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There are lots of photo sharing sites on the Web, but a Netstop called 2Pad offers an interesting twist to this overworked idea. It allows you to use e-mail to organize and catalog photos in your online albums.

For example, after opening an account with the service, you can send to it an e-mail message containing a photo and the photo will automatically be placed in an online album. So a message sent to 2Pad@2Pad.com will be posted to a general album. Including the name of an album in the address--friends@2Pad.com, for instance--will send the photo to that particular album. If the album doesn't exist, the service will automatically create one for you. 2Pad knows where to post your photos by comparing the e-mail address from where the photo was sent to the e-mail address you used when you opened your account.

Moreover, the service will take any text in the body of your e-mail and use it to describe the photo. That text can later be used to perform keyword searches to find the photo or a series of related photos.

The service can also be configured so that when you upload a new photo, a list of friends will be notified and be able to view the photo online.

One feature that I've found very enticing is the service's ability to extract photos from e-mail messages sitting in a Web mail service, like Googlemail, and place them in a 2Pad album.

Of course, you can also upload photos into your 2Pad albums in batches as you would with a conventional snapshot sharing site.

2Pad offers three levels of service.

The free service offers 1GB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 20MB and maximum video length is five minutes.

For $2 a month, you get 5GB of storage and 5GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 100MB and maximum video length is 10 minutes.

For $5 a month, you get 10GB of storage and 10GB of bandwidth. Maximum file size is 200MB and maximum video length is 20 minutes.

I've tried more than a few photo sharing sites and found maintaining a presence at them more chore than joy. That's not the case with 2Pad. Its e-mail-centric approach takes photo organization and sharing out of its Web-based silo and seamlessly integrates it into my desktop workflow. Its a smart idea and one worth taking for a test run.

There are lots of photo-sharing sites on the Internet but how many will allow you to air your slideshows on cable television? That's one of the features that Roxio claims is built into its new online sharing site. The company, maker of such products as Creator 10 and Toast, launched its Roxio Online with PhotoShow today to try and shoehorn its way into the crowded and competitive photo and video sharing market.

Aimed at families with less exhibitionistic proclivities than the typical user of such services as YouTube, the company says that its new offering is a quick and simple way to turn personal photos and video clips into engaging multimedia slideshows that can be shared privately with close friends and relatives. At the site, the company contends, slideshows can be created complete with rich special effects and transitions, creative animations and captions, and a professional soundtrack.

"There is nothing more gratifying than being able to share the joys of our lives with the ones closest to us," Roxio General Manager Matt DiMaria said in a statement. "With busy schedules and physical distances, photos and videos play an integral part in how we communicate in today's digital world."

Roxio is offering a free trial version of the service which allows you to stash your slideshows online for 30 days. If you want to use the service permanently, you have to pay an annual fee of $39.95. With that fee you get a number of premium features including a desktop version of the company's PhotoShow software.

Both the trial and the premium versions of the service include the ability to broadcast slideshows to Time Warner Cable TV.

Outfits like MySpace and Facebook are dominating the photo viewing and uploading space, according to a report released last week by InfoTrends, a Weymouth, Mass., market research and consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry.

In a survey conducted for the report, InfoTrends discovered that nearly 40% of the respondents who upload photos to the Internet do so most often to MySpace and Facebook. What's more, those sites were named as favorites by nearly half of the respondents who said they review other people's pics online.

When it comes to turning uploaded photos into prints, however, traditional Netposts like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Kodak Gallery, Wal-Mart and Walgreens continue to dominate the market, the report said. Nevertheless, net-to-retail printing continues to rise in popularity, the researchers reported, particularly among younger users. Net-to-retail users told surveyors that they used the service to receive their prints faster and to avoid paying for shipping.

"While many respondents see benefits in both delivery methods, net-to-retail is clearly taking some business away from net-to-mail services, and some 60% of survey respondents indicated that they expect their online printing to shift even more toward net-to-retail in the coming year," InfoTrends Associate Director Alan Bullock observed in a statement.

