Originally posted by Marc Sabatella I haven't looked too hard very often, but when I have looked, I didn't see anything that didn't look like it would take far more time to get decent results out of than my time is worth. Zenfolio costs $25/year, and even if I imagine my time is worth as little as $10/hour, that means if I have to spend as much as two and half hours a year mucking with some free service to get results as good as Zenfolio, it's not worth it. So that's my standard - it's got to be so good and so easy, that in two hours a year or less, I can do better than Zenfolio.
Marc is dead on right about these free sites. If you want your own dedicated site for your images, a decent free, but out of your control appearance wise.
I use SmugMug and have been very happy with them. There are a number of others as well where you can get a nice site with few limitations for $25 or so per year. Still as a rule almost all I know use either SmugMug or Zenfolio. I suspect this is so because both are pretty stable and also offer good labs for people, or you, to order prints through. They come with predefined layouts you can use, rather than designing your own from scratch. Both also offer an "easy" upgrade path to a more complex site design should you so choose.
I have yet to find a totally free photo hosting site that did not have some sort of significant drawback. Even Flickr has it's short comings that, in the end, are just not worth the frustration and time it takes to deal with them...and, oh yeah, always read the small print to see if you are granting them "free" site the rights to use any content you upload.
I can code a site in my sleep I have been doing it for so long, but for the annual cost of a SmugMug or Zenfolio site, I don't need to do anything if I don't care to put in the effort...and in my case I am now getting into the SM API for a desktop ecommerce management app I have been planning on writing for a couple years now. Zenfolio might have also released their API by now, though when I looked it really was not ready yet...