Flickr

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Flickr has been around over years and has grown more fun. It helps that the digital photography's gone towards its milestone over many years. It is hard not to favor of Flickr as it is more interesting and an easy service to use. It is owned by Yahoo. Now, the Yahoo's Mail account has become much better than its crappy Yahoo! Photos!

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It is easy to sign up for Flickr. As long as you are a member of Yahoo, you are given an opportunity to sign up here unless you aren't averse to join Yahoo. At your first attempt to sign up, you will be acknowledged that Flickr is a member of Yahoo's happy family. Hence, you are asked to sign up for a Yahoo account first. I mean, if you are not a member of Yahoo but you already have a slew of other accounts, it just simply means irksome for you. However, once you get pass this hassle, Flickr appears to be a breeze for you. You don't have to get annoying to start venturing this website as there are helpful little hints here and there to get you started, and since there are so many people on Flickr already, it is likely you will have someone to bug for tech support.

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Flickr makes uploading and posting your digital images very much hassle-free. The Flickr Windows integration makes uploading as simple as a right-click. By installing the Flickr app, there will be an additional "Send to Flickr" command in the right-click menu.

It is all very easy and very streamlined but you need to accustom with the terms Flickr uses for its photostreams. Or else, once you have uploaded a few photos, you will very soon get hang of it.

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Flickr has an outstanding social aspect. You get to see the latest pictures from your contacts on logging in. Its start page is relatively simple, fast-loading mix of your pictures, your contact's pictures and recently uploaded snaps. It is certainly popular with third-party app makers - you can embed Flickr feeds onto your websites, access Flickr from your desktop or Facebook.

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For most users, they are satisfied with the services provided by a free account at Flickr. However, for serious snappers, they should consider about going Flickr Pro which is offered for a reasonably low price at US$24.95 a year as compared to pay a Webshots. Flickr Pro's account allows you to store high-resolution versions of your photo online. Apart from that, it gives you unlimited storage and photosets as opposed to a Free account's three photosets and 100MB per month bandwidth.

Flickr is arguably the most advanced in its features as far as integration with other services. All in one, fast interface, quick loading and community feel with a huge variety of other supports and services for third party apps are indeed hard to beat by other online photo sharing sites!

Picasa

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When Google bought Picasa, they decided to make it fully a part of the Google family by adding the overly documentations into its Google Wikibase. As a comparison, when Yahoo bought Flickr, they didn't make it more Yahoo alike as Frickr still has the authority to maintain its own friendly identity that is separated from the Yahoo family. And it seems that, Flickr works well for Yahoo as it has emerged as one of the famous photo sharing sites. For Picasa, though its download site is 5.8MB which is not too big by any means but its instructions just to learn how to use it is sometimes appeared to be annoying.

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Though I am half declined to use this website immensely, it deserves my interest to visit this website. It is wonderful enough to insert pictures to its database while creating new images even while Picasa is opened. Certainly, it makes a wonderful computer organizer for your photos. The good thing about Picasa is that it has a fantastic photo-editing feature, making you forgive it for its troublesome which is particularly dealing with its overly wordy documentations.

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With Picasa, you can preview and see every image on your PC by folder in a quick and easy manner. That means you could view them in selected batches and in slideshow formats. You can crop, correct red-eye, alter color, straighten, fill light as well as fix contrast with its more-fun-bit effects! This is all done by simply pressing at the various pretty buttons. The neutral color pickers, color temperature, highlight and shadow pickers are other innovative features that Google gives away for its users.

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Apart from the above features, Picasa also permits you to post up your Web albums as part of Google services, certainly. With these services, Picasa allows you to email your photos, print them out, make cool collages, order prints as well as post them on Google. If Google fixes its troublesome tutorials and makes its Web Album more attractive and appealing, I'm sure that Picasa will just be something you can't live without.

Pikeo

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Pikeo is not a newly-invented website as it has been around for quite some time. Its name tells you that it's quirky thing that has albeit limited, appeal and an unusual stuff the internet users could expect for. However, it is fundamentally a photo sharing website. It means a lot for the travelers to share their travelling experiences via photos and geotagging with the world. The feature of geotagging allows you to easily tag your photos with locations and keywords to identify them quickly when you search through the photos which will definitely save your time from the hassle of browsing a large image file. The integrated slideshow and trip daily are pretty interesting features you will find when using Pikeo. In fact, Pikeo shows your photo location in the map in the most interesting and attractive manner.

