For consumers who want photo sharing without the distraction of advertisements or the promotion of prints and gifts to cover the costs of running the service, subscription based photo sharing services are the solution. The primary revenue model for these services is the subscription revenue from account holders. The benefits of paid sharing to consumers are that the company may offer greater guarantees about keeping the photos online and allow friends and family to download the full-size original files. They are also a great way to backup your pictures as many photographers are finding that they have lost many years of digital pictures because they forget to back up their computers continuously. However there are sites that provide free services without advertisement. Typically no ads are allowed on paid accounts since their presence would remove one of their main distinguishing characteristics.
With the introduction of high speed connections directly to homes (broadband), it is feasible to share pictures and movies without going through a central service. The advantages to peer-to-peer sharing are reduced hosting costs and no loss of control to a central service. The downsides are that the consumer does not get the benefit of offsite backup, consumer ISPs often prohibit the serving of content both by contract and through the implementation of network filtering, and there are few quality guarantees for recipients. However, there are typically no direct consumer costs beyond the purchase of the initial software, provided the consumer already has a computer with the photos at home on a high speed connection.
While peer-to-peer solutions operate without a central server this can create problems since some users don't leave their computers online and connected all the time. Using a server as an intermediate point it's possible to share photos peer-to-peer with the reliability of a central server solution. Photos are stored on the server and downloaded back as needed.
A variation on the peer-to-peer model is peer-to-browser, whereby images are shared on one PC with the use of a local (on the computer) software service (much like peer-to-peer) but made available to viewer through a standard web browser. Technically speaking this is may still be described as peer-to-peer (with the second peer being a web browser) but it is characteristically different as it assumes no need to download peer software for the viewer. Photos are accessed by regular URLs that standard web browsers understand natively without any further software required. Consequently photos shared in this way are accessible not only to users who have downloaded the correct peer software (compatible with the software in use by the sharer).
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