One of the benefits of digital photography is the ability to share photographs with friends and family without the cost and inconvenience of developing and mailing prints. Many, however, are unaware of some more efficient ways to share digital photos. Have you ever received a large e-mail to find that a friend attached pictures of his kids that were never resized? There are better ways.
Online Photo Storage and Printing Service
One of the easiest ways to share photos with friends is to upload them to an online photo printing service. All have simple interfaces and the ability to create different albums for different occassions. I highly recommend you upload the original photo, without resizing, to the photo service. These services provide an affordable way to get prints of your favorite photos (much cheaper than printing yourself after factoring in consumables). You also have the ability to send the photo album links to friends and family where they can conveniently view the photos and even purchase any photos they want.
An even more important consideration is something that most people don’t give enough though to: what if your computer crashes? One of the reasons I have chosen SmugMug for my online photo storage is that, in addition to using it to sell photos from the semi-pro work that I do, I’m able to upload images I want to make sure I don’t lose if my computer crashes. When it comes to keeping your images safe, I don’t think cheaper is better. Make sure you’ve got a good way to preserve those memories and recover them in the event of a disaster. I’m not a fan of free services like ImageShack or PhotoBucket because I would rather pay for an advertisement free system and utilize them in a variety of settings. I’ve found that many firewalls block the free service’s images.
The following is a list of some of the top online photo printing services:
Top Online Photo Services
Site | Pricing |
SmugMug |
|
Snapfish |
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Shutterfly |
|
Dotphoto |
|
Photo Album Software
In addition to the above printing services, the two top photo album software packages offer tools to share photos online. Adobe Photoshop Album, and JASC Paintshop Photo Album offer easy to use tools to manage your photos on your computer and share them with friends and family. Of the two, if price is not a problem, I recommend buying Paintshop Pro (which includes the Photo Album software) as it comes with very sophisticated tools found in high-end photo editing software.
Making your Own Web Photo Albums
Any html editor will allow you to make your own web photo albums for sharing photos. I used to build web photo albums in this manner until I came upon a freeware program called JAlbum. This freeware program uses Java script to make photo albums out of images you place in a directory. It has a large variety of skins to create great web pages in an instant. If you have space on a web server and want a simple route to create a web album without using photo album software or an online printing service to host your photos then I highly recommend this program.