As the pro-democracy protests throughout Egypt held the world captive, a flood of photos has been coming in from photojournalists and activists. The photos were posted through various online services from Flickr to Twitpic to Facebook. Unless you knew who to follow on Twitter, it was impossible to take in all of the incredible images coming in of protests throughout the country.

There are various free services that aim to make the sharing of these kinds of photos much easier. These services offer a few methods to funnel images into one location. Whether you want to know how to share photos from one event with a small group of friends, or are trying to find a way to collect a treasure of photos that document a significant moment in world history, here are a few ways to do just that.

DropEvent

Getting started with DropEvent, you can create your event and determine whether you want to approve photos before they are added, and if adding photos is invite only or open to the general public.

how to share event photos

You can then add photos yourself uploading them from the website. There is also an email feature, allowing to send in photos from your mobile phone, but in our experience it wasn't successful.

share photos online free

Invite friends to contribute to the album via an email invitation, and they can then add photos using the same methods. To add photos, they don't have to sign up, but will have to provide their email address, but it won't be displayed with the image.

share photos online free

DropEvent's simple upload interface is easy to use, but the display of photos can come across as a little clunky. It would also be nice to be able to identify (or choose to identify) who uploaded a photo especially for groups of friends. It's also worth noting that the DropEvent invitation ended up in the Spam folder in Gmail.

share photos online with group

Yogile

We've covered Yogile before and while the photo layout will appeal to the more artistic photographer, free accounts are limited to only 100 MB per month.

Like on DropEvent, you can choose whether or not to approve photos before they are added. Images are added by you or other users through the web interface. Just share the email address or album URL with friends and they can access it instantly.

If they opt not to sign up for a Yogile account, your friends can still add photos, but the drawback is, of course, that photos uploaded without logging in are not attributed to anyone.

free share photos

We love Yogile's simple approach and minimalist layout, but the 100 MB limit puts it out of the running for collecting events on a very large scale, so is better suited for small groups of friends.

Picasa

Picasa is another ideal choice for creating group albums for any given event or concept whether on a small or large scale. The advantage to using Picasa is that it's a popular service that many people use anyway, so you won't have to convince them to use another service.

When creating the album be sure you create a public album, or one that you can share with friends by sending them the link.

free share photos

After sharing the album by sending an email invitation, you can then decide which of your friends can add photos to the album. The catch with Picasa is that they have to have a google account, and that you have to manually toggle the upload icon next to each person's name on the right hand side of the album. It would be nice to be able to have a universal toggle button for all friends.

free share photos

Each Picasa album is limited to 1,000 photos and your entire storage on Picasa is limited to 1 GB.

Flickr Groups

Of course Flickr does offer a similar concept through their groups feature. Flickr Groups are probably the ideal method for someone looking for a free way to amass as many photos from one event in one place, without any limit on the number of photos themselves.

how to share photos

At the same time, if you would rather use Flickr for a private or invitation only album of photos, these options are available when creating a group.

Do you have any tips on how to share photos amongst one group? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock