I recently attended a Digital Imaging conference in San Francisco last week and wanted to share with our readers one of the key themes I heard over and over during the two day conference. Sharing your digital images on social networking sites was undoubtedly the topic of discussion for many of the attendees. As many of us struggle to determine what is the best means of storage for our digital images, many are electing to use the "cloud" or a hosted server to do this archiving

These are sites like Kodak Gallery, Photo Bucket, Winkflash, Smug Mug, Phanfare, Shutterfly, and many others. I ran into folks from a few of these sites and they are all actively developing a means to enable their users to select which images to share to one or multiple social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter.

For those that did not know, these social network sites do not store your images at full resolution; they are scaled down substantially for storage and retrieval purposes. Given this, they would not be a good choice for long term or permanent storage as the kept size has barely enough quality for a 4x6 print. 

What the “cloud” companies are doing will be beneficial because they will maintain the full resolution of your images and will automatically downsample to the appropriate size for each social network site, if necessary. Another feature that these “cloud” sites are enabling is a way to send your images to production (i.e., prints, photo-books, mugs, hats, etc...)

I really like this “one stop shop” approach, since I've had to post to multiple sites separately for printing and sharing. Having all these services bundled together will ultimately make storing, sharing, and printing much easier for everyone. Now they just need to integrate digital watermarking into your account options! (Stay tuned for more on that last one...)