Last week we asked how you watch TV shows and movies most often. The results definitely show that times have changed, but also reflect how problematic geo-restrictions are when it comes to this kind of content.
Out of 545 votes in total, less than 2% said they rent/buy single episodes or movies from an online venue, 6% rent/buy physical media, 25% watch on TV or go to the cinema, another 25% (the exact same number of votes!) have a subscription on Netflix/Hulu or a similar service, and 42% of the voters said they most often download their TV shows and movies.
Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.
By reading the comments, it’s obvious that many of the downloaders do so for lack of any other viable option. Hopefully, solutions like Netflix or Hulu will soon be available worldwide and to all users. Don’t forget to read the poll’s best comment by Hiew Yau, who won 150 reward points for the insight!
This week’s poll question is: What’s The Best Way To Share Photos?
Sharing photos is one of the most common things we do online. If once upon a time we could show our memories only to those we actually met in person, today it’s super easy to share every little snapshot we take with the world. It’s so easy, in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to choose how to do it exactly. Is uploading an album to Facebook the best way? Or maybe sharing a Dropbox album with friends and family? Perhaps email is the simplest way to share? To each his own preference, and today you get the chance to tell us what it is.
As usual, it doesn’t matter if you use several of these, just vote for your favorite/most used option. Don’t forget to tell us in the comments what makes your choice the best, or if you voted for “other”, what your favorite sharing platform is.
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I use my Flash Drive or an SD card.
So I do.
If I have some photos that I want to share with everybody, then I certainly will put them up on Facebook. But for working files, photos, video; those go through dropbox, and are only accessible between a few people.
I use email because most people find it more easy to use and understand. My friend are not that much tech savvy and email is the best way to share photos.
A great free sharing service for collaborative web albums! (Android and iphone apps!) http://www.liveshare.com/
Cool, thanks!
Instagram is the way, at the moment. If I can take a photo – shove it on Instagram which also puts it on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr at the touch of a button, what could be better??
In essence, I feel it is just for ‘snaps’ – but thats what people want. There will be something better that comes along though. Only a matter of time.
If I want to share a photo gallery, both Picasa and SkyDrive are excellent choices. If I want to share an archive of photos (such as a zip), cloud storage (SkyDrive, DropBox) or file sharing servers (Mediafire) are my choices.
I like using Picasa and if there are a lot of photos, I upload them to Picasa Web Album and share the link. The beauty of using Picasa is it’s quick editing feature, easy access to your email contacts if you use gmail. While I have Flickr Acct, I only use it to share, when I’m retrieving older photos. The photos I want to edit a little better, I use Gimp. This is where Picasa comes in very handy, since I can scan them faster, than viewing them in Gimp. Once I select the photos I wish to edit more in Gimp, I simply export them to a folder on the desktop. Eventually I will put all the photos on Flickr at some point in time. This way I have the same Photos archived in Picasa, Picasa Web(which syncs with Picasa) and Flickr. That way my photos are safe, should one of the 3 have some sort of accident.
Sounds like a nice system. :)
I use Skydrive; I have 25 gb of storage and it works extremely well.
I thick sharing photos on your computer is pointless. It’s not that I’m a oh-don’t-use-your-computer idiot, i use my computer for 6 hrs a day but I think the best way to share photos iis by actually meeting the person and showing it to them on your iPhone screen.
… think along the lines of work-wise… you have 50 events nationally and have reps in the field your client wants proof of performance that all of the events are actually taking place as promised. I use dropbox liked minus.com when they allowed downloading but theyve since made a mess of things. The downside with dropbox is that whoever has access to the folder can edit/delete files – yes they are retrievable but id prefer not to have to play clean up
This is assuming you actually can meet everyone you want to share with in person. In reality, this is not always possible.
For example, a while ago I took a 3–months long trip, from which I share photos with my friends and family back home about every week. Had I waited until I came back to show them ALL these photos on my screen it would have taken way too long, and I doubt anyone would have really seen everything. Sometimes it’s just not practical.
Same goes for sharing with people who live in other countries. There are friends I almost never meet, they live so far away, will I never share photos with them?
It would have been nice to be able to meet everyone all the time, but the Internet makes it possible to share without meeting. I think that’s part of the point.
Thanks for the comment!
Hi!
When I want to share with your friends, I post them in your photo albums on Facebook and Google+. If I want to share the photos are not for everyone, I send them an email to the selected person.
Best regards!
I use Facebook most of the time. I just find it easy that way.
It depends on several things: what kind of photo you’re sharing, why you’re sharing it and who your intended audience is.
If you want to share with your family, printing, email or a cloud service like dropbox might be best. You want the photos to reach a specific group of people and you might not want them posted online for the world to see.
If it’s pictures of your holiday, a night out with friends or something like that then social media sites like Facebook and Google+ would be best.
I could sit here all day giving examples but I’m sure you know already. The main point is different services have different communities of people sharing different kinds of photos for different reasons. Do you want the photo to reach one person, several people or as many as possible? Do you mind if other people see you sharing with a specific person? All of these things influence your choice. None of these services can be the best in every situation.
I can’t agree more. At the end which service you choose depends on your situation, and it’ll be slightly different every time.
