We take photos for our own satisfaction and also for the enjoyment of sharing them with others, and both of these are realms where digital photography can excel:  an organized filing system can make your memories far more accessible than the old piles of shoeboxes ever did, and a few clicks of your mouse can easily replace the expense and delay of reprinting and mailing prints and negatives.

Picasa Web, from our friends at Google, should be your go-to assistant for sharing your digital photos.  We’ve mentioned it briefly in the past in our columns, but we think that it deserves a closer look at this time of year.  The instructions at the website are easy to follow, but there are a few special features we’d like to emphasize:

1.  It’s Picasa Web – not Picasa  and you can use one or the other or both, independently. Just plain Picasa is a wonderful utility for storing, organizing and editing digital images on your computer.  It is very sophisticated and some people swear by it, but it is not easy to learn to use it and if you already have a satisfactory system, then it might not be worth switching.  (Frankly, we find it a bit bossy.)  Picasa Web is an online utility for sharing your photos with others, in albums that you create and upload.  Once you have organized an album just the way you want it, you send an email to your friends with its web address so that they can view it and (if you permit it) download the pictures they would like to keep.  You can even choose to enable permission for others to add more photos to the album.

2.  You will need a Gmail account to use Picasa Web.  Fortunately, it is quick and easy to create a Gmail account (if you don’t already have one) and besides, you don’t have to actually use it if you don’t want to, except for the purpose of logging into Picasa Web.

3.  It’s worth taking an hour or so to create and upload your first album, so that you can take advantage of all of the features and choices.  We suggest that you do another one quite soon and you will quickly get the hang of it after that.

4.  Culling, editing and arranging your photos in advance, perhaps in a special folder on your desktop, will make the uploading process much faster and easier than if you do it later after they are already in the online album.

5.  Internet Explorer works better than Firefox.  There is a special add-on that allows for batch uploading of large numbers of photos, and we don’t seem to be able to make that work in Firefox.

6.  Album visibility is an important concept, designating who will be able to view your album.  The range is from Public all the way to Private (see details on the website) but we have found the Anyone with the link setting to be the best compromise, because it incorporates the use of an authorization key, to keep out unwanted gawkers.  When you send an email to your selected viewers, they are the only ones who have access.  Public is the default and so you mustn’t forget to adjust that.

7.  Your friends will thank you for not clogging up their email inboxes with photo attachments.  You just send a short message that includes the URL that Google assigns to your album.  Recipients click on it, and they are quickly viewing the images one-by-one, or automatically in a slideshow.

8.  Are there competitors for Picasa Web?  You betcha!  Myphotoalbum, Flickr, Snapfish, Photobucket, Kodak and Blacks are just some of the alternatives.  They all have their fans and, like Picasa Web, they all have particular advantages and weaknesses.  If friends and family use one particular system then there would be big advantages for everyone if you used that one too.