First, what are the benefits of sharing online?

• You don’t have to burn copies of CD’s of your photos collections for others to see. Instead, simply give the people the URL and they can view them easily themselves. And, most of the sites offer photo printing so the visitors can order copies of the images THEY want, instead of getting ALL of them.
• You don’t have to try to manage your photo inventory yourself. Upload to one of the websites, and let them store the photos there. (Be aware that you may not be able to get the ORIGINAL sizes back off some of the websites, so it’s best have a backup of the original that you keep.)
• You don’t have to worry about clogging someone’s email with tons of photos. Just a link in an email and you are done.

What are some of the photo sharing websites?

• Flickr — one of the best known for sharing with the public in general. In fact, many organizations have a Flickr account to help publicize events. Free for a limited number of images/month. Not the easiest to do “private” photo sharing, more of “open” sharing.
• Shutterfly — this is a personal favorite of mine. You can upload as many photos of whatever size you want. (They have a “Shutterfly Studio” application to upload whole directories quickly.) Easy to set up private shares. Free. Visitors can easily order prints.
• Picasa Web Albums — if you love Picasa, then this can be an easy choice, built right into the application. Free.
• SmugMug — similar to Flickr but with more control on the look/feel of the pages and on privacy. Paid accounts only.
• Kodak Gallery — similar to Shutterfly but visitors have to create an account to view your photos. Free.

As you can see there are lots of options, and that’s only a small sample of what’s out there. Maybe you have a recommended photo-sharing website?

Some Photo Sharing Websites

So, the next time you are tempted to send someone 30 photos in an email, or burn a CD full of convention photos, STOP! See if sharing the photos online might save everyone some time!

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• Editing photos is a Picnik!

That’s where www.Picnik.com comes in very handy.  Being an online resource that allows you to upload, edit, resize, and then save those perfect images back to your computer, means that anywhere you might be — so long as you have an Internet connection — you can tweak those photos.   That means if your images are too large to email and you don’t want to set up a drop.io type account or use Flickr or MobileMe to share them with friends, you could just RESIZE them online with Picnik to email them with others.

If you visit www.Picnik.com you’ll see that you can do a lot of editing with images right over the Internet. Just click their “Get Started Now” button to start editing your images. It will ask you to create a FREE account, which is a good idea, but, if you just want to edit the images without an account, scroll down a little bit on that “Sign In” page to see “Or Try It Out” to bypass registration.

From there, just upload the image you want to work with. Once uploaded, Picnik gives you lots of options — editing, resizing, even adding fancy filters and affects on the image — all for free.

So, if you’re in a hurry and can’t find a good photo editor on the computer you are using, visit www.Picnik.com.

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• TIP: Photo Sharing Online