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The start page of Pikeo is packed with the wonderful stuffs that might have intrigued you to give it a try. It gets you some time to load and timed out before you are prompted for a registration. When you log in, you will be greeted with your user dashboard and a fairy interesting site. You will see a nice sidebar with a scrollable view of Pikeo's blog and urging towards Orange's users to access this site via the mobile interface on its left.

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Well, this very mobile-friendly website is currently in a beta version. As long as you could surf through your mobile, you will find Pikeo usable. It has two facets- the Web experience and the mobile experience for Pikeo. However, I found the latter is fun, the former less so.

Webshots

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Here, you will first see the promising name and the cute icon. Its member starting page gives you a great pick of what everyone is taking photos of and a close-up of featured photos as well. You might now love the person who invented the digital camera as you can have so many spectacular pictures at your fingertips even if you just have a glimpse of moment.

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Webshots is cute, cool and fairly straight to the point. Thankfully, its sign up procedure is relatively simple as compared to Frickr. Currently, Webshots has over 584 million photos, which is considered a huge amount, come to think of it.

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If you choose to pay US$29.88 a year for stock photos that aren't the usual boring bits of stock, you get unlimited downloads of the available Pro Shots. Nevertheless, when you download the photos for your own use or for other commercial purposes, you have to contact the photographer individually. Most people find this to be troublesome and indeed, if you are asked to contact the photographers themselves, sometimes it would be a shame for certain persons, really.

Like Pikeo, Webshots is all mobile support. Its mobile version is pretty simple and faster to download as compared to OVI. This is certainly a plus for those who want to have an easy and a quick mobile experience.

OVI

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Formerly, OVI was called Twango. Then, Nokia has rebuild it into more features from being merely a photo and video sharing space to an all encompassing space to push its N-Gate and music platforms.

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As OVI is powered by a Java app, you are requested to have Java installed on your system prior to the use of this website. The upload speed will depend utterly on your internet connection. You can email your photos to your OVI account, but prior to this, you need to add the originating email address to your address book. If neither of these options appeal, then Window XP users can use the Window XP Web Publishing Wizard.

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OVI is a website that you can upload various types of media. They don't limit users to merely photos or video, and perhaps, this is the beauty feature of OVI. That means you can share anything here, but its drawback is that you can't post anything larger than 100MB. With the 100MB limit, OVI makes its website less likely to be a dumping site for an illegal file sharing. Some users may have cried foul to find such limitation. Apart from this small catch, OV1 is the wonderful website for you to upload as many files as you desire and as often as you wish. You can even upload every RAW still on your camera, which is obviously a photographer's dream.

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Nokia N73, N95 and N82 users will also be able to make use of Nokia's Share Online 3.0 that matches the users' need to access to OVI interaction in a relatively simpler manner. If you are not a Nokia user, then you can use the Shozu app on your phone to upload to OVI instead.

OVI has made its website simpler to embed your images from your channel onto web pages. These channels mark the strength of OVI- it is easy for you to create more channels as you wish, even it allows designating privacy options for your media channels. OVI offers its users with the widgets and various means to display the media files, including tickers, Flash, JavaScript and slideshow, which are obviously trying to persuade you to make use of it. OVI also offers tons of features besides its little fault for an incredible price- free of charge!

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 7.5.524

AVG is anti-virus software developed by Grisoft Company. It is the best free anti-virus software which has much improved design in terms of its usability, stability and highly impressive detection feature that has gained popularity among the computer users. In other words, millions of home users trust on its high level of detection capability to protect their PC from the attack of unknown and weird viruses. Due to its high detection on almost all the wild viruses, Grisoft has awarded VB100% Award by Virus Bulletin in February 2008. Not only that, AVG was rated as the second highest rating for user satisfaction for its free edition. Additionally, its quality assurance has been announced as the top downloaded program on CNET Download.com.

AVG anti-virus free edition is permitted for a home user and not for a commercial use. The software provides real-time protection and it is updated automatically so that you will be provided with a rapid virus database to alert you for any infected files. It handles the infected files safely and it never gets your PC slow down. It is indeed easy to use this anti-virus software that protects your PC against viruses, worms and Trojans besides protecting your PC against spyware, identity-theft, Adware, hackers, network intrusions, and sophisticated rootkit attacks. It is also furnished with an anti-spam feature to help filter out any junk electronic mails. It is by far the best free anti-virus software I have been using so far.

