Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Share Your Digital Photos with Friends and Family

By Dan Feildman

What do you do with all of all of you beautiful digital photos? Of course you want to share them with your loved ones, but how? You have many options available to choose from that include burning them onto CD or DVD or even uploading and emailing the photos.

This article will discuss some of the best methods for sharing your prized digital photo albums. Once you know them, sharing your photos will be simple. Basically, there are four main ways to share digital photos:

In the tradition of film-based photography, you can always share your pictures with a hardcopy printout. All that is required is a good photo printer and some quality printing paper. I normally print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) using glossy photo paper. I get are very high quality prints from this, indistinguishable from those from the photo-mat.

If you don't have a printer available, you can still count on a photo kiosk to do the job, or even transmit your pictures to an online photo print website. These websites typically print your pictures and deliver them to your doorstep. Make sure to shop for the best value first as many digital photo printing services are expensive.

A very good option for sharing photos is storing them on CD and DVD, especially if you have a massively large photo collection. The hitch, of course, is that your family and friends have to have a CD player or DVD player to view the images.

These days, CD burners and DVD burners are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. That is an amazing amount of storage space for your photo collection.

Of course, one option for sharing photos is to email them to to a friend or family member. I do warn you to be careful though. Make sure your recipient would like to receive the photos first. Bombarding him or her with a 10MB email containing photo attachments is not a very nice thing to do - it's best if you obtained permission to do so first.

An alternative to emailing photos is to upload your photos to a website and then simply email the website link to your friends or family. This circumvents the dilemma of huge email attachments.

Uploading digital photos to a website has gained popularity in image sharing. There are now several online photo storage sites available. SmugMug is one of my favorite photo sharing sites. It enables you to upload photo albums and determine who can access those albums.

Keep in mind that there are limits to using photo sharing websites. Some of them involve a fee for their services, while others require you to order prints to keep your account active. You also may not be able to modify the arrangement of the website easily.

My personal recommendation is to set up your own web site to host your own picture gallery. If you're looking for a good web hosting company, I'd suggest you try Yahoo! web hosting. I've used them for years without any problems and their customer support is first-rate.

There are a variety of ways to share your digital photos with friends and family. Personally, I am inclined to burn my images to CD or DVD and pass them out. I also like uploading images to websites for everyone to see. Try out one of the techniques discussed the next time you want to share photos! - 15437

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