Share Your Digital Photos

E-mailing images works well for sending several snapshots at a time, but you may want to create an online photo album, complete with fancy titles and captions. In many ways, your album is similar to a personal web page--in this case, it's where you upload and display your photos. It's a terrific way to share events like birthdays, weddings, holiday celebrations and vacations. Instead of sending the actual images, you simply e-mail a link to the album to friends and family.

With the explosion of digital photography, you can now find dozens of services for building an online album. Most are easy to use, with standard features. All of them require you to register and offer password protection to limit access to your album.

You may wonder why these companies offer this service for free. While it may be "free" to build your online album, there is a price to pay. Expect to receive e-mail from them promoting their products. They're betting that once you become a customer, you and the people you invite to browse through your album will order prints or other merchandise from them. After all, they've got to make money somehow.

Choose a service with staying power. After all your hard work designing your album, you certainly don't want to lose it if the service shuts down. The ones we list have all been around a while and as of this writing, they're free:

• Flickr a service of Yahoo! provides an elegant set of tools for you to upload and organize your photos, then share them with family and friends. Flickr gives you control over who sees the images, allows visitors to post comments and lets you map the location where your shots were taken. Free accounts are limited to an upload maximum of 100 Mb per month, with unlimited storage. But for US $24.95 a year, you can upgrade to almost unlimited use of the service--a good way to store all your digital images online in case your computer crashes.
  You can also edit or delete your albums. Yahoo! offers unlimited storage and the requisite photo printing and gift items. Downside: Yahoo! deletes accounts inactive for six months.
• Kodak Gallery, from the company that brought photography to the masses, provides unlimited storage for your pictures. While you're required to make a yearly purchase to keep your account active, 4" X 6" prints only cost US $.15 each--cheap enough. But if you don't buy something, say goodbye to grandma's 80th birthday album.
• Shutterfly, like the other services, lets you share photos online, but the service is really geared to selling custom prints and gift items, such as greeting cards and calendars. The site has some good tools for organizing your ever-expanding collection. If you want to mail photos to friends and family, Shutterfly does all the work for you. Downside: anyone who wants to view your album has to register.
• Snapfish provides unlimited storage and some handy online picture editing tools. For digital images, you can upload or e-mail them from your PC or send them from your mobile phone to the site. You can also mail in film for processing and they will automatically put your shots online. Like the other services, you can order all kinds of gifts, like a mug with your mug on it.

Don't just let your photos gather dust on your hard drive, go out there and share them!

Last update: Feb 6, 2012