7/29/2012

Sharing Your Digital Photos With Family And Friends

By Dan Feildman




Let's say you've taken a bunch of beautiful digital photos and you want to share them with friends and family. What's the best way to do this? There are many options, from printing and burning onto CDs or DVDs, to emailing and uploading the photos.

Lets walk through some of the best ways to share your cherished digital photo collection. Knowing these options, sharing your photos with others is simple to do. There are basically four main ways to share digital photos:

Just like film-based photography, you can share your pictures by having a hard-copy printout. All you need to do is get a good photo printer and some quality printing paper, then print away! I usually print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) using glossy photo paper. The prints I get are very high quality - you can't discern them from those you print at photo kiosks.

You can still use a photo kiosk to do the job, or even send your images to an online photo print website should you not have access to a printer. These websites can print your photos and deliver them to your door. Shop around first since many digital photo printing services are not cheap.

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.

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

Of course, another choice for sharing photos is to email them to friends or family members. But please be careful with this. Check that your addressee wants to receive the photos first. Its easy to overload a person with a 10MB email containing photo attachments. Always get the green light to send photos 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.

One of the best ways to share digital photos is to upload them to a website. There are many online photo storage sites available. SmugMug is one of my favorite photo sharing sites. It allows you to upload photo albums and determine who can view those albums.

There are limitations to using photo sharing websites. Some charge a fee for their services, while others require that you to order prints to keep your account active. Also, you also not be able to personalize the appearance of the website easily.

My personal advice is to set up your own web site to host your own picture gallery. If you're searching for a good web hosting company, try Yahoo! web hosting. I've used them myself for a number of years problem-free and their customer support is excellent.

There are many ways to share your digital photos with friends and family. I tend to burn my images to CD or DVD and hand them out. I also frequently upload images to websites for all to see. Next time you want to share photos, try one of the above methods!




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