Photo sharing
 

Can anyone recommend a good photo sharing site for my first venture into this unknown world?

Photobucket does the job and will back up from a smart phone if you let it (I don't as my phone backs up to iCloud anyway!)

Other options offer more photo editing options so depends what you want really

Photobucket, I'll use it all the time, nice interface and tools

We use Flickr and Picasa Jim, Facebook lets you set up your own page as well if you want to create a photography site+++

Picasa integrates nicely with the desktop management app.

I'm not looking for anything too complicated, I just want to store, share and do some basic editing such as brightening & lightening

Picasa would do the job.

I agree.
I've used Picassa a lot and it's intuitive and easy to manage. The photo editing won't win any awards but it's OK. It's probably all you need.

Does Picassa let you create folders and then invite people to share them?
If not, Google Drive will.
It lets you invite anyone to see the contents of each folder. I use this to share family pics with family, work pics with suppliers and other work pics with customers etc.
It's free. Plenty of capacity and doesn't have the capacity limiting overhead that Dropbox imposes when sharing stuff.
If you want to edit, Photoshop CS2 is available for free. It takes some getting used to, but also is hard to better.

Picasa does that.. I've used it quite a few times. Lets you keep stuff organised in folders, camera import, and tagging of faces, etc.

Pretty good for a 'basic' editor, but some cool features.