People have always been able to reach out to the Instagram users they follow, and receive replies to their comments, by using the messaging feature baked into Instagram Stories. Thanks to a new questions sticker Instagram debuted, you now have a more formal (and fun) way to conduct interviews with your followers, fans and friends.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Instagram is made to be experienced on your phone, but sometimes you'll want to take a look from you computer. Ramme does just that, offering up your Instagram feed where you can like or comment on posts.

Taking photos and uploading them to the web has never been easier. The best sites to store those photos keep them backed up, make them easy to share, showcase them in good-looking galleries, and offer you lots of space and effective editing tools. This week, we're looking at five of the best image hosting sites, based on your nominations.

I'll come right out and say it: I'm not a big fan of Instagram. And no, it's not because iOS users have had their underpants in a knot over the Android release, but because for me, it really doesn't live up to the hype. Here's why, and more importantly, here are some just-as-good alternatives for Android users (and some for iOS users too!) who want to take and share photos with or without those filters that make a 5-megapixel phone camera look like a 70s' Polaroid?

iOS: Many of us already use photo sharing services and galleries to send our photos to our friends. If you're not interested in posting your family photos to the Web but do want to send an attractive-looking gallery of photos to a family member, Photogram can help.

Sharing your photos across multiple social networks is a major pain. Dropico makes sharing as simple as dragging and dropping your photos to share them across networks, directly to friends, and without clicking your way to carpal tunnel syndrome.

As a big fan of photo-sharing site Flickr, one of the most frustrating things about the popularity of photo sharing on social-networking site Facebook has always been the relatively terrible quality of Facebook's highly compressed photos. Starting today, that's changing.

Flickr's been changing up its look lately, but the photo sharing site still puts your photos on white backgrounds. If black is more your backdrop, and you like the minimalist look, Flickriver gives you Flickr photos with a new layout.

Windows only: The new Picasa lets users designate who can collaborate on albums while they're uploading pictures. It's a huge time-saver over the old method and more efficient for granting friends and family access to individual photo albums.

Facebook is easily one of the most popular places to share photos and videos with friends and family. Now the folks at Facebook have streamlined the process, allowing you to upload media directly to your account via a personalised email address.

Windows/Mac OS X: Parts Flickr and Wikipedia, photo site and desktop application Fotopedia lets users create and upload topic-driven collaborative web albums complete with Google Maps information, Wikipedia entries, tagging and more.

Sure, desktop photo managers like iPhoto and, to a lesser extent, Picasa can recognise and tag faces in photos, but what about your online shots? New webapp Polar Rose provides facial recognition for Flickr accounts.

PiccDrop is an extremely spartan photo hosting service with a friendly attitude towards a wide variety of image formats. The PiccDrop website consists of little more than a button to browse for the file and a button to upload it. Once you upload it, you are redirected directly to the image itself sans the forum and HTML-friendly formatting many image hosts provide. PiccDrop allows for unlimited uploads, has a file size restriction of 6MB, and supports a multitude of image formats including: .jpg, .png, .tiff, .bmp, .gif, .ico, .icn,s .vg, .pdf, .icns, .hdi, amd .psd. For another quick and spartan photo hosting service check out EchoPic, for meatier photo hosting check out the Hive Five: Best Photo Sharing Sites. PiccDrop

Webapp EchoPic is a no-frills online photo storage service, which has no albums or advanced features, but offers a fast way to get pictures on the web painlessly. Registration isn't necessary to use the basic features; unregistered users have unlimited storage and a file size limitation of 1MB. Registered users have the same generous storage plus an increase in file size limit to 4 MB. One minor caveat: there is no resizing feature, so make sure to resize or crop your photos before uploading them.

EchoPic

The first consumer-priced, one-megapixel digital cameras hit the streets just over ten years ago, and today digital cameras are everywhere—hell, one megapixel is tiny for even our cell phone cameras. As a result, we snap picture after picture without giving a thought to the price of film, which means you've got hundreds of pictures to share with friends and family. Earlier this week we asked you to tell us your favourite photo sharing web site, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Hit the jump for the low-down on the five best photo sharing tools the web has to offer.