Share Your Digital 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. 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:

• Printing the photos
• Storing the photos on CD and DVD
• Emailing the photos
• Uploading the photos to a website
   

Printing the Photos

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 the Photos on CD and DVD

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.
 

Emailing the Photos

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.

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.
 

Uploading the Photos to a Website

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.

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.
 

Conclusion

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!

Share Your Pictures at SmugMug

If you've tons of digital photos to share and but are not sure which photo sharing site to choose, then do take a look at SmugMug. I've been a happy user of their photo sharing service for two years now and I've been most impressed by it. The service allows you to upload, arrange and share your photos, as well as buy prints or burn picture CDs.

Related Articles

You may also wish to read the following related articles:

How to display digital photos on your TV
A guide to storing your digital photos
How to organize your collection of digital photos
A list of tips for printing digital photos
A review of the Canon Pixma iP4000 photo printer