• Kodak Gallery
  (www.kodakgallery.com)

This is a solid site for sharing albums with friends in a few straightforward steps. Though its options for editing photos tend to feel a bit clumsy, they’re probably the best out of the five sites. Most sites expect users to edit images before sharing them. Earlier this year, Kodak introduced a new version of its EasyShare desktop software program with richer editing features, such as images that expand to almost the entire screen.

In addition to its $25 a year Gallery Premier account, you can opt to pay twice as much for the account and a discount on Kodak prints — 10 cents each rather than 15 cents. Paid accounts let you download high-resolution versions of each photo and give you a unique Web address for sharing photos that can be password protected. But the other four sites offer personal Web sites as free features, rather than just with paid accounts.

• Shutterfly
  (www.shutterfly.com)

Shutterfly seemed to be the simplest site, though it isn’t the most attractive or user friendly. All of its features are free. Shutterfly does away with two conditions that Kodak Gallery and Snapfish have: It doesn’t require any purchases in order to keep your account from being deleted nor does it ever require your friends to sign in before viewing a shared album.

But Shutterfly’s simplicity can also be a hindrance. It doesn’t let you upload videos to share, nor can you download high-resolution versions of each photo or send photos to the site via email or mobile device; the other sites do these things either for free or with a paid account.

• Snapfish
  (www.snapfish.com)

Snapfish is Hewlett-Packard Co.’s photo-sharing site, and it stands out because it has the most restrictions. Along with its requirement that you purchase something at least once a year to keep your account, guests who view your albums must always sign in; you can’t change this setting like on the other sites. To skirt this issue, Snapfish emphasizes its Group Rooms, or personalized sharing Web sites that users view with a specific URL and a password (if you choose to have one).

Snapfish and Shutterfly both have Web sites on which photos appear too small for my taste, though Snapfish does offer generously sized images in photo slideshows — a plus. I’d prefer the site itself showed larger images in other instances. High-resolution version of photos can be downloaded for a fee of 25 cents for one and five cents for more than one.

• Flickr
  (www.flickr.com)
• Photobucket.com
  (www.photobucket.com)

Of the two community sharing sites, I preferred Flickr over Photobucket. The site felt cleaner, with fewer distractions and one less advertisement than Photobucket. For people who aren’t used to these more progressive sites, Photobucket and Flickr may seem extreme. They offer things like tagging and use terms that can be confusing. Flickr uses “sets” in place of “albums,” and photos are organized within “batches.” Photobucket organizes albums, but then lets you create sub albums within an album.

Neither site requires annual purchases, and both allow free high-resolution downloads of photos. Instead of one-time sharing, the sites use photostreams, or constantly updated photo blogs that friends can check.

Flickr and Photobucket make it easy to post photos to blogs in one step, including Blogger and Typepad. Photobucket also lets you post to MySpace and Facebook in one step.

In Flickr, you can meet people who have interests similar to yours by searching through Groups. I joined a group that shared photos of tennis courts around the world. Digital photos suddenly offered ways to socialize online without chatting or leaving overused messages for strangers.

Among other things, Photobucket lets you create a Remix — a presentation made of your photos and/or videos after they’re dragged into a storyline and mixed in with music, transitions and graphics. The result was entertaining and professional, though it took just seconds to make.

Ideally, I’d like to combine a favorite feature from each of these sites to make one great photo-sharing Web site. I found something wrong with each one, but Kodak Gallery and its EasyShare software program offer a good combination of editing and sharing. Flickr was my preferred community photo site, though it and Photobucket both offer fresh ways to share digital photos.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

These images offer an intimate peek into the homeowner’s life — reflecting whether he gets his smile from Mom or Dad, capturing a memory from a recent vacation or reaffirming a fan’s loyalty to her favorite college football team. But over time, the photographs displayed in your own home become less noticeable to you, causing your eye to pass over scenes you once saw as fresh and new.

A terrific solution to this syndrome is found in digital picture frames. These gadgets have been around for years and can load your photographs, displaying them in slideshows so that one frame houses an ever-changing collection of images. Basic digital frames have built-in memory-card slots and USB ports, allowing you to transfer photos to the frame directly from your camera or computer.

The Kodak EasyShare EX-811 Digital Frame, $230, shows photos from the Web and PCs.

