Share pics with your pals

• Ofoto  • Club Photo

• Shutterfly • Snapfish

Your new digital camera is your pride and joy. It lets you take as many pictures as you want, without the cost and inconvenience of traditional film. But don't you miss that magical moment at the drugstore, when you get your photos back from the developer and hold them in your eager hands?

Fortunately, online photo services deliver the same thrill, even with your digital pics. The weakened economy has weeded out a few online options; Zing and PhotoPoint recently fell by the wayside. But today's remaining online photo services, which include Ofoto, Club Photo, Shutterfly, and Snapfish, allow you to enhance and store your images online, create and modify virtual albums, and invite your family and friends to gawk over your very own Internet galleries--at no cost. Plus, for a fee, you can order and receive lab-quality prints, archival CDs, or customized gifts and accessories.

To help you settle on a top-notch service, we put four well-known sites through their paces and found out which online photo services were helpful, versatile, and downright fun.

CNET recommends
Only this photo site combines maximum power with minimum price. Accept no imitations. CNET recommends

Ofoto site

In the past, amateur photographers who wanted to view or share photos would entrust their film to the local one-hour photo joint, then hold their breath. Now, if you have a digital camera, Kodak-owned Ofoto lets you touch up your photos, store them in an online database, and share them with anyone who has an e-mail address. Plus, if you want hard-copy photographs, Ofoto delivers stunning, high-quality prints. Ofoto easily beats its freebie competitors Snapfish and Shutterfly. But if you want to view images at high resolution, you may want to pay for Club Photo.

Simple yet effective
Like its competitors, Ofoto doesn't require you to install files on your computer. To sign up for the free service, simply enter your name and e-mail address at Ofoto's site, and you're ready to create your own personal photo album.

The site's interfaces are clean and clutter-free. Five general navigation tabs sit across the top of the screen, your albums or photos are on the left, and a small column of operational commands are on the right, each of which blossoms into a pull-down menu. If you need help, you can access Ofoto's impressively complete collection of help files and photography tips via the Help link at the top of the page.

Albums R us
To start building your album, you must first choose how you want to upload pictures; you can drag and drop them from your desktop, browse and upload them from your hard drive, or select them via the downloadable OfotoNow utility. The straightforward OfotoNow app not only streamlines computer-to-Internet transfers, it also lets you crop, rotate, and remove red-eye from your offline images--a feature you won't find at Snapfish. Even better, you don't have to worry that you're uploading too many pictures: Ofoto currently provides you with unlimited photo storage space--nice.

Ofoto offers an impressive array of online, single-click editing features and effects, including watercolor and soft glow, tint adjustments, and numerous artistic borders. If you want labels on your pictures, you must type them in manually on Ofoto's "Add a photo title" page, since Ofoto doesn't upload filenames with your images (but OfotoNow, the downloadable photo manager, does). Although this simple procedure takes but a few seconds per photo, you will wish Ofoto did it automatically if you have to label scores of pictures.

Guests welcome
With Ofoto, it's easy and fun to share your albums with friends and family. You merely click one or more pictures or an entire album, enter the e-mail addresses of your intended recipients, and compose an accompanying message. Within minutes, your guests will receive an attractive invitation decorated with your preselected images. When guests visit your album, they can watch a slide show of your photos or use the thumbnail gallery to see individual images. Unfortunately, unlike Club Photo, Ofoto does not support high-resolution image viewing, so both you and your guests must look at small (448x336), less detailed, Internet-quality images. To be fair, this practice seems to be the standard among most free sites.

Speaking of free, although its album service costs nothing, Ofoto does charge for prints and accessories, such as frames and archival CDs. Ofoto provides print services, courtesy of Kodak (its parent company), and based on our tests, the resulting pictures are definitely worth the cash. Although we waited no longer and paid no more than we would have with Snapfish or Shutterfly (US$0.49 (S$0.88) for a 4x6, US$3.99 (S$7.20) for an 8x10, and US$1.79 (S$3.23) for four, wallet-size miniatures), Ofoto's prints impressed us most. Processed on high-grade Kodak DuraLife stock, all of our test prints retained their true colors, achieved optimum contrast, and were perfectly cropped and aligned. Ofoto also offers 16x20 and 20x30 enlargements, an option not available elsewhere.

Don't call us
Sadly, Ofoto's technical support is a mixed bag. The company offers a wealth of help resources online and responds within hours to e-mail requests, but it does not provide telephone customer support. That poses a real problem for anyone who needs immediate information.

Ultimately, however, Ofoto is a joy. Its presentation is crisp, its knowledge base impressive, and its print quality second to none. Telephone-support issues aside, Ofoto is practically perfect in every way, and we highly recommend it to all nonprofessional digital photographers.

Club Photo site

Unlike free online photo sites such as Ofoto or Shutterfly, which charge only if you order prints, Club Photo charges an annual fee just to store your images. This service's extras, such as high-resolution image viewing and an online-community photo gallery, however, may justify the price to photo enthusiasts. Casual shutterbugs who simply want to store and share medium-resolution images should check out Ofoto instead.

