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Free Gallery Space for Your Photos

Get storage, a Web photo gallery, and high-res printing for a song.

Richard Jantz, special to PC World

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Online photo galleries offer a terrific way for both amateur and professional photographers to store and share their images with friends, family, and the world. While Web-based photo sites are proliferating at a fast rate, PhotoLoft.com stands out. New to this burgeoning field, PhotoLoft offers some special features that make it one of the best free photo sites out there.

Unlike many competitors, PhotoLoft is much more than a mere repository of images. The site, which identifies itself as an online photo-album community and digital-imaging commerce center, provides free software for uploading files, handy zoom and pan tools for enhanced viewing of online images, and--most impressive of all--print software that lets you output high-resolution images with layout control.

In addition, PhotoLoft provides a whopping 20MB of free storage space to anyone who signs up. That's more megabytes than any other free Web-based photo site I've visited--5MB is much more common. If you want more, you can buy it: $29.95 a year gets you 50MB of storage space, plus password protection (if you prefer to keep your photo albums private).

High-Quality Output

After signing up as a PhotoLoft user, I downloaded the free software and started creating my own photo album within minutes. PhotoLoft's best feature is high-resolution printing. Unlike the low 72-dpi resolution that Web browsers normally use when printing on-screen photo images, PhotoLoft's print software--which uses Hewlett-Packard OpenPix print technology--lets you print photo images from your browser at your printer's highest resolution, and in a variety of standard photo sizes, such as 3-by-5-inch, 5-by-7-inch, 8-by-10-inch, and wallet. PhotoLoft supports JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP image formats.

I was particularly impressed by PhotoLoft's ability to maximize my use of paper when printing photos. For instance, I wanted to print multiple wallet-sized shots, and rather than output each on a separate piece of paper, PhotoLoft calculated the size of the photos and placed eight on a single page. This is an especially great feature when you're using expensive glossy photo paper.

I encountered a couple of glitches in a few instances when using PhotoLoft--my first attempts to use the online printing feature were fraught with error messages, and one of the images in my album refused to display in the slideshow view. But overall, PhotoLoft's software and site services performed well.

Show Your Stuff

Another strong point is PhotoLoft's creation of an online community where photographers can show their work and swap ideas. To share your photos with visitors and other PhotoLoft participants, you can use a number of keyword categories--ranging from Animals and Astronomy to Water Sports, Weather, and "Just Weird." Site visitors can search for photos by using these keywords, or they can view individual photo albums in their entirety. Visitors can use any browser, without plug-ins, to view images at PhotoLoft.

You won't find photo-finishing services at PhotoLoft. These are offered for a fee at other sites, such as FotoWire, Kodak PhotoNet, and PictraNet. But PhotoLoft does provide various e-commerce features. For instance, you can create photo-personalized gifts such as coffee mugs, T-shirts, and mouse pads, and an online greeting card service is soon to be introduced.

PhotoLoft provides great services and shows signs of positive growth--both in features and in its user community. By offering high-resolution printing within its free-of-charge framework, PhotoLoft should help to raise the bar for all photo gallery sites on the Web.

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