Share your photos: the software way

Posting your photo albums on the Web and inviting all and sundry to view them, however, represents the ultimate in photo sharing. For quick-and-dirty posting, we tend to like PhotoDeluxe best; essentially, you drag photos from the Gallery into another frame and click the post button. Of course, it only works with ActiveShare. PhotoSuite, PictureIt! Photo, and Ulead Photo Explorer all work in some integrated fashion with their partner sites, but they also allow you to create generic Web sites that can be manually posted to any host.

If you prefer to upload images to a site on the fly, rather than organize them into albums first, we recommend Photo Explorer. It uses an interface called the "Drop Spot:" You simply drag a bunch of files onto the Drop Spot applet, and it automatically uploads them to your iMira account. The only drawback is that after they're uploaded you must then move them into other albums (unless you want a really big album called "New Album"). Photo Explorer also works well for quickly generating nothing but pages of thumbnails. Paint Shop Pro also has a seamless one-click upload to its StudioAvenue.com partner.

For album-based sharing, however, PhotoSuite gets the nod. It seamlessly allows you to upload albums without sending you to the Web. PictureIt! Photo attempts the same seamlessness, but its integration with PictureIt on MSN doesn't quite match that of PhotoSuite's with GatherRound. On the other hand, PictureIt! Photo gives you the tools to directly publish your photos to any Web site to which you have FTP rights. This should appeal to people who don't want to get locked into a specific photo-sharing arrangement.

Print your photos
The most traditional way to share your photos, of course, is to print them. A few packages, including PictureIt! Photo and PhotoSuite, have direct links to providers like PhotoNet, Fujifilm.net, and Ofoto to get standard photographic prints (and novelty items) from your digital files.

You can also simply print them yourself on the color inkjet printer that's most likely hooked up to your home PC. With all the products you can print a single image at a time; most of the consumer-level products also offer an option to print multiple copies of an image on the same page (usually called "print multiples") and can print to popular third-party inkjet-paper layouts. Photoshop 6.0 is one of the few apps that will generate print "packages," multiples in different sizes on a single page. PhotoDeluxe, PhotoExplorer, PictureIt! Photo, PhotoExpress and Photoshop all automate the production of thumbnail prints, though you can generally figure out some way to get these from any of the products. Surprisingly, only PhotoSuite supports automatic poster printing (by tiling the image across many smaller pages).

The one thing you tend to lose when using a consumer package is control over how the colors are reproduced on the printer; if the printout doesn't match the display, you're out of luck. PictureIt! Photo, Photo Express, and Paint Shop Pro only give you the choice of turning the printer's ICM profile on or off (which gives you one more shot before you're out of luck). A better solution for color-management neophytes lies with PhotoDeluxe and Qbeo's PhotoGenetics techniques. You calibrate the printing system by printing sample pages, then telling the application which one looks most like the screen display; the application generates the correct way to compensate.

Products like Photoshop, Photo Paint, and PhotoImpact give you far more sophisticated -- though far more complex -- controls over print color quality and printer-screen color matching. Color management is forbidding territory to venture into, but it can also make a significant difference in the quality of the output, or at the very least your satisfaction with the output. If you plan to print lots of photos by yourself, you might want to check out MonacoEZColor, a highly recommended color-profiling package that's both effective and easy to use.