Just Picture This!!
by Gary Woods

There are a lot of picture sharing sites around that you can use for free or cheap but I found two that I think are a little cooler than the rest.

First up is Flickr http://www.flickr.com, a free Yahoo-owned service that allows you to share your photos with the world or just selected people. After you upload your photos to the service you can tag them, create albums, view slide shows, and post pictures to external Blogs.

Moving your pictures around is easier if you download Flickr's handy batch-upload utility, which also adds a "Send to Flickr" command on Internet Explorer's context menu. You can upload as much as 20 MB of photos per month for free and up to 2 GB per month for just $25 per year.

Another service I found is called Picaboo http://www.picaboo.com . This photo-sharing site has a free downloadable piece of software with which you can create very cool looking albums on your PC then you can upload those albums to Picaboo's server for sharing with the people you specify.

To create your albums you can use one of Picaboo's many album wizards, or use a layout of your own devising. Picaboo makes their money from selling prints of the albums, but the software allows you to print your own using standard photos sleeves and album covers as well as individual prints and slide-show DVDs. Photo album prints cost $25 for up to 20 pages and photo DVDs cost $10.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910