Can you please recommend a web site for me. I'm after a photo-hosting service with as many of the following features as possible.

• Free
• Easy (very) to set up
• I can invite a group of people to visit to see the pictures
• Password required to see the pics
• Hopefully an automatic sizing system so the program automatically sizes the preview pic.
• Minimum of advertising
• Anything else you think I need. (It's for a bunch of mid 50's students who went to school together)

Thanks

Steve Shaw, , NSW

There are many sites that allow you to upload photos and share them online. Often, when you order prints of your digital photos online, your photos are stored online for a limited period of time.

However, there are also specialist sites for photo sharing. One of these is Flickr, which was recently acquired by Yahoo! It offers free accounts with 20M of uploads per month and allows you to store approximately 200 photos. You can create albums and invite people to view them, or you can create a private group and all members of the group can upload photos to share with other members. This would be a great feature for a reunion event.

Picasa, the free photo managing and editing software, has just introduced a new photo sharing feature called Picasa Web Albums. It offers free accounts with 250M of storage. You do need an invitation to use the service but you can get one if you have a gMail account. You can create public and unlisted albums and invite friends to view them.

(Remember that Australians can now get a gMail account by applying for it - you don't need to be invited any more. And if you're worried about the privacy of your prime email account, a gMail account can be considered expendable. -Paul Zucker)

Uploading and sharing photos is very straightforward on both sites. For the Picasa Web Albums, you need to download the Picasa software. On Flickr, it’s a simple matter of browsing your computer for the images you want and clicking on upload.

We;d also like to hear reader recommendations on photo sharing sites.

(Alex is a staff writer for Australian Netguide, a sister publication to PC User magazine.)

Alex Zandstra