David Pogue has a piece on photosharing in today's NY Times Circuits.
...
The best digital shoebox programs, including iPhoto and Photoshop Album, can automatically shrink your photos to a reasonable size before e-mailing them. But what if your recipients have wisely absorbed the message that, these days, opening any e-mail attachment is a virus risk? They'll never see your photos.
You could post your pictures at a Web site, of course, and just send your mom its Web address. But to do that inexpensively, you need a recessive geek gene and familiarity with such cheerful protocols as HTML and FTP. And to do it simply, you usually have to pay an annual fee, either for a one-click photo-gallery service (like Photosite.com or Apple's .Mac) or for a photo-hosting site. (One attractive exception: webshots.com, where you can post up to 240 pictures at no charge. Your fans can sign up for automatic e-mail notification whenever you add to your gallery.)
Of course you could always drag your pictures directly into an instant-messaging window, using a chat program like Apple's iChat or LifeScape's Hello (an add-on for its Picasa photo software) - but that system doesn't work unless you and your mother are online and chatting at the same time.
It finally occurred to somebody - two somebodies, in fact - that there might be a better way. Why not adapt the desktop-to-desktop, peer-to-peer formula of networks like Kazaa, so popular in music trading, for trading photos? After all, it would be perfectly legal.
The two contenders, ShareALot (sharealot.com) and OurPictures (ourpictures.com), are designed to shoot your photo files directly to the desktops of designated friends and family members, completely bypassing e-mail and Web sites.
The simpler service, and the one most devoted to its task, is ShareALot. When the program is running, a yellow folder icon sits on your Windows or Mac OS X desktop. To share some photos, you just drag them onto that folder. From a pop-up menu, choose Create a New Share. Your ShareALot address book appears, and you click on the names of the lucky recipients.
...
Ourpictures is soup-to-nuts, sharealot is more focused...
esc
