Share digital photos with family and friends

Taking photos with a digital or mobile phone camera is easy, but finding a practical way to print pictures and show them to friends and family can be more complicated. Fortunately, there are many websites that allow people to upload their photos so they can be viewed by a wider audience.

You can also restrict access, so your private family photos aren’t available to the whole world. Many sites offer a printing service too, with the ability to output your favourite snaps to mugs, T-shirts and other gift items. Whether you have a handful of holiday shots or you’re a serious photographer with a large image archive, there are plenty of sites that can make printing and sharing a pleasure.

A photo-sharing site enables people to upload images from a digital camera or phone to an online album, where they are stored for public or private viewing. Most sites offer free versions that allow a set number of photos to be uploaded with privacy features. Many also enable you to add descriptive tags to images for organising them. The range of search options varies between sites ­ some offer basic browsing, while others include advanced options, such as search by date, location and tags.

The most popular sites also include basic image-editing tools. Flickr has all of these features, so we’ve used it to show you how to make the best of your photos online.

If you do not have a free Flickr account, type www.flickr.com into the address bar of your browser and press

Enter. Click the link labelled ‘Sign up’ at the top of the screen. To create an account, you’ll need a Yahoo ID ­ if you’re not a member of Yahoo’s free email service, click the link to sign up. You can view our free Workshop on how to sign up and send your photos to the Flickr site.

Brush up your image
Once you have some photos online to work with, you can start editing them online. Click on the option labelled ‘Your Photostream’ on the Flickr home page. This will take you to a page displaying all your photos. Click the photo to edit and it will appear with a number of tool icons along the top. Select Edit Picture and a dialogue box will appear asking you to run the online image editor Picnik.

Click Yes and the image editor opens as a web page, with buttons to rotate, crop, resize and enhance the colours of your original photo. Hold the mouse pointer over each button and a panel pops up to tell you what each tool can be used for.

To adjust a poorly lit photograph, click the Exposure button; another panel appears explaining how to use the tool. Once you’re happy with the changes, click OK ­ a dialogue box will appear asking you to give the image a descriptive name and to add a tag. We’ll discuss the importance of tags later, but note that you can click the Cancel button while editing to return to your collection.

Once you’re happy with the pictures, you can start sharing them by tagging them. This means adding keywords, known as tags, to images. A tag is a simple way to categorise photos. For example, if you add a photo of one of your children on holiday, you could add tags such as the child’s name, the date (‘Cornwall holiday’, for example) and the year it was taken. On their own, the tags mean nothing, but as your online photo gallery grows, they’ll become an easy way to sort your collection. Tags appear as clickable links in a list to the right of your images ­ click a link and every photo with the same tag appears in a new gallery.

You can add tags to photos as they’re uploaded. To add a tag to a photo in your gallery, click it. On the right-hand side of the window that appears is a link labelled ‘Add a tag’; click it and type your tags in the box. You can add up to 75 per photo, but make sure there are spaces between the tags. To join two words together

in a single tag, use double quotation marks to make sure the whole phrase is recognised ­ for example, “summer holiday”. It is also advisable to put the most important keyword first, as this will appear at the top of the list of tags when the photo is viewed. Click Add to save the tags.

Keep it in the family
There are some photos you might not want to share with all Flickr users, and some you may want to reserve only for certain family members. Like other photo-sharing sites, Flickr enables you to control who can and can’t see your photos. To check or amend your current privacy settings, open any photo and examine the options that appear to its right. Beneath the label ‘Additional Information’ is a link that says who is currently permitted to view it. Click the link labelled ‘Edit’ next to it to open your privacy settings.

Here you can apply a new setting to a photo, or click the link marked ‘Change your default here’ to apply a new setting to all new images.

Viewing images as a slideshow is easy. Anytime there’s a group of more than a few photos, a slideshow will be available. To get this running, open any photo page and look for the Slideshow icon at the right-hand side (it’s shaped like a projection screen). Click it to start the show. Once in the slideshow, viewers can pause or play the slideshow, go forward, backward, or change the length of time each slide is displayed.