldwide.

The appeal of the photo-sharing market is a blend of social networking and simple voyeurism. Everyone loves to find unique images of distant or familiar sights. When sites come along that give users all sorts of interesting ways to showcase their digital photos, the predictable result is a race to see which ones will keep users coming back and which ones will add new features to make the experience more fun and satisfying.

MacAskill, for one, argues that it would be wrong to expect the number of sites to dwindle with eventual consolidation: “I think tastes in online albums are pretty individual and there will be lots of brands, just like it didn’t come down to Chevy, Ford and Chrysler as everyone predicted.”