The Problems in finding photography relatied information on the web seem to be based mostly upon people's different intentions even when they use the same words.

As usual, the most commercial photography sites turn up at the top of the photo-lists when you do a websearch. In all fairness though, many people searching the web are looking for what the mainstream commercial sites offer.

As usual, I have found that some of the best "how to sites", and sites with some of the most inspiring photographic-art and expression end up getting slighted by search-tools; Portals and media sites have incentives to steer you towards their image partners or in-house creative content while the independent sites trying to make a quick buck often pursue links and offer promotions elsewhere to their photo-sales buisneses

While terms like quality, resolution, galleries, subject, portraits, landscapes, models might come up in discussions on all photography related sites, the Audience desires and purpose are better ways to sort the sites.

Major groupings

• People who want film developing, image storing and prints for personal use.
• People who primarily seek to quickly share experiences in a more social than artistic way.
• People hoping to quickly find an image on a given subject to use in a school or internal report,
• Businesses that want to exchange the right to use images in publications in return for payment,
• Amateur and Professional Photographers looking for advice on technique, equipment, and industry news.
• Artists and art lovers who want to see pictures more based upon their beauty or quality than the factual information a picture might convey.

Below I have the sites more based upon people getting and using images, while a second page at SA focuses upon the Art photograph collections and resources on the craft of photography.

Selecting, organinzing, and printing photos is half of this image category and how to share them with your freinds is the other half. Online photo tools and photo sharing services run the gauntlet between Kodak's hope to remain in buisness, Ofoto , pioneer Shutterfly , to sites more focused on quickly and cheaply sharing photo's like Flickr and Smugbug. The lines between helping you keep track of your pictures and online shareing services are blurred, thats why I group them here. And I should mention that there are other very good services sponsored by large and small, media and software companies that have great reputations in the processing and enahanments to photos.

For review of the more photo printing and home album replacements services you might see this review of online photo services at Consumersearch.com Look carefully at the different services to see what fits you best (our minds function differently, use the tool YOU are comfortable with).

If ease of sharing photos online and forming new social ties is most import to you, join the service that your friends or coworkers are mostly using. While lots of people love the services like Flikr and Smugbug, and I do think they make the world smaller, I dislike the way they try to "box in" areas of the web rather than allowing interconnection between various sites.

You're in their turf, and while their basic services are free they control the links you have associated with your albums, are sort of building a commercial enterprise on top of your efforts, and the fenced garden generally discourages the quick rise of upstart new web sites by not allowing the easy word of mouth linking that lets individuals collectively do an end-run on media companies. (ok, that's opinion, but see, I still mentioned and pointed those site you !)

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Askjeeves and others have specialized options to find photo and images and commercial art according to your subject request.: you can usually see an icon or a word like "images" "pictures" "photos" etc to pick instead of "shopping" or "news" above those little white frames you type the subject into.

The results are a bit hit and miss, but the "SearchEngine_image_sites" usually load quickly and let you pretty quickly find a photo diagram or piece of graphic art that will work for you. As usual, their algorithms sometimes confuse popularity with quality, but hopefully they will continue to improve as they always have.

If you need higher resolution images with better photographic quality, and to get the rights to those pictures for commercial use, you'd go to another set of websites: businesses selling "Stock photos" a few of these are: Corbis , Fotosearch , and indexstock .

Another stock photo site, Photo Sights ,struck me as good place that allowed amateurs to potentially take some baby steps toward getting paid. They provided some good external links including one to a professional journal for the stock industry photographer: ASPP

The USGS map server puts many arial photo's in public domain. The topic of such images is mostly outside this pointer page (I see it more as a technical sort of imaging), but you can get a great photo of your neighborhood, or a park area to use as a diagram or a visual aid for kids projects.

Photographic art and the craft of photography on the web