How do you do decide which photosharing site to go with? If free is your criteria, there are certainly many options to choose from. Most free photo sharing sites are ad supported and come with a certain GB capacity limit. If you upgrade to a pro account, which can run anywhere from $20-$25 per year, there are typically no limits and no advertisements.

We took a look at the most popular photosharing sites' features and did a comparison to help you decide which photo site is best suited for your needs. We compared Flickr, Photobucket and Zooomr and then test drove each of the sites to see how well they did. Check out our unscientific findings after the jump.

It's becoming harder and harder these days to exist at just one social media site or another. Some of your friends are sharing pictures at Flickr and Zooomr, while others are uploading videos to ImageStation and Vox. Making sure you keep all these communities updated with the pictures and videos from your adventures can be exhausting, but PictureSync from Holocore can make mince meat out of all that uploading. As a Mac utility for now with a Windows version coming soon, PictureSync allows you to select or drag and drop pictures and videos from the Finder, iPhoto, Aperture and more, and upload them to one or every media sharing community that PictureSync supports. As you add services to your one-click-upload toolbelt, the amount of time PictureSync can save you becomes exponentially immeasurable. Even better, PictureSync can handle metadata associated with your files such as iPhoto keywords, captions and ratings, and send them along to any compatible services. Still trying to keep track of how much time you won't waste using PictureSync?

As if all that wasn't enough, a new v1.8 update just released brings support for Microsoft Expression Media (which was once iView MediaPro) and Adobe's Lightroom. Along with support for more pro apps, however, comes a pro license: in addition to the $15 standard license, a new $30 license is being introduced for those who want to use PictureSync with the likes of Aperture, Expression Media and (possibly) Lightroom. On the bright side of this new license is the fact that you'll be seeing two: a $30 PictureSync purchase will include a second license for those who can't be bound to just one computer.

Be sure to check out the rest of PictureSync's features - like a full-screen annotation mode and upload memory - to see everything it has to offer. A demo is of course available for test drive.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has written an article called The Flickr Gunners in which he examines three promising new services that are gunning for Flickr's deeply entrenched position as king of the photo-sharing hill. His picks are BubbleShare, the not-yet-launched Ookles from Feedster founder Scott Johnson, and 17-year-old Kristopher Tate's brainchild  Zooomr. Arrington doesn't go into a lot of detail with any of the services, but these are definitely three Web 2.0 ventures to keep an eye on.

Developing a web service and don't want to manage your own authentication? Use Google's! That's the gist of this article, which describes how to use SSL and XMPP to authenticate your users against Google's database of users in the same way Google Talk does. The article uses as an example Zooomr, an interesting service made more interesting by the fact that it allows authentication from a number of outside sources, including Google, OpenID, and Meetro. The method isn't anything special, but it is an interesting way to get things done.

[Via O'Reilly Radar]