Where to Store and Share Digital Photos

If you take a lot of digital photographs of your family, you probably intend to share them with family members who don't get to see you very often. After all, children change about once a week, don't they? And a lot of us nowadays have grandparents, aunts, uncles and best high school friends living in other states.

For this article, I am going to assume that you have already gone digital and own a good digital camera that maybe even takes digital movies, too. If not, the Kodak EasyShare is highly recommended in this article. It even comes with software that makes sending pictures by email even faster.

Because by far, the easiest way to store and share digital photos online is by saving them to your computer, and emailing them to friends and family. Be sure to back up the pictures stored on your computer onto a CD. We do it once a month, since we store our pictures by month. A hard drive crash, and resulting loss of about 6 months' worth of pictures of our oldest daughter has taught us the lesson: back up everything! Another word of advice about emailing pictures: please resize. A nice email-able size is 640 x 480 pixels. You can resize by using the uploading software that came with your digital camera, or you can buy such software as Windows' My Picture, or Mac's iPhoto for your computer. The only downside with resizing your photos is that if the recipient wants copies made, you will have to send them the large file to do so. But most of the time, quicker is better.

Now, if you don't want to send pictures by email, or if the recipient doesn't have broadband (I know, hard to imagine nowadays, but some people still have dial-up internet access), you may want to use a sharing service. It's hard to say which one to use, since the World Wide Web is crawling with digital photograph sharing sites. A few well-known ones are Snapfish.com, Shutterfly.com, or Kodakgallery.com. With these and other sites like them, you can create a free account for yourself, upload your photos and enter your email address book so your friends and families get the link. Your friends and family can view the photos and even save the page for future viewing. Best of all, with a free account of their own, they can order prints. The prints are relatively inexpensive and range from about 12 cents to 20 cents per 4 x 6 print.

If you want to get fancy about it, you can create a digital scrapbook or slideshow complete with music to store and share those precious digital photos. Some of the sharing sites will allow you to create basic slide shows. But with sites like Onetruemedia.com, you can upload photos and videos and put together an Oscar-worthy streaming video. You can then save that video to DVD for posterity. And many of the sharing sites allow for creation of "memory books" which as the name implies, is an online version of those little photo albums designed to showcase "Our Vacation at Myrtle Beach", "Timmy's Third Birthday Party" and so on. Smilebox.com has a good selection of memory books, plus personalized keepsakes you or your friends can order.

Digital scrapbooking is pretty popular right now, too. Tons of digital software and embellishments are out there for the creative among you. Sites like lifetimemoments.com and peppermintcreative.com come highly recommended. And to get you started, freedigitalscrapbooking.com has free digital papers, embellishments, brushes, fonts, and anything else you need to get started.

Happy photo sharing!