How do you handle your digital pictures

[myip]

I just got a digital camera. I am wondering how folks handle all the pictures. Do you buy a printer or send it to on-line company to print the photos? How do you share your pictures with other people? Which on-line company do you like? I am looking to store the picture on-line, any recommendations?

 

[ricoba]

I have used www.Kodakgallery.com for a number of years (since it was Ofoto) to share & show photo's.

I also have a www.shutterfly.com account, but have found the print quality better on Kodakgallery, when I do order prints.

To organize & touch up my pics on my computer I use Corel Photo Album. It was a highly rated program on CNET, when it was Jasc Photo Album.

Enjoy your camera! We find that we take lots more pics now with digital over film, because it's so easy.

Rick

 

[lanalee]

My recommendation is Smugmug. I've been very happy with the prints as well.
I sent you a message with more information.

Smugmug

 

[Bucky]

As you can see from the links below, I use shutterfly. I've been very happy with them over the years. I use Picasa for all of my digital photo editing. Great free program from Google.

 

[Keitht]

I just got a digital camera. I am wondering how folks handle all the pictures. Do you buy a printer or send it to on-line company to print the photos?

Purchasing a true photo quality printer will set you back anything from $200 upwards. Producing your own 6x4 prints will then typically cost upwards of 60c per print, and that is assuming no wastage.
You will see from those figures that in purely financial terms it is unlikely that printing your own pictures will be cost effective. On the other hand there is a sense of achievement in getting the exact crop you want from an image and doing all the work yourself.
I tend not to print a huge number of images but do enjoy doing the work myself. I just ignore the cost factors

 

[DeniseM]

I upload my pictures to Wal-Greens and they are ready in less than an hour, at 19 cents or less each. I can send others the link if they want to have pictures printed. It is very, very easy and fast. I know some of the other web sights are a few cents less, but you have to wait a few days for them to mail them back.

 

[JEFF H]

I gave up on printing my own digital photos as the cost of printer,InK and paper ended up costing me more than having them printed by a service.
Most local stores now have equipment where you can upload whatever type of smart card memory you have and get professional photos printed from your digital images at very reasonable prices.

 

[mtngal]

I don't print that many of my photos. I bought and learned how to use Photoshop years ago and while I don't use many of the newer features, it's still my favorite program to make adjustments to my pictues. I used several different on-line photo album websites - webshots, imagestation, photobucket and photo.net. Webshots is fun but there's lots of advertising on it. Imagestation is owned by Sony and I prefer them over-all. The photo mug I got from them for my husband's birthday was very nice. I use photobucket to hold photos I want to llink to on another bulletin board, since they allow that. I don't care for shutterfly because they won't let you look at the full sized photos on-line (imagestation does).

I don't leave the files on my computer - I keep all of the files and when I have enough I burn a CD (arranged chronologically) with an indication on it what the disk contains. Then if my hardrive dies for some reason, I won't lose all of them.

I am thinking of printing a few of my pictures in 8x10 size to brighten up my office, but whenever I look at the price of glossy paper, I decide that I won't bother just yet.

 

[taffy19]

I printed photo images only once myself and wasted so much Kodak paper and ink that I will never do it again. I only have photos printed for family and friends who do not have a computer and can't do it themselves. I like the quality and colors too and am very pleased with the prints and they are too.

I recently signed up with http://www.smugmug.com because you get unlimited space so it is my plan to store all my photo images there privately as I have too many CDs floating around and cannot always find the image I want. It is insurance too against a flood or fire.

I love http://www.picturetrail.com/ for showing my pictures to family and friends and here too.

 

[marcmuff]

I download my pictures from the camera to my computer, either with the Kodak software (dock) that came with the camera, or I just put the photo card from the camera into the computer.

I use MS PictureIt to edit my pictures. The free one they give you in several different packages of photo paper seems to work as well as the $100 version.

I put pictures on both webshots and picturetrail. I like the music on picturetrail; however, I can't hear the music with my Mozilla browser and need to switch to Internet Explorer (strange ) to hear the music.