No Installation Required
Like most online photo services, Club Photo doesn't install on your hard drive. To use the service, simply surf to the site and enter your name and e-mail address. Your photo album's interface displays text-based navigational menus across the top, more text-based menus on the left for viewing or editing albums, and a series of impressively large image thumbnails in the middle.

Unfortunately, although Club Photo makes it easy to import batches of photos, it doesn't preserve the names of your files. As a result, your photos may have partial labels or captions until you manually retype them. If you want to adjust your images, say, fiddle with brightness and darkness, rotate them, or change captions, click the box above the thumbnail. To preview your alterations, click the thumbnail to open a second window. For detailed offline editing, which is faster than online editing, and more convenient batch-photo uploads, you can download a free, abridged version of Club Photo's Living Album software. A full edition of the program, which allows unlimited album pages and supports multimedia, will set you back US$29.95 (S$54.02).

Pay Up Or Get Out
Featurewise, Club Photo outdoes Snapfish and Ofoto. But if you want to store your albums for more than 90 days, get ready to pay. At the US$24.95 (S$45) Gold and US$34.95 (S$63.03) Platinum annual membership levels, you can create 15 and 30 albums, respectively, each with a 60-photo maximum. By contrast, Ofoto gives you unlimited storage space for free. Club Photo also encourages professional photographers to cough up US$100 (S$180) for a variety of benefits, including proof sharing, photo sales, and a professionally designed Club Photo Web site.

Is Club Photo's paid service really worth the expense? Certainly, your guests will appreciate the attractive e-mail invitation to your album. When they head to the site, they can view your thumbnail and full-sized images one by one, initiate a slide show, or fork over extra bucks for a truly flabbergasting array of accessory and gift items, including photo-imprinted mugs and even--gasp--edible cookies. Furthermore, for a fee, both you and your guests can download crystal-clear high-resolution renditions of your photos--an option that's unavailable at most free services.

Competitive Print Prices
Fortunately, at just US$0.45 (S$0.81) for a 3x5 or 4x6 print, US$3.99 (S$7.20) for an 8x10 enlargement, and US$1.79 (S$3.23) for a quartet of wallet-size shots, Club Photo's hard-copy prints are economical compared to those of the competition. We ordered a sampling of each size and were pleasantly surprised to receive our prints in three business days. Although the photo paper was noticeably thinner than Ofoto's stock, our images were properly cropped and contained accurate colors and hues.

Need assistance? You can reach Club Photo's support team via e-mail or phone from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT (Pacific Time), Monday through Friday. We received satisfactory answers to our two e-mail queries within eight business hours. A human being answered our first telephone call promptly. But our second and third calls, made within operating hours, reached only try-again-later voicemail. (Service available in the US only.)

Clearly, Club Photo is a versatile photo-management site. If you can handle its unpredictable phone support and annual fee, this comprehensive online photo site should serve you well. For a sophisticated freebie, check out Ofoto instead.

Snapfish site

At first glance, online photo service Snapfish reminds us of capable, trouble-free Shutterfly, right down to the cuddly name and orderly layout. Both offer Internet-based storage and sharing, several rudimentary editing functions, and print processing. Check a little closer, however, and you'll find that Snapfish has only drab, intrusive sharing options. Worse, neither Snapfish's limited editing and upload tools nor its print prices and quality can match the competitions'. Although Snapfish delivers the basics and charges only for photo processing or accessories, it simply doesn't compare to the likes of Ofoto.

Bearable Ads; Unbearable Privacy Intrusions
Like many of its competitors, Snapfish does not require a download or installation. Just go to the site and enter your name and e-mail address. But Snapfish forces you to enter your mailing address as well. The site claims it uses your street address only to mail your prints, should you order any. But at this point, you haven't even uploaded your pictures, let alone ordered prints. We'd rather wait to give out this private information.

Online Or Nothing
Snapfish lets you upload photos in one of two ways. You can either upload up to 12 images at a time from your hard drive or install the Drag And Drop tool and drag your pics from your hard drive to the site's photo upload Preview Area, which is in your browser. Then, just click Upload Photos to send the photos to your album. Since the company currently has no plans to enforce its 60MB photo storage limit, for now, you may upload as many shots as you want.

Snapfish's new online editing utility features the effective one-touch Correct Color tool to adjust contrast and color balance. Unfortunately, the service doesn't offer a downloadable photo uploader/editor for quick, offline editing and large batch transfers. Since online editing is more time-consuming than offline editing, altering your shots with Snapfish is far less convenient than with Ofoto or Club Photo.

Your personal photo page, where you view your photo collection, is easy on the eyes, with a row of four general navigation tabs--Home, Photos, Cameras, and Help--at the top of the screen, your pics or albums in the middle, and a button-bar screen at the right for uploading, editing, or sharing. A banner ad displays third-party advertisements throughout your session, but none are overly invasive.

