Showing off your photos in the digital age

Now that digital photography is the norm, how do you go about sharing your snapshots with friends and family?

You can e-mail the photos, of course, or post them to photo-sharing sites like Flickr or Picasa. But those aren't the only options, and they don't necessarily cover chance encounters -- those let-me-show-you-my-grandchildren moments that happen on the spur of the moment.

Some people, of course, print out their digital photos and just pass them around in print form. Most newer computer printers now do a fine job with everyday snapshots, and many have special drawers for photo-size glossy paper. There are also dedicated photo printers.

Polaroid, which in the days before digital photography helped enable millions of instant pass-around photos, now has a line of small, take-everywhere portable photo printers, including a pocket-sized model that makes 2-inch by 3-inch sticky-backed photos.

Some people just use their camera as a photo storage and sharing device. I tend to be diligent about deleting photos from my personal camera (and occasionally reformatting the memory card, just for maintenance's sake) once I've downloaded the photos to a computer, even though my current camera's removable SD card has room for hundreds of photos. But I know people who have photos on their camera from months and months ago.

Well, Kodak is introducing a new touch-screen camera, the Slice, that's designed for this purpose. It has internal memory (not a removable card, but built-in memory) capable of storing 5,000 photos in the proper resolution for display on the camera's HD screen. There's also a micro-SD card slot; you store the photos in their full, original resolution (up to 14MB) on the removable card, downloading them to your computer or deleting them as needed. The somewhat-smaller HD copies are kept on your camera so that you can pull the camera from your pocket and show them to friends at a moment's notice. In effect, you can carry your entire library of photos (at least, photos you take from this point forward) in your pocket. The camera includes face-recognition features which would allow you to quickly call up all of the photos of a specific person.

I've been playing with a similar face-recognition feature in Picasa lately, and it's pretty amazing.

The web site RedEnvelope (redenvelope.com) offers a "digital brag book" with a 3 1/2-inch screen and room for up to 2,000 photos in its memory.

There are also little pocket-sized keychains which display a slide show of your photos. I had given one of those to a family member as part of her Christmas gift, and then I recently got one of my own as an added premium when I was buying a new point-and-shoot digital camera. The resolution on mine isn't that great; I suspect the photos mean more to me, having seen the originals, than they would to anyone to whom I showed the keychain.

As touch-screen smartphones like the iPhone or Droid become more common, they, too, will become a mechanism for sharing photos. The nice thing about this is that the phones can show photos from their internal memory or (via an app or web browser) from photo-sharing sites online. Tablet computers like the iPad may serve some of this function as well.

--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.