webshots

Birthdays are one of the wonderful aspects of life that set us apart from robots, but that doesn't mean the cloud that is the Internet isn't fond of well wishing people with birthday salutations. Working at Webware, I register with an average of two services a day, often times more. Depending on the type of site, they'll occasionally ask for my birthday (mostly for age verification), which gets tucked away deep inside some server farm in rural Russia, or Ohio. Over the course of the past 10 months I've been here, plus whatever sites I've … Read more

The number and quality of online photo-sharing sites, along with their burgeoning communities, have been growing exponentially ever since mainstream consumers embraced digital photography.

Flickr, Picasa, Snapfish, 23HQ, Zoomr, and Webshots (disclaimer: Webshots is owned by CNET Networks) are only a handful of the free sites that let you publish your own pics and explore other photographers' creations.

Once you've established your digital presence on a photo-sharing site, you may find yourself uploading hundreds, if not thousands, of photos to share with friends and family. While the sites have powerful technology to display, categorize, and host your images, they'… Read more

Each time I go shutter-happy, I'm reminded of digital photography's beautiful myth. Yes, impressive megapixel loads deliver in-your-face resolution that elevates photos from the usual point-and-shoot quality. However, there's that time-sucking task of cropping, editing, captioning, and distributing the sprawling photo collection, and those are things even the fanciest camera on the market won't do.

The time and effort it takes to process a large batch of photos can be off-putting, but here are a few media-organization tools from the CNET Download.com library to move along the sometimes-arduous process of getting photos from the desktop to your friends.… Read more

On our weekly Real Deal podcast today, Tom and I covered online photo sharing. It's not so much a comparison of the dozens of good photo sites we know of, but rather an overview of the issues for people confused about the whole space. Topics covered: Various services. How to pick a site. Privacy and copyrights. Online editing. And listener questions.

See also our Newbie's Guide to Flickr.

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums.

PreClick announced its photo-messaging service last week at the Demo conference. The free app, called Instant Photo Messenger (or IPM) lets you share photos with others using a simple drag-and-drop interface. On the receiving end, users with the IPM software installed get a taskbar notification letting them know photos have been sent their way. They can then view the shots without leaving the program.

IPM doubles as an e-mail program of sorts, letting you send photo messages to any e-mail address. You also have a contact list, as you would on any other instant-messenging client. Contacts are added automatically after … Read more