Digital Photography Online

All of the digital photography sites we'll visit are similar in that you can upload and store your photos. Some offer innovative tools to organize and share your digital photos. You'll also find some great tools to edit, fix and enhance your photos. Some sites make it easy to print digital photos, and there are even some FREE digital photo print services. Others offer photo enlargements or will sell photo gifts on mugs, calendare and t-shirts. Here are my picks for the best photo printing and photo sharing services on the Web.

• Flickr isn't shy about promoting itself. The self-proclaimed "best online photo management and sharing application in the world" wants to help people make their photos available to others, whether it's showing off their best pictures to the whole world, or privately sharing photos with family and friends. Flickr also focuses on new ways of organizing photos. The concept of "albums" may have worked in the days of film, but this metaphor has outlived its usefulness. Flickr makes the process of organizing photos collaborative, meaning you can give your friends and family permission to help organize your photos, add comments, and category tags. As all this searchable "metadata" accumulates around the photos, you can find them much easier later on.
• Snapfish makes it fast and easy to upload your photos from a computer, digital camera or camera phone. Even better, you can email your photos to Snapfish from a camera phone or your email account. Store and share your photos for free, or use the Snapfish photo printing service and get your first 30 prints for free. You can also use Snapfish for developing film or disposable cameras. When you mail your rolls to Snapfish, they automatically put your photos online ¨C so you can enjoy the benefits of digital photos without a digital camera. Tools are available to fix and enhance your photos. You can transform color photos to black and white, add borders, crop unwanted background objects, lighten up dark images or remove red eye.
• Photobucket provides a simple and reliable service for sharing and publishing digital photos online. Images and videos can be directly linked from Photobucket to any site, including popular sites like MySpace, eBay, LiveJournal, Xanga, Friendster, and Neopets. This is great for people who don't have their own website, but want to include photos in online auctions or social networking sites. Some cool tools at Photobucket enable you to make scrolling image strips, slideshows and animated image collages. You can also have your Photobucket images printed into posters, photobooks and calendars. Mobile and email uploads allow users to upload their images via a camera phone or email address, and advanced searching makes it easy to find the images you're looking for. Photobucket was named the fastest growing site of 2005 according to Nielsen/Netratings and now ranks as a Top 100 site by traffic, serving over 50 billion images a month.
• Picasa is a free software download from Google, and runs on Windows XP/2000 and Linux. WIth Picasa you can quickly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa also makes advanced editing simple by putting one-click fixes and nifty effects at your fingertips. When you're ready to share your digital photos, Picasa helps you email, print photos at home, make gift CDs, and post pictures on your own blog. The new Picasa Web Albums service helps you post your photos online with a one-click web upload directly from Picasa. The online portion of Picasa lets you keep track of your favorite people and see when they've added something new. Scroll through photos quickly, rotate, zoom or add your own captions and comments.

Are you a photo sharing fanatic? Do you use an online photo printing service? Share your comments below...