Sharing photos online is easy and free!
Create an online photo album in 5 minutes or less
Stop feeling guilty about not sending photos to everyone on your list.
Online photo albums are one of the easiest ways to share photos.
You can upload pictures in a matter of minutes and when family and friends want prints, they can place the order themselves.
Posting photos in an online album is even better than email. Large photos can clog the inbox of family and friends, but with a link to your photo album they can easily see any collection of images you want to share.
Steps to posting your photos online:
1. Choose one of the online photo services, such as:
- Shutterfly
- An easy-to-use consumer-oriented service with password protection and printing options.
- Kodak Gallery
- Long known for their print quality, Kodak has a great online photo site, as well.
- .Mac - A special online photo service for Macintosh computer users
- Flickr.com - A favorite of professional photographers and amateurs, Flickr is a great site for sharing your photos and networking with people all over the world.
2. All online photo sites require a short registration form to set up a free account.
Once you register your account, you can create an album by uploading images from your hard drive. Just click on the Upload button and choose the pictures you want to share.
After you upload some pictures, you can give access to family and friends with an email message. (And you can require passwords to ensure privacy.)
3. After a few minutes of filling out the forms, you're ready to go.
4. Uploading your pictures is really easy. You simply click the upload button on an online photo site, find and select the images you want from your hard drive, and send them directly to the site. Photos you submit are added to your online photo album, where you can preview them yourself before you share them with friends and family.
You can upload any digitized images, whether you take them with a digital camera, scan them into your computer, or receive them in email.
5. When you finish, you can email messages to friends and family with the special Web address for your photo album, and give them your user name and password (if you chose to keep your album private).
Tip: Not only are online photo albums faster than email; you'll never overload anyone's inbox with attachments -- you just send them the URL of your online album.
6. With your photos in an online album, your friends and family (and anyone you give access to) can order prints, personalized coffee cups, ornaments, and more. Prices for these services vary, and this is how these sites make money and why they can offer the online photo album service for free.
Optional step: You can edit your pictures in a program such as Photoshop Elements before you upload them. (Learn more about Photo Editing.)
Share a Family Photo Site
We found that creating one online photo album the whole family can use is a perfect way to share everyone's photos.
When we get together with dueling digital cameras now, we're all set up to share them with each other right away, just by uploading them to our family photo site.
The beauty of the family photo site is that we can all upload photos from our various computers and then view each other's images online -- we can even order prints and other goodies from anyone's images to remind us of the event.
Here are some of the most popular online photo services:
Kodak Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com): Kodak is one of the best-recognized brands in photographry and offers a popular website for sharing, editing, and printing photos. You can create many great services to create photo greeting cards, bound photo albums, personalized calendars, coffee mugs, t-shirts, and more.Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com):An easy-to-use consumer-oriented service with password protection and printing options. Shutterfly makes it easy to post and share photos for free, offers simple photo editing tools, and sells printing services you can use to create a variety of gift items and prints. Shutterfly has an intuitive interface, and you can use their specialized printing options to turn your pictures into greeting cards, photo albums, calendars, coffee mugs, t-shirts, tote bags, and more.
Flickr (www.flickr.com): Flickr is one the most sophisticated online photo sites, offering a wide range of services, including the ability to manage lots and lots of pictures in multiple personal albums. You also get more advanced options for adding captions and other text to your online album.
If you blog, you may appreciate Flickr's features that make it easy to add photos to a blog or online journal. You can even search through photos from other Flickr users and add their photos to your albums. (Sharing is optional; you can keep your own albums private or make any or all of your images viewable by anyone who uses the site.)
I've had great fun at Flickr.com creating photo galleries with my travel and wildlife photos. The Flickr Photobadge here will give you a preview of what you'll find in my Photostream on Flickr. Just click on the Photobadge and you'll go directly to my photos.
.Mac (www.apple.com/dotmac/): If you use an Apple Macintosh computer, you won't find an easier way to share photos than iPhoto and .Mac. With iPhoto, Mac users can create photocasts to share any photo album with friends and family. When you use this free service, your photos are automatically uploaded to .Mac and your friends and family receive an email with a special link. When they click the link, they automatically receive your photocast. Best of all, when you update your photos, your friends and family receive updates automatically.
Want to learn more about photo editing?
You'll find tips, tricks, and tutorials for saving, editing, and protecting your precious family photos in our Protect and preserve family photos section.
Want to learn more about how to build a web site or blog?
Even if you plan to create a more complex web site or blog later, you may want to start with an online photo album site because it's one of the fastest and easiest ways to put photos online. You can link your online photo album to your family site later.
If you want to know more about more advanced web design options, check out these tutorials:
The many ways to create a web site
