Digital Photos Sharing 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:

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 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.

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.

Keep in mind that there are limits to using photo sharing websites. Some of them involve a fee for their services, while others require you to order prints to keep your account active. You also may not be able to modify the arrangement 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!