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Digital Photos Sharing 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 walk you through some of the best options for sharing your treasured digital photo collection. Once you learn them, sharing your photos will become a breeze. Essentially, there are four main ways to share digital photos:

Just like film-based photography, you can share your pictures by having a hardcopy 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.

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.

Storing your photos on CD and DVD is another great alternative for sharing photos, particularly if you have an enormously huge photo compilation. A disadvantage might lay in that your family and friends need to have a CD player or DVD player in order to view the content of the disk.

CD burners and DVD burners on the market today are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. This is an overwhelming amount of storage space for your photo albums.

Another option for sharing photos is to email them to a friend or family member. Be careful though; make sure the receiver would like to receive the photos first. Overloading him or her with a 10MB email containing photo attachments might not be appreciated. Always check for the go ahead before you hit send.

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 various ways to share your digital photos with friends and family. Personally, I tend to burn my images to CD or DVD and pass them around. I also like uploading images to websites for all to see. Do try one of the above techniques the next time you want to share photos!

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Tags:   Posted in Digital Photography

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