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.

Lets walk through some of the best ways to share your cherished digital photo collection. Knowing these options, sharing your photos with others is simple to do. There are basically four main ways to share digital photos:

Just like film-based photography, you can share your pictures by having a hardcopy printout. All you need to do is get a good photo printer and some quality printing paper, then print away! I usually print my photos from an inkjet printer (the Canon Pixma iP4000) using glossy photo paper. The prints I get are very high quality - you can’t discern them from those you print at photo kiosks.

If you don’t have a printer available, you can still count on a photo kiosk to do the job, or even transmit your pictures to an online photo print website. These websites typically print your pictures and deliver them to your doorstep. Make sure to shop for the best value first as many digital photo printing services are expensive.

Storing your photos on CD and DVD is another great alternative for sharing photos, particularly if you have an enormously huge photo compilation. A disadvantage might lay in that your family and friends need to have a CD player or DVD player in order to view the content of the disk.

CD burners and DVD burners on the market today are very affordable. A single CD-R stores 650MB and a DVD stores 4GB. This is an overwhelming amount of storage space for your photo albums.

Of course, another choice for sharing photos is to email them to friends or family members. But please be careful with this. Check that your addressee wants to receive the photos first. Its easy to overload a person with a 10MB email containing photo attachments. Always get the green light to send photos first.

An alternative to emailing photos is to upload your photos to a website and then simply email the website link to your friends or family. This circumvents the dilemma of huge email attachments.

One of the best ways to share digital photos is to upload them to a website. There are many online photo storage sites available. SmugMug is one of my favorite photo sharing sites. It allows you to upload photo albums and determine who can view those albums.

Keep in mind that there are limits to using photo sharing websites. Some of them involve a fee for their services, while others require you to order prints to keep your account active. You also may not be able to modify the arrangement of the website easily.

My personal advice is to set up your own web site to host your own picture gallery. If you’re searching for a good web hosting company, try Yahoo! web hosting. I’ve used them myself for a number of years problem-free and their customer support is excellent.

There are many ways to share your digital photos with friends and family. I tend to burn my images to CD or DVD and hand them out. I also frequently upload images to websites for all to see. Next time you want to share photos, try one of the above methods!

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