To better compete with net-to-retail, he recommended that net-to-mail providers "differentiate their products and services from those available at retail, focusing on items that cannot be easily produced at retail locations."

The magazine that brought business periodicals out of the dulldrums, Fast Company, has added a new channel to its Web TV site. Aimed at photographers, it's called PhotoCycle. Its first episode takes a trip to Yosemite Valley with Ansel Adams's son Michael, who talks about his dad's life and photography.

"A lot of people don't realize how much his [Ansel's] final result was dependent on what he did in the darkroom," Adams tells Photocycle interviewer Marc Silber. "That was in many ways the genius. A lot of us could take the picture and come up with the negative, but he could do some magic things with it in the darkroom."

"He always told people that this is not reality," he continued. "What I'm giving you in this print is not what you're seeing in the environment. You're seeing my interpretation of it. You're seeing something very dramatic in many ways."

RocketLife may not be as well-known as the likes of CVS, Kodak, Snapfish and Shutterfly, but in the minds of the consumers who participated in a recent study comparing Web-based applications to create photo bric-a-brac like picture books, coffee mugs and calendars, it definitely tops those other outfits in usability. The focus group research conducted by InfoTrends, a market research firm in Weymouth, Mass., found consumers gave RocketLife better grades than its more visible competitors in eight major measures--

• Speed and use of uploading images.
• Organization and viewing tools.
• Editing, cropping and zooming images.
• Ease of selecting images.
• Quality and variety of creative options.
• Simplicity of creative tools.
• Speed of creative tools.
• Overall ease of use.

"According to survey participants," the research report noted, "one of RocketLife's greatest advantages is in the speed and ease of getting started. RocketLife does not require users to set up an account, choose a password, or even provide an e-mail address. Furthermore, the program does not actually upload the full images until the user is ready to place an order."

"Given this design approach," the researchers continued, "most users can start a project within a few minutes of their first visit to the site, and the second visit can be even faster....To this end, RocketLife's mean score of 7.8 for ease and speed of upload is 60% higher than the second-ranked program."

We suspect, though, that this study sponsored by Visan, the company that created RocketLife, did not have a lot of Firefox users in the focus group, otherwise the satisfaction rating would have been a little different. RocketLife, you see, only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher.

As much as those of us in the opinion business like to think that what we write about a new product is the be-all and end-all on it, from a consumer's point of view, it makes more sense to taste the water from more than one well before committing to a purchase. The trick, however, is not to drown in information in the process. That's where Reviewgist comes in. The recently revamped service scours a universe of "trusted" web sites for reviews on a panoply of products--including digital cameras--and using its "patent pending deep semantic analysis engine" crunches the opinions in those reviews to rate the products. A nifty feature of the site is its new comparison interface. Not only does it compare products side-by-side, but when you roll your cursor over the bars in an item's rating graph, excerpts from reviews appear beside the comparison chart. So if you touch the "image" bar in a camera rating, for instance, quotes relative to imaging extracted from reviews on the product will pop up on the screen. Reviewgist is still billing itself as a beta site, and its product database seems a bit underpopulated at the moment, but it's still worth a looksee.

Horizons broadened today for some 40 million users of Photobucket, one of the largest photo sharinig sites on the Internet., as the service introduced new technology that allows images and videos stored at its site to be accessed from a wide spectrum of places--places such as Web sites, Web applications, desktop applications, browser plug-ins, mobile phones, home-entertainment systems, digital photo frames and directly from cameras.

The technology called anAPI, Application Programming Interface, empowers developers to create applications that permit Photobucket users to

• Securely log into Photobucket accounts
• Create, edit and access albums
• Upload new content to their albums
• Share content from albums via email
• Search through publicly available content on Photobucket and
• Access and update metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.)

Following the Photobucket announcement, a number of developers launched applications using the new API.

