Online photo sites such as Flickr are perfect for sharing your pics with your friends wherever they happen to be, but how do you make sure your photos are seen only by the people you want to see them?

The fact is that online photo services are not a perfect solution for everyone.

There are privacy issues, security issues, and cost issues (Flickr’s not free for example. If you need to upload any more than 100MB a month – which is just 10 photos from a 12 megapixel camera in RAW format – you’ll need to start paying $25 a year), not to mention the issue of what happens to all your pics if the whole site suddenly goes down or the company goes out of business.

So what can you do? How can you get the same photo sharing capabilities that Flickr gives you while retaining much more control over your photos?

The answer is to buy the Western Digital My Book Home Network Storage box and create your own Flickr at home using Western Digital’s brand new iPhone and Android apps.

Let’s see how it works.

How to use the WD My Book to share your photos in your home

The WD My Book range is a set of home network storage boxes with huge capacities. The WD My Book World Edition, for example, comes with 1TB of storage space, while the WD My Book Live comes with a whopping 2TB of storage space.

Once you’ve connected the My Book to your network, every machine on that network can access any of the files stored on it.

But don’t worry about copying the files over – the MyBook will automatically back up any file or folder – or even your whole hard drive – that you tell it to. Once backed up, all these files, photos and videos can be viewed by anyone connected to your network, letting you share your media wherever you are in the house (and don’t worry – you can restrict access if you need to!)

How to share your photos across the Web

Of course, sharing photos across your home is all very well, but Flickr lets you share them across the Web as well.

So does the My Book! Using the My Book’s secure remote access feature, you can access your files from anywhere that has an Internet connection, whether you’re at work or on the other side of the world!

How to share your photos on your mobile phone

It gets better, though! Using WD’s new WD Photo Viewer app for iPhone or Android smartphones, you can view all of your pics from your mobile phone. All photos are automatically resized for optimal viewing on your phone, and there’s a smart filtering feature that lets you find exactly the photos you want quickly and easily.

You can even share your pics to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Picasa or email with just a single click, giving you the best of both worlds!

Your own personal Flickr

Western Digital have knocked the ball out the park with the My Drive range. They’ve turned a simple network backup solution into your own personal Flickr, and created a device that not only gives you the peace of mind of securely backing up all your precious memories, it lets you share them with your friends wherever you are in the world.

It really is your own personal Flickr – but with much more control.

Check out the WD My Book and My Book Live now.

Fortunately there’s a solution. The latest generation of digital cameras have all manner of social photo features that let you upload your pics to sites such as Flickr, Picasa and even Facebook with absolute ease.

We’ve rounded up 5 of the latest social snappers to see how they help you share your pics amongst your friends and across the world,

Kodak SLICE – The sleek-and-cool option

Let’s start with one of photography’s biggest guns – Kodak. This sleek number is one of Kodak’s newest devices, the Kodak SLICE, and it’s bursting with technology to bring your pictures to the web on a device barely bigger than a mobile phone.

The SLICE has a massive 14 megapixels with a 5x optical zoom (never trust digital zooms) and has a very cool 3.5″ touchscreen interface on the back making it simple and intuative to operate. It also has face recognition, so you can tell the SLICE the name that belongs to the face, and when you take pictures, it automatically tags them with the right names. This can save you hours on Facebook!

The best thing about the SLICE, though, is its one-touch upload feature to Facebook, Flickr or email (and even videos to YouTube). Simply find the photos you want to share, press the ‘Share’ button, and select where you want to share them to. The next time you plug the SLICE into your PC via USB, all the pics are automatically uploaded to the destinations you’d selected. There’s absolutely nothing for you to do, it’s all taken care of for you.

The Kodak SLICE is one of the smartest cameras today, and could be the one for you if you want the technology without the fuss.

Samsung ST1000 – The kitchen sink option

The Samsung ST1000 is a camera that has a trick up its sleeve for all you travellers out there – GPS. No, you can’t use it to find your way to Rickmansworth, the GPS is there for Geotagging, the simple process of adding location data to each shot.

So what esle does the ST1000 pack in to its little case? How about 12 megapixels through a very smart 5x inner zoom lens (yes, the zoom is still optical but it’s inside the lens housing!). Not enough? How about bluetooth to send the pictures to your smartphone for emailing? Or onboard WiFi to skip the PC completely and email them from the ST1000 itself? Or DLNA networking for viewing the photos and videos on any DLNA device, such as an HDTV?

