If you can't wait to get to your PC, some cameras (and memory cards such as Eye-Fi) and all smart phones now let you do so right from the same device that snapped the photo. Starting with the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G3 , some digital cameras now come with Wi-Fi built in. This lets you upload photos and to Web sites from the camera—assuming you're near a wireless hotspot. The latest significant entry in this group is the Canon EOS 6D, the first full-frame DSLR with built-in Wi-Fi. In between those options you have the Sony Alpha NEX-5R, NEX-6, and Samsung's NX line, which also come with Wi-Fi capability on board.
Even if your camera doesn't have built-in Wi-Fi, you can use memory that does: The remarkable Eye-Fi SD memory cards can wirelessly transfer photos from your camera to your home computer, phone, or tablet, add GPS data to images, and supports both standard JPG and Raw image formats. The card can send photos directly to popular photo-sharing sites or transfer them to your smart phone, from which you can email or share them in other ways, including SMS.
Share in Email
Attaching photos to emails and sending them to your contacts has been the go-to way of sharing photos for many. For a while, e-mail was indeed the largest photo-sharing service on the planet. But people are starting to wake up to better options that don't clog your recipients' inbox with hundreds of megabytes. If you still want to use email, Outlook.com lets you share photos via email without attachments. Instead, the photos are uploaded to Microsoft SkyDrive, and your recipient can view them without having a large attachment in her inbox. If you use another email service, you can use YouSendIt to accomplish the same thing. Your recipient gets a download link instead of a large attachment, but won't get an online gallery like SkyDrive's.
Photo Sharing Sites
Photo sharing sites offer not only the advantage of sparing your friends' email inboxes from large attachments, but a lot more as well. They also give you a way to give your photos the acclaim they deserve by sharing with a larger audience. They also give people more ways to view the photos in different sizes, more info about the photos, such as location, camera data, and keyword and people tagging. These sites also usually offer a selection of printing and product options—think mugs, books, and tee-shirts emblazoned with your photos.
The largest photo-specific sharing site on the Web is Flickr, and it offers a few photographer-specific features like the ability to display camera EXIF data—things like the camera model, lens, aperture, and shutter speed used when shooting the photo. Though Flickr lets you privately share photos with friends and family, it really comes into its own with its worldwide photo-centric community. You can add contacts whose photos you like, join interest groups, and interact with comments and favorites. There's even a built-in private messaging service.
Flickr also offers great ways to discover stunning images, especially through its Explore pages. A recent redesign makes uploading with greater control much easier and pleasurable. And you don't have to go to the site: Every photo app shares to, even pro apps like Lightroom and Aperture. Flickr offers pros ways to get their work noticed—some groups are regularly scanned by publications, and you can submit your images to the Getty Images for use as stock photography.
There are other photo sites, of course. SmugMug is favored by some pros, as is 500px, which only wants your best shots and gives you ways to make money from them. Photobucket is a longtime choice for hosting images for display on other sites like eBay. It's also recently undergone a redesign. Picasa Web Albums does a good job with online albums and is intimately tied together with the excellent entry-level photo editor of the same name.
A few services offer shared private photo albums. This lets you and your collaborators all upload images to a common Web gallery. Of course, a closed Flickr Group can handle this function, but SnapFish offers Group Rooms, which are designed to get everyone's best shots of an even they all attended. Cooliris's LiveShare is conversational group photo sharing service that works via Web, iPhone, and Android. Adobe's new Revel service is fairly Apple-centric, though Android and Windows Phone apps are in the works. It duplicates iCloud Photo Streams in some ways, but allows you to create nicely designed online galleries. But the latest entry in the group photo-and-slideshow-sharing game is Photobucket Stories, which lets groups create timelines of photos, videos, and text that can in turn be embedded on other sites like Facebook
Photo Streams itself with iOS 6 got a big sharing update: Its iCloud Group Photo Stream now lets your friends see shots in a private or public Web gallery. You can even share the gallery link to Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or email, but the galleries offer no interaction such as comments, but they do let viewers download the photos.
Social Networks
Facebook has overtaken email as the number one most popular way to share digital photos. And luckily for the users, Facebook has periodically improved its photo hosting capabilities, to the point now that there's little to be desired in terms of showing your pictures to family and friends. You can now view photos in full screen (sometimes), albums are clearly organized, and you can download large images. But you lose EXIF info that Flickr makes available, tagging is limited to people's names, and too often no full screen view is available. Most recently, the social network added a mobile-to-Facebook syncing feature (see next section).
Not to be neglected in any discussion of sharing photos on social networks is Tumblr. While it could be considered a mini-blogging platform, Tumblr lends itself perfectly to photo sharing with the world at large. You can either add a photo to your tumble log using a link if the image is already hosted somewhere like Flickr or Photobucket, by directly uploading it, or snapping it from a connected camera. Once the image is in your stream, other members can very easily reblog it, heart it, but not comment on it directly. If you want password protect photos, you have to create a secondary blog, and Tumblr also lets you create a group blog for multiple contributors.
Slideshows
For a more impactful presentation when sharing your photos, consider the slideshow. This lets you add text titles, transitions, and background music. Any photo software worth its salt has some level of slideshow creation, and many can instantly launch a simple slideshow of selected photos. In some cases, as with the free Adobe Photoshop Elements, Nero, and Windows Photo Gallery and, you can start by selecting photo in the photo editor and finish it in the movie editor for fine-tuning, in these cases, Premiere Elements, PowerDirector, and Windows Movie Maker.
Be aware, though, that slideshows usually end up as video files; this has the downside of a large file size, but it also means that you can share them on video sites such as DailyMotion, YouTube, and Vimeo. Alternatively, many of the programs let you burn your slideshows directly to discs for physical distribution.
I hope this has given you some ideas for how to effectively share your digital photos. If they're not quite ready for sharing, be sure to learn how to organize, correct, and enhance them from previous articles in PCMag's Digital Photo Super Guide.
Source and Picture pcmag.com
How to Share Your Digital Photos on the Web