Flektor, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, trumpeted a new slideshow creation tool made exclusively for Photobucket that lets its members create MySpace addons like slideshows, polls, surveys and quizzes with customizable skins, sound and interactivity that are all updated in real time.

Intercasting Corp. introduced a tool for seamlessly moving photos from mobile phones to anywhere within Photobucket.

Another player in the mobile space, Ontela, says it has adapted its PhotoCopter service to automatically upload images from mophos to the 'bucket.

Personal book publisher Blurb revealed that it has incorporated the new API into its BookSmart software so Photobucket users can "slurp"" pix from the service into Blurb's program where they can be used to create photo books.

Another tome maker, Albumoprinter, has embraced the API, which can be used to drag-and-drop images from Photobucket into the company's online personal photo book system.

The API is also being used by Tapatap to allow Photobucket members to meld their images into the social photo game maker's mobile offerings.

And Picnik, an innovator in online photo editing, is using the API to link its editing tools with Photobucket. Picnik users can work on their Photobucket images from within the editing service. and when they're finished working on a photo, it can be sent back to Photobucket without leavinig Picnik.

No doubt these are just a few of the applications we'll see cropping up in the coming months as developers warm up to the new API.

Adobe garnered headlines when it launched its new online photo sharing community Photoshop Express at the end of March, but it also caught some flack for the site's service agreement--an agreement that looked like a power grab for the intellectual property rights of the Netpost's users. That was never its intent, the company said, and today it has attempted to rectify the situation by issuing revisions to the service policy. In the proposed revisions, which take effect April 10, Adobe says that it will be retaining "only those limited rights that allow us to operate the service and to enable you to do all the things the service offers. If you decide to terminate your Photoshop Express account, Adobe’s rights also will be terminated. Adobe doesn’t claim ownership of your content and won’t sell your images."

If you're still waiting for your 15 minutes of fame and would like to see what it'll be like when it strikes, you might want to surf over to MagMyPic. Although pretty much a one-trick pony as far as Web sites go, the Netstop lets you upload a photo and see what it would like if it were the cover of People, Vogue, Time, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and others. Well, the actual names of the magazine templates used by the site are more like Popular, Vague, Life, Natural Geography and Sports Celebrated, but you and your friends will still get the picture, or should I say cover? I know that hard core Photoshoppers are shouting at their computer screens right about now, "I don't need no stinking Web site. I can do that myself!" If you do have that kind of do-it-yourself bent, you may want to check out Dave Johnson's step-by-step for the process over at PCWorld.

Adobe Systems entered the photo sharing arena today with the launch of Photoshop Express. Membership in the site is free and includes 2GB of storage space for your photos. What's more, there's a Flash-based editing program at the cyberpost that lets you massage your images online from any computer with a Web browser.

The main interface for an account at the site is intuitive to learn. On the left side of the main window is a navigation well that gives you access to your photo library, any albums you may have created and a direct connection to some other popular sites--Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa.

A menu bar at the top of the window permits you to upload pics, zoom in and out of a photo and display images either individually, as a grid or as a table of information.

At the bottom of the window are controls for sharing albums, displaying them as slideshows, e-mailing and reviewing photos and editing them.

The editor in the application covers all the basics. Little sweat equity need be invested in learning how to use it, and I found it to be very responsive with a cable modem broadband connection.

Most of the tools for the editor are in a vertical band on the left side of an editing window. The tools are divided into three groups. In the Basic group are tools for cropping and rotating images, auto correcting them, altering their exposure, removing red-eye, erasing blemishes and scratches and modifying saturation. Tools in the Tuning group let you fiddle with the white balance in a shot, change the highlights in it, add fill light and sharpen or soften its focus. The Effects group allows you to have some fun with a picture by "popping" its colors, modifying its tint and hue, turning it into pseudo art or distorting it.

With the launch of Photoshop Express, Adobe is entering a crowded market, but the immeasurable cachet of the Photoshop brand should attract a fair number of gawkers who, once they get a taste of this nimble application, may decide to make the site a permanent home for their photos.