PC Tools Antivirus 3.6 Free Edition

This software is very useful to protect your PC against the latest fast-spreading worms and virus, such as Netsky, Mytob and MyDoom which can seriously infect your PC as they can be transferred to other person's PC who accesses your email contacts and computer's network. Additionally, these infections may allow hackers to steal your database from your PC, and later use it to launch threats against other computer's users or website or to send large numbers of SPAM mails. Therefore, it is always safer to use this software to keep alert of infected files.

Its real-time protection is trusted with rapid database updates and it is essential to keep your PC safer against any online threats and malicious infections attempting to gain an easy access to your PC by stealing your personal details. The suspected viruses, Trojans and worms will be quarantined, disinfected and destroyed thoroughly. It is worth using this software as it is free to use plus it has no time-limits.
For a direct download, please click here.

ThreatFire Free Edition 3.0.8 (Beta 4)

The chart clearly shows that ThreatFire's Active Defense feature has proven to provide up to 243% more protection when combined its usage with the traditional anti-virus products. ThreatFire is powerful software to detect and to stop any malicious and cyber-threats which include known and unknown spyware, adware, keyloggers, viruses, buffer outflow, Trojans, rootkits, worms and malware as well. This is its unique feature as compared to the traditional antivirus products as virus threats are sometimes remained undetected and thereby infecting your PC.

1. RapidShare

   
   
   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 300 Megabytes. Downloaders can only get one file per IP per hour. Files are removed after 30 days of inactivity.

2. MegaUpload

   
   
   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 500 Megabytes. Files are removed after 90 days of inactivity.

3. File Dropper

   
   
   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 5 Gigabytes. Files are "forever as long as they are being downloaded."

4. Uploading.com

   
   
   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 100 Megabytes. Files are removed only when the user deletes them.

5. YouSendIt

   
   
   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 100 Megabytes. Files are removed after 7 days.

6. MediaFire

   

   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 100 Megabytes. There is currently no time limit for stored files but the site says it will notify users in advance in the future if it becomes necessary to delete older files.

7. EatLime

   

   Quick, no hassle uploads of up to 100 Megabytes. Registered users can upload files of up to 1 Gigabyte. Other users can immediately begin downloading the file once you begin uploading it-even if it has not been completely uploaded yet. Files are kept on the server “as long as they're in demand.”

There you go folks. These are the best free file hosting sites I have found in my years of webusing. I personally use file dropper the most these days but all of these are excellent options depending on your needs.

Happy hosting!

With izimi, there is no limit to the type of file you can share. If you'd like to share a picture, a movie, an MP3, a zip, a rar, it's all possible. You can even use izimi to post images and sounds to your blog, or anywhere else on the web.

Your recipients don't need any special software to view your content, other than a standard web browser, since izimi serves your files direct from your own PC, so files that you wish to share don't need to be uploaded to any central service.

You can choose whether the file you wish to share is public to all, which will make it available on the izimi social networking website and added to the search engine there… or you can choose to make your file sharable only through private means, which means only the people you directly give the link to may download that file.

Izimi also comes with shell integration, which means instead of having to open the client each time you want to share that file, you can simply right click on it, select one of the several options for izimi from the menu that pops up, and izimi will do the rest. It'll even generate the link for you to give to someone else.

Aside from the sharing features, izimi offers a great tool to see all the files you're currently sharing, organized into types. The file browser is well thought out and easy to navigate, with all of your files being readily accessible, even if they are spread out on your computer. Any time you wish to unshared an object, you can simply delete it from the list of shared files, and it will no longer be accessible.

The only down-side to izimi is that since your computer is the file host, it will need to be on 24/7 to allow your users access to the files you wish them to have. If your computer is turned off, or the Izimi service shut down, your files are still archived and displayed in the search engine, but an offline message will be displayed to let users know your computer is currently offline.

Since Izimi doesn't place any restrictions on the type of content you can share, there will undoubtedly be adult content that may not be suitable for children to view. Izimi offers a filter that turns off this content, which must be activated in your account preferences.