Bring Your Digital Photos to the Web Party

Sharing photos by sending them as e-mail attachments is so 2003. Nowadays, the place to store and share digital photos is on the Web. Here are some ways to share, tag, and otherwise explore a world of photos in your Web browser.

Upgrade Your Flickr Experience With Free Tools

These tools and tips take the popular Flickr photo-sharing site to a new level.

Spell it out: One of the most entertaining Flickr mashups is Spell With Flickr, which scours Flickr for pictures that show letters of the alphabet and uses them to spell out the message of your choice. After the site renders your ransom-note-style collage, you can change individual letters to taste by clicking on the individual letter you wish to change (see the screen above right). When you're happy with the result, copy and paste the resulting HTML into a blog, a page on your site, or elsewhere.

You're it: At moments when I need to unwind, I browse Flickr for interesting photos. Tagnautica offers a new way to explore what's on the site. Type a tag name, and at once a ring of popular, related tags will surround the term. Click a tag in the ring, and it will move to the center, its own related tags encircling it. At any time, you can click the middle tag to go to a Flickr page displaying all photos tagged with that term.

Everyday people, everywhere: Flickr and other photo sharing sites cover the world, but Flickr-Vision introduces you to the people who live in those places through either a 2D map or a 3D globe. As you watch, freshly uploaded photos pop onto the map in balloons, indicating their point of origin. If you see something you'd like to take a closer look at, hover your mouse over it and a larger view will pop up in the center of the window. There's something mesmerizing about watching snapshot slices of life from people in just about every nook and cranny of the planet appear in near real time.