While I currently upload most of my photos to Flickr, BubbleShare is one of the best looking alternatives. The site offers a ton of fun features for categorizing and labeling photos that none of its competitors are currently implementing. You can add audio captions to photos on-the-fly, include cartoon word balloons on images and share photo albums without ever creating an account. By creating an account BubbleShare includes a number of additional options for organization and managing images, as well as the ability to keep your albums private.
BubbleShare offers a few neat tricks other photo sharing sites should be drooling over. You can send out puzzle games of your photos for friends to try and reassemble. BubbleZoom is a clever favorite among the bunch - providing a 3x enhanced view of a section of any photo.
Album display options for BubbleShare are outstanding. For example, there's the slider display and photo story mode with the slideshow fading between images. All of this is done automatically. You can share albums with other users of BubbleShare or pass them along to friends who have never even heard of the service. A BubbleBar option displays images on the desktop for both Mac and Windows users.
Bubble Slider
Fader
Admittedly, the service isn't without flaws. It's optimized for creating these albums, whether you want to upload one picture or one thousand pictures. There are many cases where I upload a one-off image and the "album" concept doesn't make much sense. The only way to add multiword tags is to either add each word separately (like 'summer' 'palace') or run the words into one long run in (like 'summerpalace'). These are minor shortcomings for a site that makes sharing photos both easy and fun.
Someday they plan to announce a live sharing service with collaboration between multiple users. Similar to something like a shared desktop service from GoToMeeting or WebEx, you'll be able to browse and edit slides with other BubbleShare users. You can see a demo online, but they haven't made the service completely live just yet.
At the moment, all these services are both free and advertising free, so I'm not entirely sure how they will sustain the service over time, although they indicate there will be a premium version someday. In the meantime, BubbleShare is a fun way to compile and share images with friends, family and complete strangers (if you choose to share).
