Services offer to simplify sharing of digital photos

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Bob Carlin enjoys the simplicity of snapping photos with his digital camera and has amassed a considerable collection of shots from parties, car shows and Yosemite. His complaint isn't about taking pictures, it's what to do with them afterward.

Carlin, who lives in a suburb south of San Francisco, finds sharing pictures by e-mail to be clunky at best. Posting them to a Web site so his friends and family can view them is too time consuming. Exchanging prints by regular mail is oh so 20th century.

He's been testing a new service called ShareALot that tries to simplify sharing over the Internet. To send a picture, he drops a photo into a folder on his PC, and it automatically appears in folders on the PCs of friends he's designated as recipients.

"The user interface needs a little bit of work, but the actual mechanism of how the product works is really, really good," he said.

ShareALot is among a trio of new products that seek to simplify picture sharing with remote friends and family.

ShareALot, OurPictures and PhotoSite take different approaches. The first two connect senders and recipients, passing the pictures through servers but not keeping them there. PhotoSite stores photos on its servers but simplifies posting.

There's growing demand as digital camera sales take off. InfoTrends Research Group forecasts global shipments will jump to 53 million in 2004 from 41 million in 2003. By comparison, film camera shipments are expected to fall to 36 million in 2004 from 48 million last year.

ShareALot is a free download, said founder John Mathon. However, he said ShareALot will eventually charge for yet-unannounced premium services.

PhotoSite, which will reveal upgrades to its existing service at DEMO, lets shutterbugs upload pictures to a publicly available Web site using a program that includes basic editing and resizing functions. It's a service of the Web-building and hosting firm Homestead Technologies.

One of the new features, PhotoSite Inbox, makes uploading a picture as simple as sending an e-mail. Instead of mailing the photo to a person, it goes a unique address at PhotoSite and appears in the user's designated online photo album. Images also can be sent from an Internet-enabled camera phone.

OurPictures, like ShareALot, creates a sharing network rather than a central storage place. But it includes a number of organizational and printing tools as well as basic editing functions with its program, which costs $50 a year for three users. A beta version will be released next month.

John Paul, the company's founder, hopes to take all complexity out of digital photos.

"We intend to be something that's simple because it does what everybody wants to do most of the time," Paul said. "We're trying to be the common solution."

On the Net

www.sharealot.com

www.ourpictures.com

www.photosite.com