Photos, audio and video

Sharing material on the web for people to access or download can avoid the significant problems of emailing large files. It can be a very low cost and easy way of making available resources that would otherwise be hard to share using an existing website.

High resolution photographs, audio and video files are very large and so it makes sense to store these online with a specialist service provider and not necessarily in the space provided by the organisation that hosts the other parts of your website. These specialist providers will have the huge storage capacity and very high-speed internet connections required to handle such large files.

• Photosharing: These services allow digital photos to be uploaded and shared with groups or universally. Photos can be sorted or grouped by theme or event. The best-known example is Flickr.

• Podcasting: This is a way of distributing audio and video files, over the Internet for playback on mobile devices (such as iPods and other MP3 players) and computers. It can be a useful method of sharing recorded presentations. Podcasts can be distributed automaticall using RSS feeds, allowing people to subscribe to a podcast and receive new audio and video programmes automatically as they are released.

• Video sharing: This is similar to photosharing. Websites allow users to upload, view, and share video clips. Two popular sites that do this are Google Video and YouTube.