From 3,000 miles away, a daughter shares her baby’s first steps with her mother. Across town, friends laugh about a great get together they had last month. Around the globe, a grandma shares memories from Christmas with her kids and grand kids. How are they doing this? Well, online photo sharing of course. Online photo and video sharing are more popular than ever and are only gaining in numbers of participants. It is simple, fast, and fun. With only a few clicks, you can upload, edit, save, and send your photos to whomever wherever.

Almost everyone has encountered online photo sharing at some point whether you’ve viewed someone else’s pictures or videos on Snapfish.com or uploaded your own photos to Walmart.com. As I said before, it’s fast and simple and everyone wants a part of it. There are so many photo and video and file sharing programs online today, it’s hard to choose which one to use. Some offer public sharing, unlimited storage, one-click order printing, flash animations, or visual blogs. Some of these programs are free (to a certain extent) while others charge a minimal fee of around $25 per year. Most programs require all participants, even viewers, to sign up for an account with their site. This all sounds great, but one thing not addressed is the security and privacy of your files.

Let’s start with websites like Facebook and MySpace. Once you upload your photos, any of your “friends” can view them. This means if your boss, co-workers, teachers, professors, or even potential employers are your “friend” they can view any and all of your pictures. This means that anyone that can view your pictures can save your pictures to their hard drive and edit and repost them as they please. These issues are possible with any site that allows you to share your files publicly. With other sites, even though people have to be invited or approved to view your files, they can still see entire albums you have posted, not just individual pictures from an album or even a selected few.

A newer alternative to online file sharing is the File Management System. A File Management System consists of user friendly web pages that offer privacy, security, organization, and best of all, ease of use. It’s as easy as uploading a link to an email and clicking send. You simply log in to your file manager, create new albums or folders, upload your files, and create links for the files you would like to send or share. You have the ability to create links for specific files within your folder or album. You can send the link to whomever you choose but not just anyone can log in and view your files without your permission. You also have the option of creating a onetime only link where the link can be opened only once by the recipient. If they try to open it more than once, the file manager will not allow it. You can also set the link so the recipient can open it as many times as they wish. Say you’re a wedding photographer and you want to share wedding pictures with your client but you have several clients who can view your site and albums. Instead of sharing these photos with everyone risking your clients’ privacy and security, you can use a file manager to send a link and/or username and password to specific clients so they can only view their wedding photos. However, your viewers do not have to be logged into the file manager to see the files you have sent them unless you have assigned them a username and password to view specific files.

A File Management System also has no limit on file size. Typically, when sharing photos or videos via email, you must condense them into small files which can lower the quality of the file, making it harder for Grandma to print quality pictures of the kids from their birthday parties. When using the file manager to send links to your files via email, this isn’t necessary since the email only contains a link. Also, with a file manager, you have control. You set permissions for people to view and upload files to your page. If you’re a photographer with a team of photographers, you can set permissions for them on your page so they can only access and upload to given folders or pages. If you’re a mom with shutterbug children, you too can give them permission to upload their photos to only certain folders or albums.

The downfall to the file manager is the ability to edit or quickly print your photos, but that’s what Photoshop and Paint are for. Even with these two limiting abilities, the file manager is the safest, smartest way to share your files online and through email. It’s not worth the risk of your identity, reputation, or even job to do it any other way.