Share Your Digital Photos with Friends and Family
If you have all of these wonderful digital photos, what can you do with them? Of course you want to share these precious moments with friends and family. This can be done through a variety of options including printing or burning them onto CDs or DVDs or 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:
In the tradition of film-based photography, you can always share your pictures with a hardcopy printout. All that is required is a good photo printer and some quality printing paper. I normally print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) using glossy photo paper. I get are very high quality prints from this, indistinguishable from those from the photo-mat.
Of course, if you don’t have a printer, you can still approach a photo kiosk to do the job, or even submit your images to an online photo print website. These websites usually print your pictures and are able to deliver them to your doorstep. Make sure you do some shopping around first - digital photo printing services don’t come 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.
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.
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.
A good alternative to emailing photos is to upload your photos to a website, then simply email the website link to your friends or family. This avoids the problem of huge email attachments.
Since one of the best means in sharing digital photos is to upload them to a website, there are many online photo storage sites are now out there. SmugMug is one of my favorite photo sharing sites. It allows you to upload photo albums and decide who can view 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 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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