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.

Designer Dustin Curtis rightly points out that American Airline’s website sucks. The functionality you want is buried amongst all sorts of other content, and even then the search isn’t that great. And American Airlines isn’t the online airline with an annoying web page. In fact, I can’t find one I like, just ones that I don’t like, with Ryanair’s page topping the list of worst sites – it advertises flights from distant airports and the search doesn’t let you search all airports for a city.

Mr. Curtis proposes a redesign that reminds me a good deal of Kayak.com – my favourite site to search for flights. His looks like this:

The American Airline’s unofficial response to Mr. Curtis is simply depressing and reveals why airline pages sucks so hard. Quite simply: internal politics. Everyone has some vested interest in putting something on the website, and rather than focus on the other all user experience, everyone tosses something up there to make one big mess. I won’t hold my breath for a good airline site to come along, thankfully we don’t have to deal with them that much thanks to the joy of Kayak.

The 2008 Weblog Awards are open for voting, with a list of intriguing travel blogs, many of which I was unfamiliar with. I love reading about people’s travels and spinning that into ideas for future adventures. Questing obviously isn’t in the running for these awards, but you can vote for this blog in the blogger’s choice awards. We’re in the top 10 right now, and I’d be very grateful to you all if you could toss a few votes our way.

The weblog award nominees are:

MyKugelhopf
Lots of talk about food mixed in with the travels and spectacular photos to boot.

Folie a Deux
A blog for dreaming about comprehensive trips with a strong personal touch.

The Asian Traveler
A look at some of the fun and funny kitsch of Asia, but with an annoying design.

Curious Expeditions
The bizarre and macabre from around the world, unfortunately not updated that often.

Notes from the Road
Not so much of a blog as an online photo magazine detailing various areas.

The Lost Girls
A group of friends roaming the world, the fun they are having shows.

LL World Tour
A serial traveler going to areas that are fairly accessible from the US.

Jaunted
An online travel magazine that churns out a ton of material.

Intelligent Travel
National Geographic’s standard travel blog, with a bit of a focus on Washington DC.

The Cranky Flier
Mostly blogging on the aviation industry, which of course is a central industry for travel.

Mashable just announced the winners for the 2nd annual Open Web Awards, and Spotted by Locals is taking home the prize in the travel category. Spotted is a series of city blogs where locals post about their favorite local haunts. Right now all of their cities are in Continental Europe, but you can probably look for that to change soon. Meantime, if you are planning a trip to Europe, Spotted blogs should be one of your first stops.

While convincing a friend to join me for my ski trip, I was re-introduced to Buzz, a feature on Kayak which I highly recommend if you’re still scheming up your next adventure. You enter your city and a general area to which you’d like to travel, and you receive a list of options within a certain month. It’s a fun way to help you decide where you will be going.