Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Digital Photos - Ways To Share With Family And Friends

By Dan Feildman




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.

This article will discuss some of the best methods for sharing your prized digital photo albums. Once you know them, sharing your photos will be simple. Basically, there are four main ways to share digital photos:

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

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 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.

Now, CD burners and DVD burners are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. That is a remarkable 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.

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.

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 advice is to set up your own web site to host your own picture gallery. If you're searching for a good web hosting company, try Yahoo! web hosting. I've used them myself for a number of years problem-free and their customer support is excellent.

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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