Science has finally solved the problem of the old shoebox in the cupboard under the stairs stuffed with half-forgotten photographs. Instead of leaving them to moulder, you can put your prize snaps on the web where friends and family will be able to look at them immediately, no matter where in the world they are.

Putting pictures on the web also means not having to say you're sorry for forgetting to send people copies of prints. You simply tell them the internet address, and possibly a password, instead.

There are already more than a dozen websites designed to make it easy to put your photographs on the internet. They can be divided into two types. The first is aimed at people with digital cameras, and the second at the traditional photographic market. Sites aimed at digital camera users typically offer to convert image files into high quality prints, whereas sites aimed at film camera users convert prints and negatives into image files. In other respects they tend to overlap.

There's nothing new about putting digital images on the net. People have been using the free web space at home-builder sites like GeoCities for years. However, "family album" sites such as PhotoPoint, PhotoLoft, GatherRound (owned and operated by Intel), Hewlett-Packard's Cartogra and Zing make it easy to put pictures online without the effort of creating web pages or, usually, uploading things the hard way using the file transfer protocol, FTP.

PhotoPoint accepts pictures sent by electronic mail, for example, while Shutterfly offers "drag-and-drop image uploading". Photo Access has automated the process with its PhotoStreamer technology. "Just plug your camera into your PC. It's automatically detected, the upload window pops up, and your pictures are extracted," it claims.

You can then send the web address to friends and relations so that they can look at your pictures, usually by clicking on a link supplied. This is easier than emailing the same image to a dozen or more people, and avoids any problems in decoding and displaying the pictures.

Once the pictures are online, the sites have the chance to make money. For a start, they can offer to make prints using large professional printers, which produce better results than cheap colour printers. And most don't stop at paper. For example, PhotoPoint will put your pictures on to greeting cards, photo cubes, puzzles, mouse mats, mugs, coasters, baseball caps, baby onesies and wall clocks, for a fee.

PhotoLoft's chief executive officer, Jack Marshall, says: "a photo personalised item... is never a commodity. It can't be. It contains a picture that is, by definition, of high value to the purchaser."

But what about the hundreds of millions of people who don't have a digital camera, or a scanner that can convert prints into image files? Film and photographic processing companies have been targeting this market for more than a decade with offers to deliver prints both on paper and on floppy disk or CD-rom. Now they're offering to post them on the web as well.

Kodak's PhotoNet service does this in the US. Kodak has also been working with America Online and more than 40,000 retailers to roll out a system called You've Got Pictures, instead of You've Got Mail. Cross the box marked AOL on the photo processing envelope and Kodak will email a set of pictures to your AOL account for an extra $5.95. Seattle FilmWorks runs a similar operation with AT&T's internet service, WorldNet, and it has already scanned more than 70 million images. Seattle FilmWorks also offers an innovative service called WeddingWorks, which combines pre-loaded cameras with pre-paid film, processing, and online archiving.

Putting pictures online does involve making one decision that wasn't a problem during photography's first hundred years. Do you want to keep your pictures private, or will you let anyone anywhere in the world look at them?

Some things must be public. Photo sites are often used to post pictures of things for sale in online auctions, for example, and could be used for missing persons . Others are just as obviously private.

In fact, lots of people do make their pictures public, about 20%, according to PhotoPoint. Most online photo sites sort albums into categories and provide a Yahoo-like index to make them easier to access. PhotoPoint, for example, has sections for People (Reunions, Babies, Families), Attractions (Disney, Theme Parks, etc), For Sale & eBay, and Destinations/Travel, among others.

Most sites also allow visitors to add comments to a "guest book" attached to the photos, and these are often more interesting than the pictures themselves. Sad to say, the photographic quality of most online albums is dire.

While online photo sites attract a few sad exhibitionists, they do not seem to have a problem with pornography. They do not have the time or the staff that would be needed to check all the things people put online, but they will look at anything that attracts an unusual amount of traffic, and remove it if they think it's unsuitable.

Photo sites

America Online
https://pictures.aol.com
Club Photo
www.clubphoto.com
EZPrints
www.ezprints.com
FotoTime.com
www.fototime.com
ForoWire Print Service
www.fotowire.com
GatherRound
www.gatherround.com
Hewlett-Packard Cartogra www.cartogra.com
Kodak PhotoNet
www.photonet.com
Photo Access
www.photoaccess.com
Photo Loft
www.photoloft.com
PhotoPoint
www.photopoint.com
Print Room
www.printroom.com
Seattle Filmworks
www.filmworks.com
Shutterfly (JC)
www.shutterfly.com
Webshots www.webshots.com
Zing www.zing.com
See also: http://dir.yahoo.com/ Business_and_Economy/ Companies/Internet _Services/ Web_Services/Photo_Albums