Photobucket Launches Group Albums

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Leading photo and video-sharing site Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com) today announced the launch of Group Albums, giving people an entirely new way to create and share photos and video collections. Group Albums provide multiple users with an easy way to store, share and view digital media – including photos and videos – in one convenient profile on the popular Photobucket site. Sony is the exclusive launch sponsor of the Group Albums feature.

“Photobucket is already a place where millions of people record their lives, and there are so many important occasions that we share with others – from weddings to sporting events, graduations, concerts – you name it,” said Alex Welch, president, Photobucket. “Somehow with all the convenience of digital photos, it still proved complicated for people to share photos and video of a single event in one place, so we made it our goal to fix that.”

Welch continued: “Group Albums are designed to offer a simple way for colleagues, friends and families to collaborate on creating photos and video collections where the entire group can contribute, access and enjoy them.”

After creating a Group Album on the Photobucket site, Group Album owners can invite other members and choose whether to password-protect the albums, as well as having the option to moderate each group if desired. Owners can also give Group Albums easy-to-remember “vanity” URLs, such as http://photobucket.com/smithwedding.

Members of Group Albums can transfer photos, images and videos from their other Photobucket albums, from Web URLs and from their camera’s Flash memory or computer’s hard drive. As with all Photobucket content, media in Group Albums can be posted on blogs, social networking profiles and all kinds of Web sites. Users can also share Group Albums content by sending links in email or instant messages.

Other Group Albums features include:

• Ability to share an album’s contents as a self-running slideshow, or via email or IM
• Quick-and-easy album invitations via imported Gmail, Yahoo, AOL or MSN/Hotmail email addresses
• RSS feeds of Group Albums contents
• Ability to list Group Album as a “favorite” in the sidebar in other Photobucket albums
• Option for Group Album owners to be notified by email whenever someone adds photos or videos to their album
• Ability to store up to 1GB of photo and video content on each Group Album

In addition to creating Group Albums for events, users can build them around topics of interest, even when they might not know each other in person. To illustrate this aspect of Group Albums, Photobucket has worked with Sony, FOXSports.com and FUEL TV to create special-interest albums that are open to the public:

• Beautiful Weddings (Sony): http://photobucket.com/weddings
  
  
• Baseball Fans (FOXSports.com): http://photobucket.com/baseballfans
  
  
• Skateboarding Fans (FUEL TV): http://photobucket.com/skateboardfans

Photobucket users can start creating Group Albums today at: http://photobucket.com/groupalbums/.

About Photobucket

Photobucket is one of the Web’s most popular sites, with more than 40 million unique users worldwide1 linking billions of personal photos, graphics, slideshows and videos daily to hundreds of thousands of Web sites, including Bebo, Blogger, Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, MySpace, Orkut, Xanga and many others. In addition to linking content, Photobucket users share their personal digital media by email, instant messaging, and mobile devices. Every day, more than 10 million personal photos, graphics and videos are uploaded to Photobucket for sharing with family, friends and the online world. The company actively moderates content to create a safe environment for its users, partners and advertisers. Photobucket has offices in San Francisco, California and Denver, Colorado and is located online at http://www.photobucket.com. For the latest feature announcements and news, please visit the Photobucket blog at http://blog.photobucket.com.