Sharing Your Digital Photos
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.
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:
You can always share your pictures by having a hardcopy printout just like with film-based photography. Requirements include a good photo printer and some quality printing paper, after that its just printing! I typically print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) on a glossy photo paper. The end results are high quality prints comparable to those printed at photo kiosks.
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.
Storing your photos on CD and DVD is a very good option for sharing photos, particularly if you have a immensely huge photo collection. The downside, of course, is that your family and friends need to have a CD player or DVD player to view the content.
These days, CD burners and DVD burners are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. That is an amazing amount of storage space for your photo collection.
Of course, one option for sharing photos is to email them to to a friend or family member. I do warn you to be careful though. Make sure your recipient would like to receive the photos first. Bombarding him or her with a 10MB email containing photo attachments is not a very nice thing to do - it’s best if you obtained permission to do so first.
A good option to emailing photos is to upload your photos to a website, then email the website link to your friends or family. This avoids the issue of large 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.
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.
Setting up your own web site to post your own picture gallery is my personal recommendation. I would suggest you try Yahoo! web hosting if you are searching for a good web hosting company. I myself have used them for years free from any problems and their customer support is top-notch.
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!
Tags: Digital Photography Posted in
Leave a Reply