Share your digital images

Share your digital images
By: Edward Valentine

Digital photography is a great thing.
You can take scads of pictures and save them to your PC's hard drive, a CD, DVD or one of the other new-fangled storage mediums currently being marketed toward digital photography hobbyists.
There's only one problem with all these photographs. How do you let other people see them?
Sure, you can print some of your favorite photos and frame them, put pictures in a traditional photo album or send a few favorite shots to family members. But printing more than a few photos gets expensive, whether you do it yourself or have them done professionally.
You could burn CDs or DVDs and distribute those to family and friends, but that involves a good deal of time and effort.
You could pick a handful of your favorite photos and e-mail them to those same family members and friends.
Or, you could choose the simplest, easiest and probably most effective way to share a large volume of digital images with treasured family and friends - you can post them online. That's what I do.
There are several ways you can accomplish this. Personally, I use HP Instant Share. This is Hewlett Packard's digital photo sharing site, and it was a snap to set up. The interface is available directly from the image editing software I installed when I purchased an HP inkjet printer a few months ago, and setup was easy - just follow the instructions in the Instant Share wizard to establish your site, and in a relatively short period of time you are ready to share pictures. Once you have access, just upload the pictures and name your album.
How much time does all of that take? To give you an idea, while I was working on this column I uploaded two albums totaling 23 photographs and was done in less than 5 minutes. One word of advice, though - downsize your pictures to manageable proportions before you upload. If you leave them at their original size, which in my case defaults to 16 by 22, your upload time will be significantly increased.
Then, follow the online guide to e-mail friends and family the album URL so they can see your pictures.
To check out HP's photo site, got to http://hpphoto.com.
You don't have to use HP Photo, however. There are any number of quality photo sharing sites available, many of which are free to use.
You could try Yahoo (http://photos.yahoo.com), the Kodak Picture Center (www.ofoto.com), Photo Fun (www.photofun.com), Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) or any of several other sites.
For full lists of photo sharing sites you can check out Ranks.com (http://www.ranks.com/home/organize/topphotosharingsites/). Features will vary from site to site. In some cases, you will just be able to upload albums. Others offer extras like online photo printing, e-cards, photo frames, screensavers and more.
Check them out and see what is right for you, Remember, however, with a digital camera and a PC there's no reason not to be sharing those pictures - even if the people you want to share them with are thousands of miles away.

If you have Windows XP

Windows XP offers you a host of options for handling your digital images. You can use a Web Publishing Wizard to publish your pictures to the site of your choice. To use the Wizard, open the folder where your pictures are located, select the photo you want to publish and click 'publish this file to the Web.' Follow the step-by-step instructions in the wizard to publish the pictures.
For more picture-sharing ideas, Windows XP users can go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/videos/emailpics.mspx.