But uploading photos can be a hassle, and a frame equipped with Wi-Fi — giving it the ability to wirelessly connect to a computer or the Internet — seems like the ideal solution. This week, I tested Eastman Kodak Co.’s first entry into the Wi-Fi frame category: the $230 Kodak EasyShare EX-811 Digital Frame. This frame, which will be available next week, can wirelessly tap into photos stored on Kodak’s popular photo-sharing Web site, EasyShare Gallery, and can also discover photos, videos and music stored on networked computers.

I found many of the EX-811’s features enjoyable to use, and it became the focal point in my house for me and for guests; the changing images were just as much a surprise to them as they were to me. But the EX-811’s Wi-Fi capabilities were limited. While it consistently connected to and displayed photos from my Kodak EasyShare Gallery account, it didn’t always find my networked computer. When it did, the connection wavered, stopping in mid-slideshow and playing videos in a choppy manner. Also, you must download a third-party software program to get the EX-811 to find and display your computer’s content.

The EX-811’s screen measures 8 inches diagonally, and a slightly larger 10-inch model is also available — the $280 EX-1011. For simply displaying digital photos, plenty of companies including Kodak offer basic digital frames. But I wanted to focus on a frame with built-in Wi-Fi.

Setting up the Kodak EasyShare EX-811 was straightforward. An on-off switch and memory-card slots are hidden behind the frame, and it plugs into a standard AC adapter for power. A tiny included remote control facilitates navigating through photos and adjusting settings, but the frame also has a few basic buttons.

The frame is divided into four categories on the Home screen: My Frame (content stored on the frame’s 128 megabytes of internal memory), Kodak Gallery, Network Computer and Settings. After using an on-screen keyboard to enter my Wi-Fi network’s password and my Kodak EasyShare Gallery username and password, I opened the Kodak Gallery section. Like the Web site of the same name, the frame version of Kodak Gallery is divided into My Albums and My Friends’ Albums. I opened photos from both categories, and watched as images from each appeared in slideshows.

To get my EX-811 to display content from my Windows XP laptop, I had to first install Microsoft’s free Windows Media Player 11, which filled up with my computer’s videos, photos and some music during installation. Per Kodak’s instructions, I turned on the player’s media-sharing capabilities. Most people aren’t even aware that WMP 11 can load and share photos, and even if they are, it’s frustrating that Kodak doesn’t offer its own program for this procedure.

Your laptop must be also on and out of sleep mode in order to communicate with your frame, which can be a real downside.

For a while, my frame wasn’t able to discover my computer long enough to select it from my Home screen. Finally, I was able to see my computer’s content on the frame, and I sorted through various folders of photos to find one filled with memorable shots from a visit to see my sister in Boston. But just a few minutes into a slideshow of these photos, the frame’s connection to my laptop was lost, stopping the slides. I had even more trouble while watching a video from my computer: Each time it started, the footage stuttered and stopped, not playing long enough to even hear its accompanying audio.

Kodak says its Wi-Fi frames can also view music, pictures and videos on Apple computers with help from a $40 software program called the TwonkyVision MediaServer, though I didn’t test this.

Photos from Kodak Gallery didn’t fill the entire screen because they aren’t of a high enough resolution. Full-resolution images, including those from my computer, the frame’s internal memory and from memory cards, filled the screen entirely and looked great.

Twelve different transitions can be chosen for moving from one photo to the next, and photos can appear on screen for as little as three seconds or as long as an hour each. (Currently, Kodak Gallery images must stay on for at least a minute each, but Kodak is working on a fix.) If you’d rather show one photograph in your frame without changing, that’s also an option. You can opt to display all of your computer’s photos at once in a giant slideshow, but Kodak Gallery images can only be shown one folder at a time.

I watched as videos and photos that were loaded on my frame’s memory played in succession; photos changed into video footage and vice versa without any problems. I also played a few songs during this slideshow, and the music automatically stopped playing when a video started so I could hear the video’s sound.

You can’t email from the frame, nor can you use the on-screen keyboard to add captions to images that will be shared through Kodak Gallery. But you can load photos onto your frame from a memory card or a camera, and can then wirelessly copy the images over onto your Windows PC (Kodak says this option won’t work on Macs).

The Kodak EasyShare EX-811 Digital Frame isn’t perfect by a long shot. But its wireless capability is a step in the right direction for digital frames, and if you use Kodak EasyShare Gallery, you’ll find using the frame to be an even richer experience. Where discovering and playing computer content on your frame is concerned, the EX-811 has work left to do.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

See Corrections & Amplifications item below.

