Ghosts!

If you have all of these wonderful digital photos, what can you do with them? Of course you want to share these precious moments with friends and family. This can be done through a variety of options including printing or burning them onto CDs or DVDs or 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:

You can always share your pictures by having a hardcopy printout just like with film-based photography. Requirements include a good photo printer and some quality printing paper, after that its just printing! I typically print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) on a glossy photo paper. The end results are high quality prints comparable to those printed at photo kiosks.

You can still use a photo kiosk to do the job, or even send your images to an online photo print website should you not have access to a printer. These websites can print your photos and deliver them to your door. Shop around first since many digital photo printing services are not cheap.

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.

Now, CD burners and DVD burners are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. That is a remarkable 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 option to emailing photos is to upload your photos to a website, then email the website link to your friends or family. This avoids the issue of large 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.

There are limitations to using photo sharing websites. Some charge a fee for their services, while others require that you to order prints to keep your account active. Also, you also not be able to personalize the appearance 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.

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!