The Best Way to Share Digital Photos with Friends and Family

Everyone's got a digital camera these days. They make taking pictures so much easier and cheaper than those clunky old film cameras. Even most cell phones have cameras on them nowadays. With all these photo friendly gadgets, you probably have more digital photos than you know what to do with. The problem with all these digital photos is how to share them with your friends and family. You could have them printed at a drug store or photo printers but there's an easier way, especially when you're separated from the people who you want to keep in touch with. There are two popular websites that are designed to help you store and share your photos with friends and family, Picassa and Flickr.

Flickr

Flickr is owned and operated by Yahoo. It's by far, the most popular photo sharing website and you can browse through photos other people have uploaded.

They've got a free account and a pro version for $24.95 a year which is close to $2 a month. With the free account, you're limited to uploading 100MB of photos each month. If you re-size your photos to take up less memory this isn't too much of a problem. A bigger problem is your limited to only 3 sets of photos. You can think of a set as a photo album. If you want more than that, say of a wedding, vacations, and just pictures of your kids, you're gonna need to upgrade. You're limited to seeing only the most recent 200 photo's you've uploaded. The older ones are still there, but Flickr stops listing them. With the ease of digital photography, 200 is a easy point to reach. The pro version of the program lets you have unlimited photos, storage, photo sets and bandwidth used to upload. If you constantly share photos with people, the pro account is easily worth it.

Picassa

Picassa is owned and operated by Google. While not as popular as Flickr is, it is a good option to consider when decided where to place your digital life. Since it's run by Google, you know it's a solid company that's not gonna disappear or steal your photos. Picassa also offers a program you download and install so you can edit and retouch photos on your own computer without an Internet connection. The program offers all the basic photo editing tools most casual photographers need. You can edit colors, size, crop and many more things. Even if you decide to use Flickr, you should consider downloading this program to edit your photos. The Picassa website is similar to Flickr's. You can do the same basic things and they've got a free version and and upgrade. The free version lets you store as many photos as you want up to 1GB. You pay for more space. Ten more GB cost $20 per year. It's not unlimited like Flickr. You need to pay for the space you use.

Which to use

You'll have to consider what works best for you when deciding which website to trust with your photos. For the standard free account, Picassa offers much more and more control over your photos. The upgraded version definitely favors Flickr because of it's unlimited photo's and storage. With Flickr, your also joining a community of users like you and you can browse pictures they've uploaded that they want to share. You can see pictures of scenes and streets from all around the world easily. Picassa's free download program is a solid photo editing program that can save you money by not having to purchase one but it can be used with Flickr too. Either just edit and save photos on it before you upload them to Flickr or email it to the email address Flickr gives you to email photos to automatically upload for you.

What to do after you upload your photos

Regardless of what program you choose, sharing photos with friends and family has never been easier. First of all, you may want to tag your photos. Tagging is like putting a list of labels on each picture so in the future you can easily search through and find what your looking for. For example, you can tag each photo from your trip to London with "London" so you can find it later or you can share it so other people can see your pics when they search for London.

After you label, it's a simple matter to make a set or album and share the address with anybody you want to. You can just email it to them and they'll be able to see your pictures wherever they are as long as they have an Internet connection. Using the Picassa desktop program, you can email albums directly to people so they get your photos in their emails but be careful who you send this too because you don't want to overload a friends inbox or fill up his email storage.

Conclusion

We live in a new digital age and sharing photos have never been easier. Instead of inviting friends over and showing them a slide show or pulling out your photo albums, you can just email them your photos or links to see it when they have the time. You can stay in touch and keep up to date no matter what the physical distance is between you.