One of the most satisfying ways to share digital photos is to do so using an increasingly popular and delightfully analog item: the photo book. These books contain a collection of your digital photos, professionally printed on heavy paper and handsomely bound with hard or soft covers. They are fairly priced and can be made and ordered with little effort or skill.

MyPublisher Inc. (www.mypublisher.com), the company that started this business over five years ago, continues as a main player in the field. It now offers its books in various sizes and prices, and recently released a new version of its book-assembling software program, BookMaker 2.0.

Apple Computer, iPhoto Price: $29.99 for 8.5\”x11\”.

But other companies know well the emotional draw of these books — and so sell their own photo books that play to their strengths. Apple Computer Inc. uses iPhoto, the stellar photo-organizing program that comes on its computers, as a starting point for making books, incorporating handy editing within the company’s famously simple user interface.

Eastman Kodak Co.’s Kodak EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), one of the most popular Web sites for sharing digital photos, encourages users to make a book using photos that may already be uploaded for sharing. Its book-assembling software is a Web-based interactive program.

Each company offers a hardcover photo book that measures roughly the same size and costs $30 for 20 printed pages. The only way to know how each book will look is to assemble and order one from each company. So this week, we did the job for you, taking time to make and order books from MyPublisher, Apple and Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

All three contenders use book-making software that allows you to choose various themes and layouts. With each, you can either start from scratch, manually placing every photo, or you can start with an auto-fill feature that initially places your photos throughout the book, but allows you to rearrange, resize or delete them, or add others.

MyPublisher Inc. Price: $29.80 for 8.75\”x11.25\”; $59.80 for 11.5\”x15\”.

In our test, MyPublisher, which runs on Mac and Windows operating systems, reigned supreme, though Apple wasn’t far behind. MyPublisher offers three book sizes, three cover materials, two ways to display a cover photo, an intuitive assembling software program and elegant layouts. Though Apple’s iPhoto books were a pleasure to make and produced some of the most artistically appealing books with 19 optional themes, iPhoto runs only on Macs, leaving out most computer users. And it doesn’t offer as much overall variety as MyPublisher.

Kodak’s books cost the same or more than those from MyPublisher and Apple, yet stood out as the most difficult to assemble and the least attractive. And because Kodak EasyShare Gallery’s book-making software lives online, it’s slower.

We used the same set of photos from Katie’s summer vacation to make each book in standard size — about 8.5″ by 11″ for MyPub and Apple and 9″ by 10″ for Kodak — and started with each company’s auto-fill feature.

We also created the newest extra-large books offered by Kodak and MyPublisher; respectively, they measure 12″ by 14″ and 11.5″ by 15″ and cost about $70 and $60 for 20 pages. Apple doesn’t offer larger books.

MyPublisher’s BookMaker 2.0 follows five steps: Get Photos, Organize, Make Book, Preview and Purchase. These numbered sections appear at the bottom of your screen with your current step highlighted; moving ahead or back is done by selecting another section. To get your photos into MyPublisher, you can drag and drop them into BookMaker 2.0 from anywhere on your computer.

We spent most of our time in MyPublisher’s third step: Make Book. Here, we edited images, moved them around to tweak the auto-fill feature and changed page layouts. A bar at the top of the screen offers a place for dragging and dropping unused photos or those you’d rather use later. After assembling a page filled with sailboat images, we saved one unused sailboat shot for later in the book and this area served as a reminder that it was there.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery Price: $29.99 for 9\”x10.25\”; $69.99 for 12\”x14\”.

Page layouts describe your options for arranging photos on each page. For example, one three-photo layout arranges a large image above two smaller shots. MyPublisher’s small flaw is that it doesn’t automatically coordinate page layouts with the number of photos you choose to show per page; you must select the number of photos per page and then choose the page layout in a separate step.

Depending on the type of book you choose, you can opt to add captions or not; we opted for layouts that emphasized photos rather than photos and captions, but added a few captions when possible. We typed out titles on the cover of each book, and added a few sentences of description on the title page. IPhoto offered automatic spell checking; the others didn’t.

In iPhoto, we looked through 19 book themes before settling on Watercolor — a design with calming pastel colors in the background of each page and colored stripes on the cover. IPhoto provided the best editing options, including red-eye remover, retouching and eight different photo-altering effects. Its full-screen option shows extremely large images of photos for detailed editing. As we assembled the book, we easily switched to editing mode by double-clicking on a photo.

