Sharing Your Digital Photos
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!