In the last article, I explained what online photo sites can do for you, and why you might want to use them. It's time now to get down to business: choosing the one that's right for you. What specific features should you look for? And which are most appropriate for your personal level of technical sophistication?

By and large, every one of the online photo sites accomplishes the same goal. Each lets you upload a collection of digital photos, and they make it easy (or at least it's supposed to be easy) to share them with other people. They also let you (that is, encourage you) to order prints of your photographs, and perhaps other customized items.

But, naturally, few sites stop there. Each site has its own unique features to make you choose that company instead of one of the other dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- available. Sometimes, the "extras" are the special attention they invest in making the process easy for computing novices, or maybe they're fancy tools to add bubbles or comic-book style captions to the photos. Other times, the site has unique capabilities to link your photos to other sites and to help you participate in a public community.  read more »

YouTube has risen to prominence in recent years as the Internet's choice for getting video from point 'a' to point 'broadcast' - attracting Google's attention and purchasing dollars with its one hundred million video views per day. While there are other options to get your video online, YouTube remains, by far, the most wildly popular. Its massive amount of content attests to its ease-of-use. However, these tips and tricks will help you out with just about any video broadcast site out there - from iFilm to GodTube - since they focus on the basic practices of capturing, editing and converting video into a format the Internet can understand.

If you would rather watch than read, here is a short video tutorial showing you the steps involved. 

Getting started
To get your video up on YouTube, you need four things:

• The footage itself
  
• A computer with a high-speed Internet connection
  
• Basic video editing software
• A YouTube account.
  

I bought my first digital camera soon after my son was born. I took so many photos that I turned the picture counter back to 0000. Yes, my bundle of joy was the subject of more than 10,000 shots—and why not? That's the beauty of digital: click away, delete the rejects and develop the photos you want. With the vast range of digital cameras on the market, I'm clearly not their sole fan. But like all products digital, the choices are both overwhelming and confusing. Following are the eight most common mistakes made by first-time buyers, plus which digital-camera features really matter.

Megapixel mix-up
Digital photos are made up of tiny dots called pixels. Simply put, the more pixels your camera has, the sharper your pictures will be. But don’t let the higher numbers mislead you. What's considered the minimum nowadays -- 3 megapixels -- will result in crystal-clear photos that can be developed as large as 20 in. x 30 in. without degradation in quality. In fact, a 3-megapixel camera is more than enough if you want to showcase your photos in a traditional photo album and e-mail them to friends and family. So why consider a camera that boasts as much as 7 megapixels? Anytime you crop a photo to hone in on your subject, you are actually reducing the number of pixels and, therefore, losing some picture quality. If you start with more megapixels at the outset, the diminishment is less likely to make a difference in the quality of your photos.  read more »

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You've just returned from vacation with a digital camera stuffed full of photos. And, wow! Some of these look pretty good! But your family is spread all over the country. To show Aunt Molly what the new Busch Stadium looks like, you'll have to send the pictures electronically.

But wait -- don't reach for your e-mail program. Even if you have a high-speed connection that makes downloading big files easy, you can't assume that all of your friends and relatives have equally fast access. Besides, e-mail is a good way to send files, but it isn't a very good way to share them. For example, an e-mail message doesn't have any way for you to arrange the photos; they're displayed haphazardly. And it's hard to include a caption, such as, "Can you believe this baby is so bald?"

Many better options are available, which are just as easy to use -- and they're free!
Several online services let you copy your digital photos to the Internet, and then display the photos to the world … or to only a few of your chosen friends. Instead of dumping megabytes of images into someone's inbox, you send your sister an e-mail message with a link to your "Trip to the Metropolitan Museum" photo album, and she can look at the photos at her leisure. Most of the sites help you send out that e-mail message, too, to make it even simpler.  read more »

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