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Half the fun of photography is later on being able to show off the pictures to others. Traditionally this might have involved passing round a pile of snaps, which would quickly get covered in thumbprints, or being forced to flick through album after interminable album under the watchful gaze of some relative or other. But the tandem evolution of digital photography and the Internet has revolutionised the way snapshots can be shared. These days it's easy to upload a batch of photos to the web for other folks to view at their leisure, which both eliminates the inevitable dog-earing of printed photos and reduces the risk of boring your friends and relations to tears.

Over the next few pages we'll explain all you need to know about getting your photos online and take a look at some of the most popular photo sharing services.

Sharing essentials

Online photo sharing allows anyone with an Internet connection to show off their digital photography efforts to anyone else on a dedicated website. Of course, sharing digital photos isn't new, or even difficult: it's possible to email images to other folks, or upload photos to your own web space, assuming you have some and know how to do it. However, such options won't always be practical. Many email servers still baulk at messages bearing huge attachments, while Internet services providers are rarely very generous with the amount of free web space doled out to subscribers. And if you want to present your photos nicely in a gallery rather than just

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chuck all the files in the rough direction of their intended audience, that means creating a website, which is another reason to postpone the whole excercise indefinitely.

That's where online photo sharing services make their entrance. Quite simply, these are websites dedicated to the storage and display of digital photos. Individual services vary wildly in their make-up, but typically you can expect some rudimentary image manipulation facilities (rotate, brighten, adjust contrast and so forth), some organisational tools, and the ability to present your photos to a wider audience, be it the whole wide world or just selected friends and family members.

In addition to the ability to apply captions to your photos, expect to be able to add 'tags'. Tagging is a feature common to all good photo sharing sites, along with the latest blogs. Essentially it means electronically attaching one or more descriptive keywords to photos, so that they can later be filtered or otherwise categorised according to the tags. For example, you might upload a summer holiday photo and label it with the tags 'holiday' and 'sunny'. Later, searches performed using either of those keywords will see the tagged picture turn up in the results list. Tagging family photos with the names of the people in them, for example, can save a huge amount of time later when Auntie X wants to find all the latest pictures of little Y.

Sundry other features include the ability to purchase prints and gift products bearing chosen photos, the option to link uploaded photos to blogs, calendar functions to tie snapshots to particular events, and even the facility to flog prints of your photos to anyone with the desire to buy them.

In terms of costs, most of these services offer basic accounts free of charge. Such freebies generally carry restrictions, though, like a limited number of photo uploads in a month or a relatively small amount of storage space. High-resolution photos can take up a lot of megabytes. If you're a heavier user, with a need for lots of storage, then watch out for charges kicking in and quickly ratcheting up.