IPhoto, like MyPublisher, has a section for holding unused photos at the top of its screen. This section could also display the entire book’s pages and layouts — helping us avoid repeating the same layouts page after page.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery struck out in too many areas. Its Web-based software took a few seconds to save our book every time we turned to another page. We couldn’t see our book’s pages or the photos themselves in a detailed view.

The most frustrating feature of Kodak EasyShare Gallery is its lame selection of page layouts. Even the semi-interesting layouts arrange all photos (except full-page images) up too high on the page. And the auto-fill feature in Kodak’s largest book had such limited layout choices that we would have given up, had we not been testing for this column.

The finished products for each book matched our experiences with their software: the standard and extra-large books from MyPublisher were attractive and well made. We especially like MyPublisher’s cover choices: either a matted image viewed through an opening in the hard cover, or a label with one of our photos. The iPhoto books looked stylishly unique and used the most attractive fonts on the cover and title page. But they didn’t offer the covers with an inset photo, which we found more attractive.

The standard and extra-large books that we made using Kodak EasyShare Gallery both arrived with cheap-looking bindings. The covers on these books both used inset photos, but with windows that were too small to see the book’s title, which makes no sense. And the layouts for photos were nowhere near as appealing as those made with the other companies.

If you want the best combination of variety and a software program that works on all computers, you’ll be pleased with MyPublisher. IPhoto’s books are just as attractive and even more stylish, but aren’t available for Windows users or those hoping to make a large book. This holiday season, consider choosing one of these two book-making programs to hold your family memories.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

MyPublisher doesn’t plan to release a version of its BookMaker 2.0 software to run on Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh computers until next month. Macintosh owners today can use MyPublisher to print their photo books, but they must use a plug-in for Apple’s iPhoto program. This article erroneously implied that the MyPublisher software for making photo books runs on Macintosh computers now.

How many times have you wanted to email a large attachment — like a bunch of digital photos, an album of songs, or a hefty video — but didn’t do so because it exceeded your email provider’s, or the recipient’s, limits on attachment size, or because it might max out the recipient’s mailbox?

This frustration is growing increasingly common as better digital cameras produce bigger photos and large video clips, and digital music becomes more widespread. Computer hard disks have grown nicely to accommodate these files, but limits on the size of email messages haven’t. And, even if you could send such large attachments, it can take forever to send them via email, partly because broadband upload speeds lag far behind download speeds.

Instead of suffering the frustration of a bounced email, many folks have resorted to Web-based services like Shutterfly or Kodak EasyShare Gallery or YouTube.com or Google Video for sharing digital photos and videos. They upload the files to these sites, then send links to their friends and family. But this method has major drawbacks. The recipients don’t get the full-size files on their own computers, and sometimes must register with the sites to view your material.

This week, we tested a new, free, application called Pando that aims to solve this problem without requiring you to use an intermediary Web site. Pando lets you email huge attachments — up to one gigabyte each — to anyone, without breaching email size limits, or clogging anyone’s inbox. It comes in versions for both Windows and Macintosh computers, available for downloading at www.pando.com.

It sounded fishy to us, too, but Pando, from Pando Networks Inc., performed really well in our tests — even in its current “beta,” or trial, stage. It’s simple, fast, and effective, and it solves the large-attachment problem.

Pando works by merging the mechanism of email with its own small program and a modified version of BitTorrent, a back-end file-transfer system best known until now for speeding up the downloading of large, unauthorized files, like pirated movies.

Here’s how you use Pando. First, you download and install the small Pando program. Then, you select the files you want to send. These can be any type of files you want, or even whole folders of files. Then, still using the Pando software, you type in the addresses of the recipients, the subject, and a message. The software then does three things: it creates a Pando Package, a small special file that instructs the recipient’s computer on how to fetch the files; it sends an email containing that package file, plus any text you want; and it uploads the files to a Pando server.

On the recipient’s end, an email is received in his or her normal email program containing the Pando Package as a tiny attachment (one huge 94 megabyte attachment we sent required only a 22-kilobyte attachment). The recipient just opens the Pando Package attachment, and it in turn launches the Pando software, which then downloads the files or folders you sent. The first time the recipient receives a Pando email, he or she will have to download and install the Pando software. There’s a link in the email to the download site.

