PhotoRocket makes sharing photos just about as easy as it can get. This handy application lets you share photos via e-mail with little more than the click of a mouse.

Once PhotoRocket is installed, you can use it whenever you're viewing a photo or group of photos--whether those photos reside on your hard drive, a Web site, or just about anywhere. You simply select a single photo or multiple images, right-click them, and choose "Share via PhotoRocket" from the menu that appears.

Doing so brings up the small but attractive PhotoRocket interface, where you can insert new e-mail addresses or choose from those you've used in the past. You can type a brief note to the recipient, add captions if you choose, and click "Share." That's it: you're done.

Recipients get an e-mail link to PhotoRocket's viewer, where they can view individual photos or click through multiple images. The viewer is a bit bare-bones, but gets the job done, making it easy to browse through photos. Recipients can order prints from PhotoRocket if they desire; prints are handled by EZPrints, a third-party vendor. Your friends don't need to sign up or login in order to view the photos, but signing up will allow them to see all of the photos that have been shared with them, even ones that arrived in different batches. It also gives them the option to download a full-resolution copy of the shared photo.

PhotoRocket isn't perfect. It didn't allow me to share photos that were displayed as part of a Flash-based slideshow on a Web site. And the "Send via PhotoRocket" option didn't appear at all when I right-clicked on photos in Windows Photo Viewer. I also had a slight problem with some of the prints I ordered. Due to what PhotoRocket says was a newly-discovered and rare bug, a few of my photos were printed with incorrect dimensions: photos that should have had a landscape orientation were printed in portrait format, and were stretched print accordingly. PhotoRocket says the bug has since been fixed, and supplied me with new prints that looked excellent.

It's also missing a few features that some photo-sharing sites offer. It doesn't, for example, allow you to see which of your recipients has actually viewed your photos, and it doesn't present photos in slick slideshows like some sites do. But it also doesn't require time-consuming photo uploads, either. PhotoRocket is free, and it's drop-dead simple to use. Why not give it a try?

--Liane Cassavoy