Over the past few years, online photo sharing has become wildly popular. I didn't get on the photo sharing bandwagon until now. I finally installed Gallery to create My Photo Gallery. I've already got over 1,000 pictures sorted and tagged. In my gallery you can find all kinds of photos, including:

• Teaching Pictures
• Embarrassing Pictures from Childhood
• Pictures from Trips
• College Pictures
• Random Stuff, Like Nats vs. Dodgers
• And Tons More

For anybody interested, I chose Gallery over other services because it's open source, robust, and is run by me -- not some company like flickr.

I would definitely recommend Gallery to others. The only drawback is that you need your own website to run Gallery. If you are really interested in Gallery, I would highly recommend getting a web hosting package from Dreamhost for two reasons. First, Gallery is super easy to install on their servers. Their web-based program guides you through everything. Second, their hosting packages have TONS of storage for all your pictures. I have over 200 gigabytes.

Also, here are the reasons I didn't go with the other options out there:

• iPhoto: Yeah, iPhoto works well on my computer, but the only web-integration that they have is to produce cookie-cutter web pages that display my pictures. However -- you can integrate both iPhoto and Gallery with this program.
• Facebook: I've gotta give it up to facebook. They do have some awesome photo integration with tagging, etc. However, they reduce the quality of photos significantly. On top of that, their albums aren't portable at all. So if you wanted to take your pictures somewhere else, you would be out of luck and have to re-upload them all to a new website. The one upside is that facebook has strict privacy settings for photos, which a lot of people like. I don't care too much about that, though.
• Shutterfly, flickr, etc: My problem with these websites is that they make money off of my pictures. Plus, if one of these sites goes under, so do all the albums that took so long to create. I'd rather avoid that risk and keep them all on my website. I'm not too sure about how easy it is to export photos at these sites. I imagine export capabilities vary greatly, and I don't have the time or interest to investigate. But, I can see why someone without a website would like one of these sites.

The bottom line: Gallery is your best bet if you have a website.