Once downloaded onto the receiver’s computer, all Pando files can be found in a special folder that Pando automatically creates. In Windows, it’s called My Pando Packages and is in My Documents. On the Mac, it’s called Pando Packages and is in the home folder. The files are also listed in the handy Received list in the Pando software.

As a bonus, Pando can sometimes transmit these large files faster than your email program or Web browser could. That’s because it uses a modified version of the speedy BitTorrent technology.

We downloaded and installed Pando in just a few minutes. Opening the small Pando email attachment from Microsoft Outlook on Windows or Apple Mail on the Mac prompted a little Pando window to pop up, in which all sent and received files were organized. This window is simple, showing a thumbnail image and text description of each file. A list of received files shows who sent the file and when; the sent list shows to whom you sent files and when.

We started out big, sharing a 95-megabyte, high-resolution video. You must create a username and password to send using Pando, which we did, entering our email and first and last names. A simple “Send New” icon opens the email-like form, where we dragged and dropped this big video file.

No Pando Package can total more than one gigabyte, and an automatic tally shows you how large the Package is becoming as you drag and drop more files into it.

The Pando software program allows users to send large email attachments without running afoul of normal size limitations.

Another way to send files using Pando is by right-clicking on any file or folder in your computer and selecting a “Send With Pando” option that appears after the software application is downloaded. Selecting this also opens the familiar sending window. But this works only in Windows.

The 95-megabyte video took eight minutes to upload, and nine minutes to download — impressively fast times. Another Pando Package filled with 44 high-resolution digital photos totaling 65 megabytes took six minutes to upload, and six minutes to receive.

But Pando can’t entirely overcome slow Internet connections, so your speeds may vary considerably. This is especially true on the uploading side, as even broadband cable and DSL connections typically offer upload speeds that are a fraction of their download speeds. In our tests, at our office and homes, our download and upload speeds ranged from 30 kilobits per second to 250, depending on where we were and when we were testing.

Even if you didn’t see any speed improvement with Pando, you’d still benefit from the sheer ability to send huge attachments. That’s a big deal.

On July 25, Pando Networks will introduce a special plug-in for Outlook, making it even easier for users to send huge files without worrying about inbox congestion. And the company also has plans to introduce plug-ins for Web-based email programs like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail.

If you’re tired of bounced emails, and of using Web sites to share your personal videos or photos, Pando is a straightforward solution that anyone can understand in a matter of minutes. It’s a great solution to a vexing problem.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Sharing digital photos online can be easily done using a Web site like Kodak EasyShare Gallery or Shutterfly to store the images for online viewing. These sites are usually rather basic, with a focus on allowing friends and family to see your digital images. And they generally work well — permitting others to look through your photos in a slideshow format, buy prints or gift items, and even make comments about the images.

But most of these photo Web sites don’t offer you the chance to design handsome layouts for your photos, nor do they offer simple on-screen editing options that work with the ease of a software program.

This week, we reviewed the beta (or pre-release) version of a new photo-sharing Web site called Tabblo (www.tabblo.com), from Boston-based Tabblo Inc., that will be officially released on June 30. Tabblo differs from other Web-based sharing sites. It’s a so-called “Web 2.0″ service, meaning it functions like a software application, offering features like dragging and dropping and editing all on the same Web page, without the annoying constant reloading that characterizes so many photo sites.

Tabblo also puts special emphasis on presentation, allowing you to arrange your photos in collages and designs with descriptions, rather than as straightforward slideshows, so as to add a little flair and style to your photos. The company calls these photo montages “tabblos.” If you really like the tabblo that you create, you can order high-quality printed posters of them in 11×17 inches for $10, or 8.5×11 inches for $8.

We’ve been playing with Tabblo for the past week, arranging digital shots into collages — some with text descriptions and some without. Katie made a tabblo of pictures from a friend’s graduation party, and Walt made one of photos from the Journal’s recent “D: All Things Digital” technology conference.

We used various background colors, photo sizes, style arrangements and image effects, and got results that required very little effort on our part yet still looked professional and polished. An 11×17-inch Tabblo poster that we ordered turned out to be an attractive keepsake that displayed a bunch of photos all at once, eliminating the need to leaf through stacks of prints or scroll through hundreds of digital files.

Tabblo also encourages community interaction through its Web site, so that the tabblos become a form of simple social networking. Just as MySpace.com lets you create a list of “friends,” Tabblo.com allows you to add people to your “circle” so that you can see when those people create new tabblos. You can even make tabblos that combine your own photos with those belonging to people in your circle, if they allow you.