If I happen to meet the intended recipient in (more or less) regular times, then I’d just send it via Bluetooth or passing on flash drives.
If it’s just one or two photos, email is in order.
Very true, thanks for the elaborate comment!
Facebook!
Allows you to choose whom you wish to share and also is more fun since the people you chose all comment together, so you get started with conversations on an image itself :p
Email and dropbox also allow to send to the person you want but this fun gets missed out!
Most people (including me) most often turn to Facebook when we want to share photos online. You get to quickly share with friends and family who use Facebook. However, Facebook doesn’t offer much other than tagging, liking and commenting on posts. Searching according to name or date too isn’t possible as far as I know.
If I want to share photos with specific people (close friends, family, etc.), I tend to use Picasa. Uploading photos is real quick and the interface is easy to navigate. I am an avid Google user, so Picasa integrates with other Google services. Picasa also supports a lot of other raw formats apart from JPEG, which is great. It offers 1GB of space for the standard version, which is good enough for me. The Pro version is priced at a decent level too.
Since I think 1GB is way too small, I backup my photo archives to Box (25GB when I signed up for Fetchnotes)-the rest is the same. I like Picasa and it’s also my default image viewer.
Hello,it is so difficult to choose the right web site/way in a variety of available options. In the end it depends on your needs, I mean your goals. I use flickr.com because it is free, it is widespread and I happened to see many peoples join to my newly create photo group without having to look for them! When I need to realize a photobook printable on demand I go to http://www.lulu.com; free and well known.
Thank you.
Nice, thanks!
I use mainly Skydrive and Dropbox to share photos wiht family. Not yet good enough as a photographer to share with others.
Dropbox works really well when sharing with students or with parents.
Facebook , second pick would be dropbox
I just love sharing images with Dropbox. It is easy and you don’t have to open any site to share them. The only thing you have to do is share a Dropbox folder with somebody and then you can just keep adding pictures. The only downside is the limited space. But I bought a HTC recently, and I was given 23GB extra space on Dropbox, so that can hold a lot of pictures.
Woohoo, 23GB! That’s awesome. Dropbox really is convenient, especially if you have all that space.
I usually share on Facebook, but I would love to know… is there a good place to keep your photos so that if your computer dies you can still access them from a different computer?
It depends on how many photos you have. You can get an external hard-drive and back up stuff on to it. It’s always good to have backups anyway. If you don’t have a lot of photos, you can use Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. You can even get a paid Dropbox account if you want more storage.
Only limited images that I post on Facebook, mostly just to keep reminding people what I look like :) but for sharing images that I took at a family/friends dinner, I would put it up to either Dropbox or Box. I actually like how Box automatically emails me whenever someone downloaded a file from my shared folder.
IMGUR is handy for sharing pics from the web or your files.
As others have said, if I’m sharing with the world (ie, showing images of new work or trying to drive people to my website) I’ll use Facebook; if I’m working with my graphic designer or web designer or someone who need access to my images I’ll use Dropbox. It’s so easy and seamless and can be kept as private as needed.
My concern is to balance security and bandwidth. In most cases, I do not want to publish something to the world; I am sending a specific image – a work in progress – to a specific person or group of people.
Facebook is notoriously sloppy about privacy, so even though you can adjust privacy settings, I don’t trust them to restrict access. The same goes for Instagram and Google+. Those services are geared towards those who want to share everything with everybody.
Email is relatively secure, but I consider it rather rude to send large files via email, especially in these days of throttled bandwidth for handheld devices. I prefer to send a link to a hosted image.
Dropbox is good for this, but I only use it when sharing with good friends; I may be paranoid, but I suspect a Dropbox link creates a security hole. So, in the end, I mostly end up using either Flickr or a non-membership temporary image hosting service to share an image.
Nice comment, thanks for going through all the options like that!
I like Jalbum, easy to use and very nice templates
Do also use Dropbox and Picasa for quick sharing
Jalbum looks nice, I haven’t heard of it before. Thanks. :)
Looks like jAlbum is more a program than a photo-sharing service. It helps you make an album (which you can post elsewhere, or they can host). They have a free trial, then it seems like they charge for the program/hosting.
Might be interesting, but I think I’d call it a portfolio display option rather than a photosharing option.
I like picasa or google docs/drive
I don’t share photos very often, but when I do – I use Minus ( minus.com – 15GB free storage).
I use Picasa for all of my photos and make use of Web Albums for sharing pics. I find this method better for me and anyone who would like to view and/or download my pics.
I use a blog and a Smugmug account. I just give the URLs to those I wish to share the photos with.
For me it’s printing.
because you can give it to the one you love and you can make more effort out of it.
Interesting, and what do you do when you want to share photos with someone in a different country or just far away?
Make more and more effort..
Well, mailing still exist.
I know it’s out of date but it can touch someone’s heart than online sharing of photos. Then the receiver will say: Oh, she really made an effort for me , I will keep these and treasure these for her. :D
Nice. :)
i use social networks twitter,facebook and pinterest
I find facebook the best source for sharing photos, because you can share and tag friends in it and they can further tag their friends if they wanted to and so on. and you can also limit your sharing with the privacy also.
Dopbox and Skydive equally. I’m glad to see most of us use these services.
rrrrrrrr… Sorry!