I take pictures to keep memories fresh, but I know that I use them just as much to share the story of my travels. Online photosharing services make the second task an easy chore, so long as you know the right one to use. Here’s a rundown of one’s I’ve encountered and my thoughts on them.

Flickr:
I use and love Flickr to share my travel photos. A couple of days ago my love was re-affirmed and Flickr loved me back a little bit in the form of a note from vtravelled that they were using a picture I took in La Plange on their site. And to me, that’s really what I want most out of a photo hosting service, the ability to share even with people I may not know. The biggest fault with Flickr is that you can’t resize the images to any dimensions you would like for embedding, you’re stuck with their standard sizes.

SmugMug / Photoshelter:
Gary from Everything Everywhere, one of the most constant travel bloggers/photographers, has recently left Flickr to a powerful platform -SmugMug. SmugMug, and other similar services, cater to people pushing the limits of armature photography. They cost a bit more money, but you get all sorts of features like watermarks and resizing images to embed them. I don’t really want to invest in the fancy option, and I think I would miss the Flickr community.

Picasa:
I used Picasa when I first started this blog, and didn’t like it one bit. I found navigating among pictures to be a slow and cumbersome process, and the way the pictures load takes longer than Flickr and they look bad as they slowly load.

Photobucket / Snapfish / Shutterfly:
When I was first roaming around the world I tried all these different photo sharing sites. They all felt like MySpace to me – poorly designed and inexplicably popular. They all cater to people who want to make prints, which I rarely have interest in doing.

Facebook:
Facebook is the most popular way to share photos, and it’s also the most social. It’s so popular and natural that it almost feels like a no-brainer, I would assume that everyone uses it to share pictures.
While it isn’t useful as a photo hosting service, being able to tag the people with whom you’ve shared the journey. I upload fewer pictures to Facebook than I do Flickr, and normally they are ones with people in them or funny images from my phone uploaded right at the moment they were taken.

In about a week I’m going to start travelling a bunch for work. I’ll in a bunch of different cities over the next couple months and I need to figure out something fun and funky to do in each place to commemorate the trip. I’m thinking something along the lines of the famous “Where the Hell is Matt?” dance video above. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I want to see if I can gather some ideas from everyone else out there to see if there are any cool thoughts as to what I should do. So lay the ideas on me. What should I do?

World in Focus, the biggest and best photo context of the year, is into full swing. The drawback is that it costs $12 to enter the contest, but the prizes include trips to Tanzania and St. Lucia, so I think it’s worth a shot. Also, I think winning the competition is anyone’s game, as I was very surprised by last year’s winner.

You can enter the contest here.

Photo: one that I’m thinking of submitting. It’s one of a couple of different pictures from Morocco that I like, but I’m indecisive when it comes to choices like this.

The Eiffel Tower is one of the most photogenic objects in the world. My sister and I stopped by twice while in Paris this last weekend, and I just couldn’t keep my finger off the shutter release. The problem I have is that everyone else has also taken scores of pictures of the tower. As a result I don’t feel happy taking a standard picture, I have to get funky. The resulting photos tell a odd story about how I experienced the tower.

Take the two in this post as examples. These pictures of the tower make it feel like I almost wasn’t looking at it. It happened to be a convenient prop to help make the picture interesting. Really the same problem exists for all landmarks, but I feel it especially the case for the Eiffel Tower simply by being the biggest thing in one of the most visited cities. I’m going to have to start reminding myself when I come across famous landmakrs, while I’m taking my funky photos, also take a plain one, maybe even with me in it, to simply remember the experience of being there.

I use Flickr to share my pictures, but I’ve never explored all of the fun features that Flickr offers. Poking around today, I found a couple of features that rival Google Earth in both their ability to make me want to travel and to waste my time.

Places: lets you drill down into a certain area and explore what it has to offer.

Maps: will take you whipping around the world to see some of the most interesting pictures on Flickr and recent uploads.

Start playing with these two fun toys and you’ll quickly find that you’ve burned away your Sunday afternoon. Trust me, happened to me.