Sharing Your Photos with Friends and Family

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.

I want to walk you through some of the best options for sharing your cherished digital photo collection. Once you understand the options, sharing your photos will become a breeze. basically, there are four main ways to share digital photos:

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

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.

Another option is to email your photos to your friends and family members. I do warn you to be careful though. Please make sure your recipient wants to receive the photos first. Showering 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 better option is to upload your photos to a website, then email the website link to your friends or family. This avoids the problem of huge email attachments.

One of the best ways to share digital photos is to upload them to a website. There are many online photo storage sites available. SmugMug is one of my favorite photo sharing sites. It allows you to upload photo albums and determine who can view those albums.

You should know that there are limitations to using photo sharing websites. Some of them charge a fee for their services, while others require you to order prints to keep your account active. You also may not be able to customize the presentation of the website easily.

You can also set up your own web site and host your own picture gallery. If you're looking for a reliable, and free, 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 a huge variety of ways to distribute your digital photos with friends and family. I personally like to burn my images to CD or DVD and pass them around. I also enjoy uploading my images to SmugMug for all to see. I recommend you pick your favorite option the next time you want to share photos!
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