Though you can still print out everything you shoot just like we used to in the days of film, generally speaking those days of making 4×6 prints of every shot you take and gluing them into a photo album are gone. Get with the times. This is the digital era, man.

What most of us do is store our images on our computer, and print only those that we really like. The remainder of our pictures we email or post to websites which offer photo sharing features.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite photo sharing sites. Some are strictly pay, some have a free option, and they all offer a variety of features.

• Webshots
  Share your pictures through photo messages, online photo albums, custom prints and gifts.
• Snappages
  Fully flash built interface with 3D slideshows and an image editor.
• Fotki
  Free unlimited photo hosting for blogs, 9 cent prints, and photo contests.
  
• Shutterfly
  Free unlimited storage, 12 cent prints, as well as calendars and photo books.
  
• PBase
  One of the oldest and most trusted of these sites, PBase is not free, but has a really nice gallery and excellent community.
• Flickr
  Arguably the most popular and widely used photo sharing site these days, a free and unlimited Pro option with geotagging and 15 cent prints.
  
• Smugmug
  Unlimited photos, unlimited storage, but no free account if you want to share with others.
  
• Exposure Manager
  Nice site with a focus on branding and sales. Unlimited storage and uploads, with an FTP option.
• PrintRoom
  Geared toward serious shooters and pros, PrintRoom lets you create a web storefront for your photos.
• PhotoBucket
  This one has been catching on, and offers 1GB storage on their free account, and 5GB on their pro with unmetered bandwidth.

We were talking a little earlier about Flickr Places, which seems to have now gone live – you can visit the new section of the site here.

So far I really like what I see. It’s easy, however, to forget that these pictures are not sorted by their timeliness. My first search was Beijing (it happened to be linked to from the front page) and I was immediately struck with a photograph from a riot. It took me a second to realize that while this was certainly shot in Beijing, it was actually an 18 year old picture from a riot in 1989 and though it was featured as the most prominent picture on the page, it wasn’t recent.

My second search was for home. Ontario, Canada… which produced some beautiful shots of familiar locales, complete with a map of the area, groups that are pertinent to the region, and even some weather information in the particular cities.

Every page even gives you a little reference point on a world map at the very top. It’s all quite slick, and must easier to navigate through than their “World Map” view. Check it out and let us know what you think of Flickr’s new feature.

Flickr was a smart acquisition by Yahoo – a photo sharing website that really emphasizes the social aspect of the web. It’s one thing to have a place to share photos with your friends. Flickr seems to place more value creating tools that let you share photos with the rest of the world. The upcoming Flickr Places will highlight that strength.

In 2006, Flickr added the function for Geotagging. Currently, Flickr has over 30 million geotagged photos – and according to sources the site receives a new geotagged photo every second. With all this geographical location data, Flickr has decided to do something interesting with it (beyond the ability to see the photos on a map).

The result is Flickr Places, which are pages that show the most interesting photos for a location (they call them iconic photos), the most common tags for the photos, and the most heavily trafficked photo groups. Flickr creates a separate Places page for each geographic location, organized using a human-readable URL, and they look like this one (for San Francisco):

At launch (which should be any day now) it will drill down to city level, but Flickr expects it to be able to drill down further in the future. Places will also be accessible via the Flickr API. [via O'Reilly Radar]

This little trick works on both Windows XP systems and in OSX almost exactly the same way, you just need to make sure the shortcut (or alias) gets into the right location.

Follow the steps provided below and you’ll be uploading to your Flickr account in no time.

Windows XP

After installing the Flickr Uploadr, you need a copy of the shortcut to it. You can either create one by right clicking the Flickr Uploadr in the Program Files folder, or copy the shortcut if it made one on your desktop.

Place the shortcut in the following folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom\Export Actions

Now simply go into Lightroom and when you highlight an image (or multiple images) and click EXPORT, you will have a brand new option in the Post Processing portion of the Export dialog box.

You can select it and when you finalize the export, Flickr Uploadr will launch and automagically bring in that set of pictures for you – ready to be uploaded to your Flickr account.

Mac OSX

Find your installation of the Flickr Uploadr (should be in the Applications folder) and make an alias of it. Take this alias and move it to the following folder:

Users > [YOUR USERNAME] > Library > Application Support > Adobe > Lightroom > Export Action

Now, just like above, when you go to the EXPORT option in Adobe Lightroom, one of your post-processing options is “Flickr Uploadr”.

Want to take better pictures? Nikon School presents the Nikon Digital Learning Center, a great Flickr group that delivers loads of interesting and helpful tips and tricks to turn you into a better photographer. Experts and avid amateurs alike opine about portrait, action, travel, and close-up photography, with a bit of a bent towards Nikon technology.

I’ve only been on the group for a day now, but I’ve already learned some stuff about night shooting and heard some interesting views on how shooting RAW may affect battery life.

Visit the Flickr group today – and if you don’t have a Flickr account yet, you can join up.

When people upload pictures to Flickr, they usually leave their EXIF data intact (ie. they haven’t performed any EXIF damaging editing on the file). Flickr will accumulate all the numbers and do a report every so often – which BigHugeLabs references. You can get the details on the top 10 cameras being used at any given time there.