Welcome to Your Free Online Photo Album!

Taking pictures of the family, vacations, and special occasions has come a long way in the last 50 years. From the “Brownie” cameras, to 35mm slide cameras, to Polaroids that developed before your eyes, and finally, the digital camera, preserving images of special people and special moments has taken on a whole new dimension.

So what does that mean, when it comes to sharing your photographs with others? With digital cameras, it usually requires uploading your pictures to the computer, creating albums on the hard drive, and then re-sizing them to email your friends and relatives, so that you don’t jam their dial-up service with megabytes of photographs. Then you have to repeat the email all over again, for the next person.

But all that hassle has been left behind with the new, free services of an online photo album. Why go to the trouble of uploads, resizes, and emailing, when you can create an album that is accessible online by the people you want to share your pictures with?

An online photo album provides many benefits, including having all your pictures in one place. And you can create new albums for each set of photos or topics. Divide your pictures into family, pets, trips, and more. Then all you need to do, is provide the address of each album to the people who most want to see them.

Some consumers are concerned about the privacy of online photo albums. The answer to those concerns, is to choose a free service that offers password protection, which can be enabled once for all albums, or can provide different passwords for each album and set of users.

Displaying your favorite pictures this way is a great option for allowing everyone to decide which photos they’d like to have as a print. Let grandparents and friends choose their own images, then order them online from your host service. It’s quick, easy, and saves you the bother of sorting and burning the images on a CD, then taking that to a local photo outlet. Remember though, that many digital cameras images are often shorter, and almost squarish, compared to standard photographic prints. This can mean that your images will be cropped or altered to fit the print size you’ve chosen. Also, some hosts of online albums only allow single uploads of a certain size, in which case, anything over that will automatically be resized before it goes into the album, resulting in a print that is not the size or proportion that it was on your camera.

You can upload directly from your digital camera to the online photo album, scan print photos and upload from your computer, or, if the data feature is enabled, you can email pictures straight from a photo cell phone, to your online album.

Pictures that are hosted in online albums, have their own urls associated with each photo. This is a handy feature for business purposes, like selling goods on ebay, where you can just enter the album url instead of tinkering with resizing and uploading to their site.

Not only can you share the photos as an album, your hosting service may also offer such perks as free email postcards and special occasion cards, using your personal photos! Check them out today, and see how easy it is to create an online photo album of your own!