The last time I ordered reprints for someone, I just "sent" the files to WalMart from my computer and prints were available at the WalMart of my choice in a few days. I believe they have 1-hour service, but they are more expensive.

Once someone ordered prints from Webshots - that seemed to work better with the ones I didn't crop or edit. Apparently several people just download my pictures from Webshots because I get an Email once a week telling me how many people have visited each album and how many downloads there were.

There were 1,817 hits on my Webshots albums last week. You can see my pictures by clicking on the URLs below.

 

[Htoo0]

I handle mine VERY carefully by the edges. Just hate photos with fingerprint stains on them. Seriously though, we load them on the computer, fix them as needed, use them as a rotating screensaver and transfer the ones we like back to the disk to take to Walmart or other printing facility.

 

[2hokies]

I upload mine to a newly acquired external hard drive. I had a professional photographer tell me that even CD's/DVD's can deteriorate over time, especially if you have the ones that have a blue sheen on the back. If you do burn to CD/DVD, use the "gold" ones.

Anyway, I do postprocessing using Photoshop Elements. We have a small Epson printer that does a nice job on 4x6's, but it prints VERY slowly. For large batches I upload to Shutterfly and order from there.

I would like to try a higher quality online printing company, so maybe I'll try Smugmug or Kodak Gallery previous posters mentioned.

The professional photographer also mentioned that if you want nice prints off of your home printer, get one that has separate cartridges for the colors. Makes for less waste of ink. Of course, our Epson has one big cartridge for all colors

 

[Kal]

Anytime you burn your own CDs, they will have a limited life because of the technology being used. Home computers burn quite differently than professional systems as the pro sytems burn deeply into the matrix while a home machine is fairly superficial. Disc color has nothing to do with it.

 

[boyblue]

This link can help you choose

You plug in the features you want and it list the sights that would work for you.

 

[dswarren]

I create a structure of folders on my computer by year and month. For each year (e.g. 2006) I create subfolders for each month(e.g. Jan, Feb etc). Then within the subfolder, I create additional folders as needed for specific events (birthdays, graduations etc). I also create a custom name when downloading the picture as opposed to saving them to the hard drive with a default numeric or date value. This allows me the ability to search for a picture in windows using a specific word that I may have used in the name of the picture.

I utilize photoshop; however, it takes a while to learn. There are still many features I don't know how to use.

I backup all of my photos every 6 months. While it is true that the DVD's won't last forever, I figure if I back them up once every 6 months I shouldn't have anything to worry about. I then backup my current photos at the end of each month or when I download a large quantity of pictures. I use Nero for backing up my files; however, the newest version of Nero doesn't give you enough extra features to be worth purchasing and has been plagued with bugs. I purchased a copy of Nero 6 (previous version) from ebay for less than $20 and it has all of the features I need and more. I highly recommend Nero for backing up to DVD. If you are backing up to CD, don't bother with any software since Windows is capable of burning directly to the cd.

For my prints I either upload pictures to the Costco.com website or take them into my local location. Its a few extra prints to upload to costco.com and pickup at the store, but if its just a few pics it doesn't add up too much.

Hope this helps.

 

[taffy19]

Anytime you burn your own CDs, they will have a limited life because of the technology being used. Home computers burn quite differently than professional systems as the pro sytems burn deeply into the matrix while a home machine is fairly superficial. Disc color has nothing to do with it.

Kal, I found out today what you said in post #8 is true. I was looking today for my Molokai photo images on a CD and one of the pictures had blank pixels in the middle of the photo image so the photo is ruined.

What I see on the monitor screen is a white patch. It wasn't like that before. It was the only picture where I noticed this but I didn't look in all the other folders. Do you know why this happened? Could it be from the writing with a felt pen on the front of the CD?

 

[ysr_racer]

I print my pics at www.costco.com or www.walmart.com for sharing I use www.picturetrail.com/ysr_racer

Here's one of the pic's