Share your holiday photos

What would the holidays be without photos? And what fun are photos unless you can share them with friends and family?

Depending on how many photos you take, it's probably impractical (and inconsiderate) to e-mail all of your photos in full resolution to all of your friends and family. So the photo-sharing web site was born. These sites allow you to upload your photos to a web site where your friends and family can come and view them -- and, in many cases, order prints, photo merchandise, digital downloads and what have you.

Some photo sites also offer simple image-editing tools, such as red-eye removal, exposure correction or cropping, or can give you easy shortcuts to embed your photo in a blog post, share it on a social networking site, or what have you.

In recent years, a variety of photo-sharing sites have popped up. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and which one you use may be a matter of personal preference, and (even more important) the preferences of your friends, who are more likely to view your photos on a service where they already have an account set up.

Some of the more popular photo sharing sites include:

* Flickr, flickr.com, is owned by Yahoo! and anyone with a Yahoo! account can log right into Flickr. Flickr offers a free account and a paid "pro" account which allows more uploads each month.

* Kodak Gallery, kodakgallery.com, is -- no surprise here -- owned by Kodak, and so Kodak digital cameras come with software which automatically uploads to it. It also offers prints and merchandise.

* Picasa, picasaweb.google.com, is owned by Google, and so anyone with a Google account can log in. Picasa is actually two different things -- an online photo-sharing service, and a free photo management software that you can download for your computer.

* Shutterfly, shutterfly.com, offers free, unlimited storage. It's an independent, publicly-traded NASDAQ company.

* Snapfish, snapfish.com, is owned by HP, and so you've probably been directed to it if you use an HP camera or printer. It sells photo prints and merchandise. Several of my teammates from last summer's Kenya trip encouraged us to upload photos to Snapfish because it's possible to set up a group room for a particular event or organization. Each member can upload his or her own individual album to the group room, which makes it easy for members to look at each other's photos.

* Walgreens, walgreens.com, offers photo sharing along with prints and merchandise. One advantage is that the prints can be generated and picked up at local Walgreens stores, which may be faster than mail order.

Many other camera manufacturers and photo processors offer their own photo sharing services; check your camera's software or operating manual for more details.

One thing you may want to look at is how the photo sharing site grants access to the photos.

You may have a choice of making the photos "public" or "private." The public setting is great for vacation photos, scenery or that snowman in your back yard, but you may want to make sure you use a "private" setting if any of your relatives in the photos would object to making the photos public, especially if they involve young children.

Then again, if the photo site offers "private" access, you may want to find out how many steps your friends and family will need to navigate in order to see your photos. Will they have to sign up for a user account with the site, or can they just follow a link to the photos?

Remember, if you have photos of which you're especially proud, you can share them with Times-Gazette web site readers at t-g.com. Look for the heading "your photos" in the left column of our home page.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.