I came across this article from Forbes that is kind of a mix of a complaint focused mostly on the business model of Facebook/Instagram and a promotion of the photo sharing service – Waldo. The article is worth your time if you are interested in either topic.
I have not heard of Waldo, but from article I have learned that is a privacy first, photo service originally focused on photo collections for schools, camps, and sports teams. The article itself is more focused on individual and family sharing and explains that Waldo is expanding its reach to offer services to families.
I am interested in photo sharing as an individual and for classrooms. I have paid for Flickr for years and have used it both to share photos publicly and store others privately. I also use Google Photos and share an album with family members. I do share some photos on Instagram, but don’t really use this service heavily.
The issue of cost always comes up. The cost to a school for Waldo is about $1000 for the base model (12,000 images per year). The cost for an individual account is $5 per month for 5 gigabytes of storage. My Flickr account costs more, but I have over a terabyte of images.
Here is a resource listing photo sharing options. Google photo sharing is included and I am glad to see that Google is not listed as a free service. Photos are included within your total Google storage limit which can be substantial if you also use Google Drive and Gmail. 100 GB a month is $2.
I c0ntribute images to a federated service Pixelfed. I am a member of the instance pixelfed.social. This is social in that images are shared for viewing and commenting, but the focus is on sharing in a general sense and not just sharing with family members. One could use this service as a private account sharing only with certain members of your instance, but I don’t bother. My account has a 6 gigabyte limit, but this would allow me to store quite a few images for a free account if I wanted to use it only for private storage.