Grandparently Grandparents and Grandchildren 
Photobucket is one of the most popular and most trusted photo sharing sites. It’s been around a long time and earned a great deal of praise. One reason is its extensive editing features. Another is its ease-of-use and easy sharing. Here’s a review of Photobucket for grandparents considering using it for photo sharing.
Editing
Photobucket has a whole array of editing features and is considered one of the best photo sharing sites for editing. Its editing features are very intuitive and easy-to-use. You can remove red-eye, crop, sharpen images, add colors and effects, and so on. You can do pretty much anything you want with Photobucket’s editing features, whether you just want to touch-up and clarify, or you want to add effects to make it look like a professional shot.
Features
In addition to storing and sharing photos, Photobucket allows you to create digital slideshows, scrapbooks and other presentations. You can add music to these presentations to make them more fun and interesting. You can share videos on Photobucket as well, but there’s a limit of 10 minutes.
The Photobucket Print Shop lets you print photos in various sizes or on a variety of different goods through the site itself (not a third party like some photo sharing sites do). These goods include shirts, greeting cards, hoodies, mugs, calendars, wall posters, jigsaw puzzles, blankets, mouse pads, luggage tags – pretty much anything you can think of. The goods can be mailed directly to your home or you can pick them up at Target.
Another handy feature of Photobucket is that you can download entire albums with just one click. When you view an album, under the menu item Album Action, there’s a link to download the album.
Ease of Use
Ease of use is one of Photobucket’s main selling points. It offers a great deal of features and they’re all quite simple and self-explanatory. The layout of the site is clean and intuitive so that it’s easy to understand how to use these features. The editing, in particular, is designed to be user-friendly.
Uploading and downloading photos is easy. Within minutes of signing up, you can start uploading or downloading. There are tutorials as well if you need help. You can easily upload photos or videos from multiple sources, including a smartphone, the web or an email, all at just the click of a button.
Unfortunately, you can’t download videos but there are third-party sites and services that allow you to do that.
Sharing
Photobucket is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, so you can share your photos easily with them. It also gives you a link for each photo or album so that you can send it as an email. Each photo has an embed link that you can use to post it anywhere online, such as on an online forum, on your blog, or on your website.
Privacy
Each album on Photobucket can be password protected. There are three privacy options on Photobucket – Public, Private or Private with Guest Password.
The Public option means that your photos can be seen by anyone online, even if they don’t have a Photobucket account. The images will show up in Google and Bing search. Your most recent images will automatically show up on your Photobucket page and may show up in those of your followers.
When you set an album to Private, no one can see it except you. If you want to share an image or album, you can choose the option of doing so. Otherwise, Photobucket serves as a way to store your images. A family member can create a Private album and manually share with you when they post something new.
The other option is Private with Guest Password, or Password Protected. This is the best option for sharing images among family members because it grants access to the album only to selected people. It allows you to invite “guests” to your album. When you do this, it gives you a link and asks you to choose a password. You can send this link and password to anyone you want through email, and then they can see the album.
Photobucket Summary
Pros:
- You don’t need to sign up to Photobucket to see photos hosted there.
- A wealth of great editing options that are easy to use
- Extremely easy to upload and download photos
- Excellent privacy options that are easy to understand
Cons:
- The free account is full of ads and has a limit on storage space, so upgrading to a premium account is recommended
- The premium packages are somewhat pricey (compare 500GB at $300 per year to sites that give you unlimited storage for free)
Photobucket is a great place to store and share photos. It’s easy to use and packed full of editing features. It’s a good option for keeping images private and they’re easy to share. It’s one of the most popular and most trusted photo sharing sites.
The only drawback is that the free version is so limited and the premium packages can be pricey. I recommend trying out Photobucket and if you really love its extensive editing features, easy-to-use privacy settings and capacity for sharing, choose a premium package that you like.
Official Site: Photobucket.com