Phew! On top of all this, the ST1000 is Flickr compatible (of course) and also boasts working with Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Samsungs own photo website. This is definitely one for the travelling social media enthusiast.

Samsung ST5500 – The amazing screen option

The must-have phone this year has arguably been Samsung’s Galaxy S, and its biggest draw has been its luscious AMOLED screen. Anyone who’s seen one will rave about their vibrant colours and unrivalled contrast.

So what kind of device could also benefit from a display with vibrant colours and unrivalled contrast? A device concerned with imaging maybe? Stwp forward the Samsung ST5500, the world’s first camera to have a beautiful 3.7″ AMOLED touch screen integrated right into its frame, giving superb and accurate previews of the photographs you’ve shot, taking much of the guesswork out of how well the colours and shade have come through its 14 megapixel 7x optical zoom lens.

However it’s not just a camera with a pretty screen. It’s got the same Wifi / DLNA / bluetooth connectivity of its little brother, the ST1000, and also like its sibling, it will upload to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and YouTube. You can even use the wifi to email straight from the camera.

The ST5500 also has some clever ideas about control – yes, you can control it by touching that lovely screen, but you can also control it by tilts and shakes, scrolling through your pictures with a shake of the wrist!

If you like the look of the ST1000 but want that little bit more opulence and image control, the Samsung ST5500 is for you.

Kodak Easyshare C142 – The social media on pocket money option

The gear above is great, well specced and impressive, but it’s also expensive. A much less expensive option is the Kodak Easyshare C142. Coming in at nearly a quarter of the price of the SLICE, this is social media photography at its simplest.

A solid little camera, the C142 still packs an impressive 10 megapixels through a 3x optical lens, and it also boasts a 2.5″ LCD screen, so it’s no slouch technically. The C142 is the modern embodiment of the simple point-and-shoot you had for holidays, so while suited to the kids, it’s also at home with people who don’t want to worry about shutter stops, white balance and ISO speeds but just want to take snaps.

Nowadays we don’t get them developed in an hour at Boots, we upload them, so the Kodak makes that easy too – it’s not called Easyshare for nothing. There’s even a button for it, called – wait for it – Share, which you use to mark the images you want to er, share. Come on, it wouldn’t be easier if it uploaded them for you would it?

Hmm, well actually it does do that too, taking your share tagged images and uploading them to your profiles around the web. See, now it can’t be simpler unless it went on holiday for you and took the pictures itself, and where’s the fun in that?

The Kodak Easyshare C142 isn’t for photographers, it’s for you, the person who just wants a good value and simple to use camera to take a decent picture.

Eye-Fi – The I’ve-already-got-a-good-camera option

There will be some amongst you who have your perfect digital camera, such as a Panasonic Lumix, but find it’s not very good at sharing. However, you’re certainly not going to trade it in for one that does, as the camera you’ve got gives much better results (particularly true if it’s a DSLR you’ve got).

So what do you do? Simple: you buy an Eye-Fi. Using some sort of technology voodoo, the clever bods at Eye-Fi have shrunk a wireless dongle, 8GB of memory, geotagging and “endless memory” into a regular Secure Digital card that’ll pop in a SD card compatible camera (which is most of them).

With the Eye-Fi, you go out and take your pictures as usual, treating it like a regular 8GB memory card. Then when you return home, you switch on your PC and your camera and you go and make a cup of tea. While you do that, the Eye-Fi sends your images wirelessly to your PC – it really is as simple as that.

But what if you’re not near a PC? Well you can even set the Eye-Fi up beforehand with your favourite social site (and trust me, it’ll work with nearly all of them – Flickr, Picasa, MobileMe, SmugMug, Photbucket, webshots…you get the picture), and the Eye-Fi can upload them through Wifi. Let’s not forget Endless Memory either – it basically senses when the card is nearly full and automatically uploads your images, clearing space on the card invisibly to you.

Eye-Fi is an excellent solution for those who want to keep the camera they love, plus it’s also the best option if you want the easy life with its simple wireless uploading.

Summary

So that’s 5 devices to get your pictures out onto the web with the absolute minimum of fuss. There’s a wide variety from the great value C142 to the very cool SLICE, with some excellent gear inbetween. You can even get in on the social action even if your beloved camera isn’t quite modern enough.