The Tabblo Web site works on both Windows and Mac operating systems, using Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows and Firefox and Safari on Macs.

The process for building a tabblo is straightforward. Three tabs labeled View, Upload and Make at the top of the screen walk you through the steps. In View, you can see all of the tabblos that you’ve already made, as well as a list of those in your circle of friends. In Upload, we quickly added photos to our Tabblo accounts using Java uploader, one of five options offered by the site. Integrating your photos from Flickr.com — another photo-sharing site — is one of the five options, if you have an account.

After uploading our digital photos from the conference and the graduation party, we progressed to the Make step, which included four steps of its own: Pick Photos, Choose Style, Edit Tabblo and Share Tabblo. The Pick Photos screen is well designed, with a panel on the left showing all uploaded photos and those from people in your circle. A panel on the right called My Lightbox stores photos that you drag and drop in for use in a tabblo.

In Choose Style, we worked our way through three decisions about our tabblo: photo shape (square or rectangle), layout and theme; 512 total style combinations are offered. The layouts included one with Polaroid-style photos, another with big and small images combined with text and another layout with interlocking photos of differing sizes. For the theme, we chose Bold from a list that included Baby Pink, Wedding Traditional and Museum.

The Edit Tabblo section was especially impressive. We easily dragged photos all around the screen, seeing which fit in the best places of our collage layout and automatically swapping out other images. It was smooth and quick, exactly like working in a full-blown program stored locally on a PC, instead of a Web site stored on a distant server.

In a few instances, the automatic-layout mode made some shifts and adjustments that we didn’t like, but for the most part they made the tabblo look better. If you’d rather make all adjustments manually, a manual-layout option is also available.

We had a little trouble with fonts — when we increased the font size of some text entries, the lettering appeared jumbled and words looked like they ran together. But Tabblo fixed this problem before our column was finished.

Tabblo displays your digital photos in a stylish way and offers editing features that work like those in a software program, rather than a Web site.

When we moused over each photo, buttons and controls appeared. These included a Remove Picture button and four on-screen editing options in the top left of each image: Collapse, Scale & Pan, Show Effects and Rotate Photo. Scale & Pan was very useful, instantly showing a window in which we could zoom in or out and pan around the image. Show Effects altered the image to black and white, sepia, oil paint or negative style.

All of these changes took just a few seconds for each image — quite a switch from the constant refreshing and reloading of Web pages that are commonplace on other photo-sharing sites.

A box filled with more editing options is constantly present at the right of your screen, offering options for changing text colors, background colors and other settings. After tweaking to our heart’s content, we continued on into the Share Tabblo section. Here, we could opt for our tabblo to be seen by anyone, just those in our circles, people we invited or just ourselves.

If your tabblo is set to Public or sent to someone using an invitation, those viewing it won’t have to sign in. If the tabblo is sent to those in your circle, those people must sign in with their Tabblo account information, which they’ll already have (by being in a circle). This week, Tabblo will introduce a shareable link which can be sent to others for use without login credentials.

We ordered an 11×17-inch poster from Tabblo and were impressed by how striking it looked. The wedding posters, which the company sent us as examples, were truly stunning.

As of June 30, when Tabblo is available for use in its finished format, it will offer, among other things, larger posters for $20, frames for the 11×17-inch posters and 25-cent 4×6-inch prints.

Tabblo.com offers a clean interface with smart features that save time, and our digital images really looked sharp in all of the layouts that we tried. If you want people to see your photos in a more-personalized way, Tabblo is a good service that will change the way you look at online photo sharing.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Digital photos can be shared with friends and family from around the world in various ways. By now, even the most technically challenged computer users have figured out how to send photos using an Internet sharing service like Shutterfly or Kodak EasyShare Gallery — or at least they’ve received photos on such a service.

This week, we tested a new way of sharing digital photos, using a new service from Smilebox Inc. The real difference between Smilebox and most other sharing services is its emphasis on two things: design and ease of use. It offers templates for creating attractive virtual scrapbooks, slideshows, photobooks, postcards and greetings using your photos, which automatically load into blank image space holders. Once finished, a simple step lets you email a Web link of your Smilebox creation to anyone.

We spent this week making various themed photo collages commemorating everything from baseball-game photos to pictures of a family pet to vacations, and we sent them to friends and family. Everyone enjoyed the Smileboxes, and the creative formats — including photos, text, background music and background designs — were attractive and unique.

