Picasa

The garbage bins are just a demo pic. I could have chosen something a little more appropriate, but this was the last image I took on my camera.

Picasa is anything but garbage. Picasa is amazing! Google bought the Picasa software and is giving it away for free. Picasa indexes all the photographs on your computer, no matter where they are. Excellent for technologically challenged parents / grand-parents with their digital camera that uploads to the computer but seems to hide the images from them.

Picasa also allows you to add comments, rotate, straighten, crop, remove redeye, adjust colour, contrast, apply a number of filters. You can email, print, create a collage, burn a CD, view in a slide show ... etc

Most importantly, you can automatically blog images using Picasa to your free account on Blogger. This means you can publish the occassional photo to the web along with your comments about the image for your whole family/world to enjoy.

In the past I have used services such as Photobucket and Yahoo's Flickr to hold the images and I just placed references to link to these images in the blog articles. If you wanted to store a whole bunch of images in a photogallery then Flickr would probably be the way to go still, but you have to pay for the service if you use it to any great extent.

Alternatively, if you have a reasonable ADSL connection then you could get a small computer (old laptop or low power desktop like an e-vectra) and install MySQL, PHP, Apache and Coppermine. You could do this under Windows or Linux. You could get a free domain name from somewhere like dyndns and then just tell everyone your web address ... after you configured everything. Not for the feint of heart, there is a lot of learning involved but this method gives you the potential to have complete control. You would have your very own web server.