So now you have no excuses not to go out into the world and bring back some memories to put on the web, without losing hair over it. So much better than leavin gyour pictures buried somewhere on your hard disk, lost amongst the thousands of others and never to be seen again!

Samsung have managed to endow (for that really is the right word!) the CL80 not just with cracking camera optics and all sorts of image improvement trickery, but also a plethora of connectivity options including WiFi, Bluetooth and DLNA. And HDMI. And then they threw in email as well. Oh and auto-uploads to a range of Web apps!

Seriously, the list goes on and on. So I suppose I’d better start then (deep breath!)

Samsung CL80 camera specs

First, the camera. The CL80 offers the following:

• 14 megapixels
• SchneiderKREUZNACH lens
• 720p video recording
• 7x optical zoom
• Digital image stabilization
• Smart face recognition with up to 20 faces
• Smile shot, blink detection, red-eye fix
• Panorama shot
• Object tracking auto focus
• Smart filter

Nothing too amazing there – indeed, it’s not that different from the latest top end camera phones! However, it’s the other features that Samsung have added that make the CL80 a revolutionary camera.

Connectivity

The CL80 is all about connectivity. To that end, Samsung have given it the following features:

• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• DLNA
• HDMI

This means you can view your shots in loads of different ways:

• Connect the CL80 to your HDTV via the HDMI connection and a cable
• Upload the pics to your PC via WiFi and view them there
• If your HDTV supports DLNA and WiFi, you can view the pics on your telly without the need for wires
• Same goes for a DLNA-equipped PC
• Transfer your pics to your digitial photo fram wirelessly (if your photo frame supports WiFi and DLNA)
• Share your photos with your own or your friends’ mobile phones via Bluetooth

One touch uploading to the Web

What if you want to upload your pics to the Web? Nom problem – if you’re in range of a WiFi connection, you can automatically upload them to the following:

• Facebook
• Picasa
• YouTube

Email sharing

Photo sharing Web sites not your thing? Fine, simply email your pictures instead. Yep, not only has the CL80 got an email client built-in, it’s also got a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard, so you can write an email, attach the pic, and send it to whoever you want!

Somebody from Samsung’s mobile phone division obviously walked into the wrong room one day and started working on the CL80 thinking it was Samsung’s latest wonder phone!

Other Features

I’ve still not finished, though. Aside form all the connectivity and super-sociable gadgets, the CL80 also features a tonne fo super-cool tech, including:

• 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen
• 720p HD video recording
• SmartGesture touchscreen interface, which lets you access the phone’s various menus using swiping and gestures (told you someone from their phone division got lost!)
• Accelerometer – scroll through your pics by tilting the camera left or right

The Samsung CL80 – superb!

The Samsung CL80 is a fantastic new camera, and probably the most sociable camera around. With its huge range of connectivity options and super-easy uploading to loads of different Web sites, the CL80 makes it absurdly simple to share your photos with anyone or any device.

And surely that’s the point of photos – to share? I don’t want to go all wishy washy on you, but how many photos have you got trapped on your hard drive, or in your mobile phoe or camera?

At last, camera manufacturers are making a real effort to help not just take great photos, but to let others see them as well.

Samsung should be congratulated on make a cracking camera with the CL80 that really helps the user get the most out of their memories.

[Source: Gizmodo]

The SLICE uses a Kodak Share button, which, when connected to a PC, will automatically upload your pics and videos to whichever service you want.

And what services can you choose from? These ones:

• Facebook
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Kodak Gallery

As for specs, the SLICE is a 14 megapixel camera with a 3.5″ touchscreen, and can shoot video at 720p (30fps) as well as photos.

Point-and-shoot users will be made happy, as the SLICE has been designed for easy use, with none of the fiddly adjustments that you need to make to get good pics on more professional cameras. As such, the SLICE will “…analyse scenes and automatically adjust camera settings to deliver beautiful pictures more often”, according to a spokesperson.

The Kodak SLICE release date is set for April 2010, where it will set you back £299.99 in the UK (or $349.99 in the US). You can buy versions in black, nickel, and, er, radish! Quite why Kodak chose radish as a colour is anyone’s guess, but at least it’ll make the cmaera stand out from the myriad other black and silver models!

[Source: Pocket-Lint]