A picture is worth a thousand words…Part III

When you go online with your computer and you want to view a web site, you enter the page address in your browser and the page opens. Wouldn’t be nice if you could put your photographs on a web page that your family and friends could view by typing in a web address! You can if you upload your photo to www.flickr.com.

Flickr is a photo sharing service that gives each member a unique web address. I store photos on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/eddieandlinda — type it into your web browser and you will link to a page of photos I took in New York City last May. Photos can be viewed as web pages or slide shows, with or without captions. You can choose to make your photos “public,” which means that they can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet, or you can make your photos private, sharing them only with people to whom you send invitations.

Flickr is part of the Yahoo family of web applications, and to use it, you need to create a free, Yahoo account. A basic Flickr account is also free, and unlike most of the other photo sharing services, photos are never deleted from the Flickr server. With the basic account you can upload 100 MB (megabytes) worth of photos per calendar month, individual photos cannot be larger than 5 MB, and a maximum of 200 photos can be shown on your web pages at one time. For the price of $24.95 a year, Flickr offers an upgraded Pro Account, which allows unlimited photo uploads, an unlimited number of photos on the web pages, unlimited photo storage, and a 10 MB maximum upload size for each individual photos. Until recently, Flickr was only a photo sharing service, but a new printing service has just been added to the web site.

Smilebox (www.smilebox.com) is an innovative web site that allows the creation of postcards and scrapbooks that include animation, music and artwork and can be emailed to family and friends. You begin by choosing a design, download it to your computer, drag and drop your photos onto the design, choose backgrounds and music, and save the design for Smilebox to send as an email. The designs are free and for one-time use and come with a catch — the Smilebox email will include advertising. To avoid advertising, designs can be purchased for $1 to $2, depending upon the design. Smilebox also offers Club Smilebox for $4.99 a month, which entitles users to unlimited use of all of the design templates.

To wrap up this series of columns I want to offer a storage solution for those of you who are serious photographers. While most of the photo sharing sites offer photo storage, they all limit the size and type of files that can be uploaded and stored. If you have a large collection of photo files that you want to store online, you might want to consider an online backup service. These services will backup selected files on your computer and store them at offsite data centers for a monthly fee — typically around $10 to $15 for 5 GB (gigabytes) of storage. If you are interested in this type of storage, do a Google search for “Online Photo Storage.” Listed with the photo-sharing services of Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShareGallery will be back-up services such as iBackup (//www.ibackup.com) and AT&T Online Vault (www.attonlinevault.com) which specialize in data storage.

A picture is worth thousand words…Part II

Three sandhill cranes are taking a drink from your birdbath. You rush into you house, trailer or RV, grab your digital camera and snap that once in-in-a-lifetime photo. You download the photo to your computer and it is everything you though it would be — now you want to share it with everyone you know, but how? Last week I wrote about using a variety of web sites for digital photo finishing, including four national chain-stores that provide both online and in-store service: CVS, Costco, Wal-Mart and Target. This week I expand upon the topic and write about using the same photo finishing services for online photo sharing with family and friends.

All of the web sites mentioned in last week’s column provide online photo sharing, and all of them work in basically the same manner.

1. Photos are uploaded to the site.
2. Photos are sorted into photo albums and displayed in online photo galleries.
3. The user provides the service a list of email address of family and friends.
4. An email invitation to view the photos is sent to everyone on the list.

It is that simple! You can even choose to share just one photograph. Photos are stored in “galleries,” and galleries can be sorted into albums, just like you do with your printed snapshots. Most of the services even offer you the opportunity to make simple edits, such as red-eye correction and cropping, right online. As an added bonus, many of the sites also allow photo storage which provides a safe place to keep backups of your photos. All of the services require users to set-up an account before uploading photos, but your family and friends do not have to have an account to view your photos. Below is a listing of the online photo services with some specific information about each.

1. Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com) — Wal-Mart’s Digital Photo Center is free to all “active” users. They consider anyone an active user who has purchased prints or photo merchandise through the online service at least once in the last 365 days. The web site says that storage is unlimited. In addition to uploading photos from a computer, photos can also be emailed to the Wal-Mart photo center.

2. Target (www.target.com) — Target does not advertise this, but their online photo service is actually Yahoo Photo Service, which is part of the Yahoo network of email services. To use the service you must establish a Yahoo account.

3. CVS Pharmacy (www.cvs.com) —The CVS service appears to be very similar to Wal-Mart. An active account is one from which prints or merchandise has been ordered within the last 365 days, and users must access their account at least once each 180 days.

4. Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) — The Shutterfly web site states that they have never deleted a photo, and that unlimited storage is free.

5. Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) — With Snapfish you can email or upload digital photos, and you can also mail in rolls of film for developing, printing and sharing online. Accounts stay active if a purchase is made every 365 days.

6. Kodak EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com) — Kodak EasyShare, formerly Ofoto, is one of the best known of the photo services. The basic gallery service is free, but for $2.49 a month, or $24.99 for the year, you can have your own web page with a unique name that anyone can access by typing the URL into the address location of a browser.

In next week I will finish this three part series of columns and write about two photo sharing services that are a bit “outside the box,” as well as online storage options for serious photographers.

A picture is worth thousand words…

In the OnMouseClick column that appeared in the December 23 issue of the TR Times, I wrote about creating hard-cover books from digital photographs — something that most people will only do for very special occasions. But what if all you want are standard snapshot prints? The easiest method is to take the memory card out of your camera and bring it to CVS, COSTCO, Walmart, or Target. At the store you put your memory card in a specially designed kiosk, use a touch screen to choose the images you want to print, go shopping for about an hour, and pick up the finished prints. Standard four by six inch prints are typically priced around seventeen cents each, but coupons and advertised specials abound.

If you are comfortable uploading images to the Internet, there are a numerous of photo-finishing service that will print your photos and mail them to your home. Four by six inch prints range in price from twelve to nineteen cents a print, with most services offering free and reduced cost prints on a regular basis. Shipping charges are low, but you can save the shipping charges by uploading images directly to CVS, Costco, Walmart or Target, and then picking up your photos the next time you go shopping. However, since most of the online services do not charge tax, the savings is negligible. All of the photo services also offer 5” x 7” and 8” x 10” prints, and some even offer poster sizes prints.

To get an idea of the print quality and other options provided by the photo-finishing service, I recommend reading some of the reviews that can be found on the web. CNET provides reviews of all things technology, and their review of photo printing services can be found at http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6451_7-6245134-1.html?tag=txt. Another web site, Epinions.com, lists many of the photo services, with links to reviews written by consumer who used the services, at http://www.epinions.com/webs-Web_Services-All-Photos.

Below is a partial listing and links to the online photo-finishing services.

www.dotphoto.com
www.imagestation.com
www.kodakgallery.com (formerly Ofoto)
www.photoworks.com
picasa.google.com
www.shutterfly.com
www.snapfish.com
www.cvs.com (choose the PHOTO tab)
www.costco.com (choose PHOTO CENTER from the menu)
www.walmart.com (choose PHOTO from the menu)
www.target.com (choose TARGET PHOTO from the top menu)