Sharing Photos Online

There’s no doubt about it: Taking, sharing, organizing and displaying photographs is a digital thing. A proliferation of products, services and Web sites have made it easy and fun—just connect your laptop to your camera and away you go. The biggest challenge lies in choosing the specific system when hundreds of companies and products are out there vying for your photo business. At first glance, they might all seem very similar, but there are ways to pare down the list. Here are some important factors to consider:

Storage Space

In case of a hard drive crash, any photos in your computer could be destroyed. A Web-based photo management service provides offsite storage—your photos are protected, and many services offer unlimited storage space. Keep in mind, though, that some services manage your images at a greatly reduced size so that others can upload them quickly. You may have to pay extra for access to your original-size images. (For extra security, always burn your images to good-quality CDs and store them in a safe place, ideally at a separate location.)

Prints or digital?

Some services focus on printing images. For example, fujifilm.net and Ritzpix.com give you lots of printing options and fast service. Print quality is usually better than at sites that emphasize Web-based sharing options. Ritzpix has a cool feature that lets you create and send real postcards from your cell phone (depending on your cell service provider).

Price

Many of the larger service providers offer free membership, which includes unlimited storage space and sharing capabilities. They make money when you order prints and create items such as books, calendars, cards or mugs. Others offer a standard membership for free, with a premium membership at a cost that may include more storage space and advanced features. Fotki, for example, provides an ftp site and tools for selling photographs online to its premium subscribers for $30 a year.

Point and Share

Want to share your family’s great summer vacation with friends and relatives? Here’s what you do:

Upload photos from your camera

Most laptops have a USB port—simply transfer images from your digital camera or cell phone with a special cable (usually included when you buy your camera). If you tend to misplace cables, consider using a memory card reader like SanDisk’s ImageMate. It accepts camera memory cards of nearly every type and instantly transfers images to your computer’s pictures folder. For wireless transfer, consider Eye-Fi, a memory card that uploads photos to your computer simply by turning your camera on.

Organize photos

Most photo print/share sites offer organizational tools that include tagging (text identification for each photo); album or gallery arranging according to event or time; and search options. Snapfish organizes photos into “albums” of your choosing; it also has a “Your Favorites” button so you can quickly find the photos you look for most often. If your laptop uses Windows Vista, explore Windows Photo Gallery. This free upgrade offers many of the tools that the Web-based services do, and easily links you to the online photo printing service of your choice.

Share photos

Once your images are uploaded and organized, you can share them digitally with family and friends. Send them as attachments by e-mail or create a Web page and send everyone the link. Shutterfly’s Collections lets you create up to two Collections, or personal pages, with a distinct URL. Soon to come is an actual share site, called Shutterfly Share, which will offer templates that let you build pages for displaying photos, news and your favorite links.

Create albums, books and other cool stuff

This is the fun part. You can start with simple photo albums—organize the images by event or chronologically. Some services offer colors, frames and artwork to decorate your pages. Sites like Blurb, Inkubook and mypublisher.com let you create high-quality books in several different sizes. Simply select size and design, then insert desired photos and text. The finished book is printed and then shipped to you.