To invite others to view your Snapfish photos, click a photo or album, select Share from the button bar, enter an e-mail address, and compose a message. Within minutes, your guests receive a rather drab, text-based invitation. Once they click through to the Snapfish site, they must enter their own names and e-mail addresses before they can view your album. None of the other sites we tested insist on this invasive procedure; with Ofoto, you may choose to have your guests sign in, but it's not mandatory. And although Snapfish does allow guests to view medium-resolution, Internet-quality renditions of your images, the service charges US$0.89 (S$1.60) to download your original high-res shot for offline viewing. We don't think Snapfish is good enough to justify jumping through all these hurdles.

Hard Copies Are Hard To Like
If you want to print out digital pics for your lovely leather photo album, you'd better not be Canadian. Unlike Shutterfly and Club Photo, Snapfish offers print processing only to U.S.-based customers. Its prints also cost slightly more than those of other services at US$0.59 (S$1.06) for a 4x6, US$0.99 (S$1.79) for a 5x7, US$3.99 (S$7.20) for an 8x10, and US$1.99 (S$3.59) for four wallet-size shots. We ordered a selection of sizes but were more pleased with the three-day delivery time than with the prints' color quality. All of the pictures bore a strange pink hue. What's more, Snapfish had incorrectly aligned the 8x10 cropping with the edges of our images, leaving a thin white gap down one side. Compared to Ofoto, which provides perfectly developed prints on much thicker paper, Snapfish simply isn't up-to-snuff.

The Snapfish telephone customer support team, however, makes the grade. You can reach tech support via phone 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday. We had trouble locating the customer service number, but when we finally called, a real human being immediately picked up and answered our questions quickly and cheerfully. E-mail response times, on the other hand, ranged from 4 to 30 hours. (Service applicable in the US only.)

Snapfish remains one of the leading names in the online photo business, and it does deliver the basic elements of an online photo service. But it's too intrusive, too expensive, and too unimpressive for us to recommend. Shutterfly and Ofoto are better bets.

Shutterfly site

Perhaps because it sounds like butterfly, the name Shutterfly brings to mind a cheerful, hassle-free experience. And that's precisely what you'll find with this veteran online photo service. Like Ofoto and Snapfish, Shutterfly allows you to store and edit photos, share them with friends and family, and order lab-quality prints. True, the Shutterfly site generates at least one pop-up advertisement per visit, doesn't let guests view your images at high resolutions, and its print quality can't hold a candle to Ofoto's. Yet thanks to its bright interface and extensive help files, Shutterfly seems friendlier than its competitors. Not planning to print? Need an easy online album? Try Shutterfly.

Easy Access
Working with Shutterfly is a breeze. Online registration takes just a couple of minutes and requires only your name and e-mail address. From its sign-in screen to your own personal album pages, the site's interface is simple and intuitive. Pages load quickly, even when hampered by one of the company's frequent pop-up ads. Your photo page displays either a single image and caption or a thumbnail album in the center of the screen. Editing commands and photo information are on the right and left, and a large button bar is across the top of the screen.

You can upload digital shots in one of three ways. Two of these techniques allow you to scan your computer for 10 files or less and upload them. The third method incorporates Shutterfly's SmartUpload utility, a nifty little download that installs on your hard drive and transfers files via a convenient upload wizard. Don't worry about uploading too many photos. Shutterfly provides limitless storage space. SmartUpload also supports simple editing functions such as rotating and cropping. However, you must access the site to perform more detailed enhancements such as contrast and saturation adjustments or to add one of Shutterfly's many impressive borders. Unfortunately, this online editing takes longer than the offline changes that Ofoto and Club Photo allow.

By Invitation Only
You must choose the photos or albums you wish to share and enter the e-mail addresses of your intended audience. When your guests receive Shutterfly's rather plain invitation, they can click the link to your gallery. Here, they can view an automatic slide show, click a thumbnail display to view larger renditions of any given shot, or order reprints of your images. Unfortunately, both you and your guests will see only a downsized, medium-resolution version of your photo, which isn't nearly as crisp as the original. Club Photo actually lets you view images at higher resolutions.

At Shutterfly, money changes hands only when you order prints or accessories such as frames and customized greeting cards. At US$0.49 (S$0.88) for a 4x6, US$3.99 (S$7.20) for an 8x10, and US$1.79 (S$3.23) for a four-pack of wallet-size photos, Shutterfly's processing prices match its competitors'. We received our multiple photo shipment just three days after we ordered it and were pleased to find our custom captions emblazoned on the back of each print. Our Shutterfly photos looked faithful to their original colors but were a bit overexposed and printed on flimsier stock than our Ofoto prints.

Questions And Answers
Since Shutterfly is so easy to use, you probably won't need its tech support. Still, the telephone customer support team, available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT (Pacific Time), was quick on the draw and very helpful. Shutterfly reps answered our e-mail queries within six hours. (Service available in the US only.)

Shutterfly's light, breezy feel belies its range of features and level of customer support. Although Club Photo and Snapfish deliver higher resolution viewing (for a fee), we recommend Shutterfly to newcomers, casual photographers, and anyone satisfied with medium-resolution online images.