Dave's Favorites: Blog Your Photos at Zoto

These days, online photo sharing sites are starting to look like Swiss Army knives: They do a little of everything. Indeed, I'm starting to have trouble explaining all the things that these sites do. They take the kitchen-sink approach to software by letting you share, organize, back up, and print your photos.

While Zoto doesn't throw the kitchen sink at you, it comes close. Imagine a site that gives you 2GB of storage for free. Upload your photos in their native resolution (the pictures don't get resized along the way) and attach a title and keywords called Smart Tags to each one. There's even a feature that lets you "geotag," meaning that you can attach location information to your pictures that corresponds to positions on Google Maps. Zoto features a clever interface for filtering your photo collection by Smart Tags, so you can quickly zero in on the images you're looking for. You can link your collection with other users and add comments to their photos.

The site's coolest feature, though, is the way it seamlessly connects to popular blogging software like Blogger, Friendster, TypePad, WordPress, and others. Just enter the address for your blog and you can create blog entries and insert photos from your Zoto library right from the Zoto Web site. It's surprisingly convenient.

The first 2GB is free, and you can pay $44/year for 5GB of storage. I'm not sure there's enough value in the subscription service to warrant paying for it, but if you maintain a blog and want easy access to your photos online, you should at least check out the free trial.