Photo sharing has proven to be one of the Internet’s most common applications. Indeed, the ability to easily share photos electronically is a key driver behind the success of digital cameras. In the past five years, dozens of photo sharing web sites and other sharing services have come and, in many cases, gone. Yet I still don’t find any service that I’ve used entirely satisfying.

The first-generation photo sites, such as Zing and PhotoPoint, had a simple model: upload photos and invite people to view them. Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish, Smugmug, and many others continue with this approach. They have survived, while Zing and PhotoPoint did not, by having better monetization strategies: either they are really printing services, with electronic sharing being incidental, or they have become paid subscription services.

But for me, and I believe for many consumers, all of these Web-centric solutions suffer from a clumsiness that makes them unsatisfying and causes me to share much less than I would like. At the heart of the problem is the complete disconnect between the way I manage my photos on my PC, and how I manage them online. The only way to achieve an elegant, simple solution is to eliminate this dichotomy.

There’s three ways one might approach this:

• Make the web central. Upload all your photos, do all your organizing online, and access photos on the web whenever you want to do anything with them.

• Make the PC central, and use peer-to-peer access to enable sharing directly from the PC.

• Make the PC central, with the web being an automatic, partial mirror of what is on the PC.

Pure Web-Centric Solutions Need Much More Bandwidth

I believe the first approach will not succeed, at least in the near term, because it simply takes too long to move significant numbers of photos up to the web. There are other challenges as well, such as the difficulty of achieving a high-quality user experience in a web-based application involving large files, but the upload bandwidth is the most fundamental limitation.

Broadband is becoming widespread, but the vast majority of broadband connections have relatively modest upload speeds. There’s just no way I’m going to put up with the latency of uploading photos to the web before I can do things with them.

Peer-to-Peer is Not the Answer

Some companies have advocated peer-to-peer sharing as the answer. This has its attractions. I don’t have to spend time uploading, I don’t have to choose in advance which subset to share, and, at least if I organize using the file system, the organizing work I do on the PC is visible over the web. There are some P2P photo sharing services that have seen some success, such as Google/Picasa’s Hello and H2ST’s Pixpo.

However, I don’t believe that P2P is the way to go for most photo sharing, for several reasons:

• I don’t want to depend on my home PC being on and connected all the time.

• I don’t want my PC spending cycles and using bandwidth for photo sharing when I’m performing other tasks.

• I don’t want the recipient’s viewing experience to be limited by the upstream bandwidth of my internet connection.

There’s a reason I host my web sites at a hosting company, and not on a computer in my home or office: I want someone who is in the business of doing so to keep the server always running and supplied with ample bandwidth. For the same reason, I want photos I’m sharing to be hosted elsewhere.

Having a server “in the cloud” provides many advantages. Not only does it offer faster, more reliable connectivity, it can also act as an offsite backup. It can create photo renditions at various resolutions, providing each viewer a size optimized for their needs. It can provide a link to photo printing services. And it can serve as a collaboration hub when many people take photos of one event. (All of these things are possible in a P2P arrangement but more practical with a hosted solution.)

P2P has been a great success for sharing commercial content, but there’s two factors behind this success that don’t apply to most photo sharing. First, with commercial content, there’s thousands of copies of every file, so you aren’t dependent on any one computer being online. And the real reason P2P has seen such spectacular success is that it is a superb way to illegally share copyrighted content while obscuring who is responsible.

My Pick: PC-Centric, Mirrored Online

So I want my primary photo repository to be local, and the web to be a selective mirror. I don’t want to explicitly upload photos, I don’t want to organize on the web separately from the organization work I do locally, and I want all the metadata (such as captions) that I enter locally to be visible on the web. I want all the pictures I care about to appear magically in my web repository, for my use, but I want them kept private unless I’ve explicitly enabled them to be shared.

For most photos, the full resolution doesn’t need to be online, but in some cases I do want the original online, either for archiving or so others can make large prints. When I’ve enabled it, I want an easy way for others to order prints, and I want them to be able to download high-resolution files to print at home.

When I create a slideshow or photo book on my PC, I want it to be available online without additional work.

I some cases, I want others to be able to add photos to my collection. For my kids’ school events, for example, what I want is not just my pictures online, but on online location for everyone’s pictures. I want to be able to make photo books, and enable others to make photos books, and anyone involved to in the group to be able to order them. SnapJot is one service that does this, but it lacks some of the other critical features for my needs.

I’m not aware of any solution available today that meets my needs. As a result, I share fewer photos than I would like, and for those that I do share I endure a process that is more cumbersome than I want.

There are some interesting options appearing from companies such as Sharpcast. I think the problems are entirely solvable, but it requires a company that can craft a solution that unifies the desktop and web experience, and that can attract a large enough customer base to justify the investment. Photo sharing companies have generally been web-centric with little desktop software capability. Desktop software companies tend to be weak on the web side. And startups have a big challenge reaching enough customers. But the opportunity remains for a much better solution than exists today.

So Why Don’t I Do It?

I do believe I know what the right solution looks like. I’ve spent seven years in the digital photo domain looking deeply at all these issues. And I am looking at opportunities to start new web-based companies. But I’m not planning to chase this opportunity.

Why not? There’s just too much competition, too much noise, and it’s too hard to attract significant numbers of customers to a new offering in this space, no matter how cool it may be. One thing the Fotiva experience taught me is that a superior product idea is insufficient to create a good business.

I believe the company that wins in this space will be one that already has a great brand and lots of customers. It could be a well-funded startup with incredible marketing talent, but I think it is more likely to be an existing player. Adobe is an obvious candidate, if only it could get out of its own way. Microsoft is certainly a possibility. Apple is as well, if it put more focus on cross-platform software. Google and Yahoo have the web infrastructure, to be sure, but they tend to undervalue the desktop client piece.

Do you use a service that solves these problems? I’d love to hear about it.