Some friends of mine mentioned a site they had heard of that was similar to the photo sharing features on faces.com, so I decided to invesitgate it and do a comparison. Here goes...

The photobucket.com site is just that - a place to put your images that you want to use for other purposes like sellling stuff on Ebay, or linking them into your blog or personal site.

It does have some good features: 

• ability to host your images on MySpace, eBay, Blogs
• abilty to easily post your images to your blog
• no watermarks or embedded graphics on your images
• display of exif data (I heard from support @ faces that this is coming soon on faces.com)
• full screen views of images
• ability to group images into albums
• abilty to create "bucketstamps" and slideshows
• ability to deep link images to other sites
• pay by credit card or paypal, with automatic rebill if you elect for that
• support for several file formats including jpg, gif, png, bmp, tif, swf
• a desktop publishing tool for Windows XP - but the the desktop tools offered by faces.com seem to be easier to install, easier to use, and smarter with uploads.(the tools on faces don't make you retransmit files if they have already been uploaded but you didn't know they were uploaded)
• premium accounts can upload via FTP but really desktop tools are easier to use
• HTML generators and tutorials
• they do retain the original file name, although I'm not really sure how useful this is since most digital cameras use non-descriptive file names like DSC0016.jpg so unless they store the path name as well it might not be as useful as it sounds

Unless otherwise noted above, the majorty of these features are also present on faces.com.

But photobucket does have some ugly features:

• banner ads and google ads everywhere unless you paid for a subscription (25 USD per annum)
• only 2 levels of subscriptions - free and premium
• only 1 GB of disk space for "premium" subscribers
• max image size is only 1 MB
• for a company that ONLY does image hosting they collect a lot of unnecessary personal information during signup
• they don't have their privacy policy endorsed by a third party such as Truste so you can't be sure they don't abuse your personal data or include spyware and/or adware in their downloads
• users are limited to one account per person
• they will kill off your account if you don't touch it for 90 days
• they use "web-beacons" on their pages to monitor your every move
• the browser session ends when you close the browser
• they don't seem to have any sort of email integrity relationship established with someone like BondedSender hence their emails often get sent straight to your spam folder
• image uploads get automatically resized down to 512k or 1 MB for free and premium accounts respectively so you lose image quality and you also cannot use PhotoBucket as a backup site . They do sell CD/DVD backups but what good is that if you hi-res images have been reduced back to low quality images?
• premium users can upload images via email but the security on this is wide open to abuse as it's enabled by default and you cannot specify any of the sending email addresses you will use
• the stats shown are just "hits". Not much else you can find out about your viewing audience
• only 2 privacy settings - public or read-only. for read-only the viewer needs a secret-password. IMHO that kinda makes it hard on your friends who need to remember one more password.
• unlike faces where personal sites have URLs in the form of <username>.faces.com/something,  the URLs to your images on Photobucket are fairly difficult to remember.
• they don't seem to have any sort of peer review of images, and they state that they do not review each uploaded image, so it's likely that a degree of offensive images will make their way onto their site
• you cannot upload zipped files of images
• the pricing is based on disk space consumption AND bandwidth utilisation and that means your images can be replaced with "out of bandwidth" images if some-one else deep links to your images and effectively uses your bandwidth quota (for free accounts)
• you cannot specify the type of coyright protection you'd like applied to your images (faces uses the popular Creative Commons for this)