The million dollar question today with digital photography seems to be: "Is the Print Dead?"
My answer is: Not Quite Yet.
Today, a flood of Web-based offerings are rushing to serve the American consumer's digital photography needs. The range of functionality is wide - although the quality of the user experience varies as well - to the point where there is (almost literally) something for everyone.
The kind of photo site you gravitate towards depends on what you want to want to do:
- Share your personal photos with friends, family members, or small group?
- Order prints from digital images?
- Sharing photos with the world?
- Create a memory scrap book?
- Transfer your old photos (or entire collections) to digital format?
SHARING PERSONAL PHOTOS
There are different ways to "share a photo" online. The classic photo sites - Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, and Shutterfly all allow you to set up what are called Photo Galleries - folders of images that can play "full screen" slide shows of your photos. These are a lot of fun because of a basic (and seldom-articulated) truth: digital photos look absolutely beautiful on high-resolution monitors (which are now the norm).
I use Kodak Gallery to upload photos, send little "slide shows" of photos to families and friends, and (occasionally) order prints and photo albums. Every now and then, however, Kodak does remind me to BUY SOMETHING, DARN IT which makes me realize their business model is to sell prints and photo doo-dads. Of which there are many types: you can photo books, greeting cards, calendars, mugs, and you name it with your photos on them.
ORDERING PRINTS FROM DIGITAL IMAGES
I like the prints I get from KodakGallery. But I've always liked Kodak prints - I just think they know what they're doing in this realm. But why do we need prints anymore? The question I have is, once I show my friends or co-workers or family members my photo album, will anybody want prints from them? Maybe not. But they have access to them- and they're generally cheap online ($0.15 per print when last I checked). So if you want a real print from a digital image, The classic photo sites are all good sources for this (see above). Another photo site that delivered terrific quality prints at a low cost was Adorama.com, run by a New York City photo store.
SHARING PHOTOS WITH THE WORLD
This is another thing altogether. There are numerous sites known as "photo sharing" sites whose sole reason for existence is to allow people to post their photos online and download others. The best of breed is FlickR, which is now part of Yahoo. FlickR combines an easy-to-use, simple interface with a sophisticated and thoughtful approach to digital rights management - that is, managing who can use your photos, and how they can use them.
You decide whether your photos are private or public and, if public what others can (or can't) do with your photos (i.e., whether they can use them in commercial works or not). There are also numerous creative "projects" going on in FlickR - such as the official "Field Guide - Birds of the World" or silly stuff like people in "Beer Hats." FlickR is also fun in other ways - it has a perky and friendly "voice" that keeps you coming back for more.
There are many sites like this now - the most popular (total volume of users) is Photobucket - probably because they let viewers upload a very large number of photos (10,000). I tried it out, but found it compared unfavorably to FlickR in polish and quality of images available. I'll stick with FlickR.
CREATING A MEMORY SCRAPBOOK
Some photo sites are set up specifically to allow you to create memory books or memory scrapbooks. They have pre-designed templates that help you create a scrap book of life events such as:
- Baby's first year
- Family reunions
- Cruises
- Weddings
- Anniversaries
- Sports Albums - your kids' soccer team (etc)
One example of a site that does this well is SharedBook where you customize a specially designed book by putting in your own pictures and text. Printing quality is excellent, and you can get much more customized text on these kinds of sites than on, say, KodakGallery, where a photo book's text is pretty much limited to captions. It all goes back to what you want to accomplish with your photo sharing.
TRANSFERRING YOUR OLD PHOTOS
Finally, if you're not already in digital format, there are sites devoted to helping you get that way. This is something I'm constantly getting asked about by friends and family members. "How can I get my pictures into digital format?" "Do I scan them in myself?"
After struggling with scanning myself, I'm convinced this is a job best left to experts - especially if you're looking for quality. A professional "scanning service" can convert an entire archive to digital format for you - and allow you to not only share your photos online, print multiple copies (or multiple books) to share with family and friends - but also can help preserve your photos for future generations. A few of these services are: BritePix , DigMyPics, ScanMyPhotos, and ScanCafe. Give scanning a whirl, and join the digital photo revolution.
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