Pickle

I was in love with Bubbleshare as the perfect hosting for photography aficionados: it's free, has a lot of features, and you could download your original pictures back to your hard drive. Not anymore. The Bubbleshare team has removed that feature and now you can only download a lower resolution version of whatever you previously uploaded. That's sad. I communicated with them and they told me that they maybe will restore the feature back. Maybe.

Now comes a new brand: Pickle. They offer free and paid plans. Unlimited storage for pictures and videos (most formats are welcome). Monthly upload up to 200 Mb first year, 75 Mb second year onwards (free) or 2 Gb ($19.95/first year, $49.95/year onwards). Max file size: 100 Mb first year, 10 Mb second year onwards. I think it's a good alternative to Flickr, if you want having the option to keep any albums (boxes) private (you can't make private sets with Flickr, only individual pictures). After the first year special promotion, boxes are limited to 7 for free account users. They come with a very interesting pack of features, most of them helping you share your boxes through rich formated email messages, or even for using a custom email address as alternative upload method. The good thing is that your original images can be downloaded back to your drive and you can bestow permission to other users to do it as well. That's better than what Bubbleshare does, but only for the paid accounts.