Smilebox comes in Basic and Premium versions. The Basic version is free, but includes ads. Premium is ad-free but costs 99 cents or $1.99 a design, depending on the format. The paid version also lets you view the design in full-screen view and lets you, or the recipient, print the entire project; neither can be done with the Basic version.

Though still in beta, or prerelease mode, Smilebox worked for us with just a couple of glitches. It is due to be launched officially on June 1, and the company continues to add about 10 new designs weekly to its current 144 different designs; the total will be up to 190 by June 1, according to the company.

Smilebox’s logo is a cute box with a giant smile on its front and a jack-in-the-box-like crank. On the Web site, this box is used to illustrate how Smilebox works — photos drop into the top of the smiley box while the crank turns, spitting out a finished product. The service was, surprisingly, almost that simple.

Smilebox ( www.smilebox.com) uses a simple interface and assembles your photos in attractive projects, such as the Best Friends Forever scrapbook.

We downloaded Smilebox software free from www.smilebox.com, and got started. (For now, the software only works on Windows PCs, but a Macintosh version is in the works.) Its clean interface was refreshing — the familiar smiling box logo sits in the top left corner and a vertical panel running down the left of the screen serves as the area where your photos are held. Three simple categories are listed across the top: Design Catalog, My Designs and My Creations.

A handful of our Windows PC’s digital photos were already loaded into the photo panel — Smilebox says your most recently added images autoload, but in our tests, we found a handful of older digital photos in our photo panel. However, we could easily select Get Photos or Remove All to add or delete the images that were automatically added to our photo tray.

Every template within the Design Catalog section of Smilebox is organized into different category types within the larger categories of Scrapbooks, Slideshows, Photobooks, Postcards and Greetings. We started with a scrapbook that was appropriately titled “Cherished Memories.”

Before loading your images into a design, you can see a screen shot of the design. By selecting Show Me, you can see a mock-up of the entire design, as it would look when you emailed it to someone. Both the screen shot and mock sample use images loaded by Smilebox, but they give you a good idea of what a finished product looks like. After we selected Personalize, the design loaded into our My Designs category, and after a few seconds, the photos in our tray automatically loaded into the image spaces.

The four-page Cherished Memories scrapbook gave off the old vibe of one that was homemade. Images of tiny clothing buttons and fabric bordered each page, along with words like “Remember” and “Legacy” written in artsy print. Eleven photos can fit into this particular scrapbook, and space labeled Add Your Text Here was available beside many of the pictures for adding personal notes.

Each image could be moved, rotated or zoomed in or out to fit the page’s layout — and all of these adjustments were made right on the page. At any time, the project can be saved and closed, or previewed in Basic or Premium modes. After tweaking to our scrapbooking heart’s content and selecting “Upbeat” music to accompany the album, we pressed Send at the top of the page, entered multiple email addresses and waited a few seconds while our design was uploaded to the Smilebox server, making it viewable for our recipients.

First-time users must enter an email address and create a password, and if you opt for the Premium version you must enter credit-card information before buying. But all of this was done within the Smilebox software, so we never felt like we left the program. Every time you email a project, a copy is sent to your email account, and a receipt for Premium purchases is also emailed.

We tried Smilebox’s postcards (one-screen shot); photobooks (a mock book designed to show two pages at a time with a crease down the middle); a slideshow titled Whizzy (20 animated photos whizzed in and out of view); and a greeting titled Spring (moving words and a beautiful cherry blossom border around a photo).

Once or twice an image or a text box didn’t show up in our final product; instead, a white box showed where the photo or description should have been. Smilebox says this will be ironed out in the June final release. We also noted that Smilebox doesn’t offer editing options, such as removing red eye in shots, like many online photo-sharing services do. But for now, the simple method of just loading photos with minimal editing seems to work.

The final release will give recipients the ability to download the photos so they can save them individually. Smilebox also plans to offer a $4.99 monthly subscription for unlimited premium designs.

We found Smilebox simply enjoyable. It jazzed up our photos with fun designs, gave us the ability to see the final product during any stage of our creating process, and didn’t take long to use. If you’re looking for a new way to share digital photos, this company’s Web site is well worth a look.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

With the myriad of different features and options available on digital cameras, the camera section of your local electronics store is now almost as confusing as the TV aisle. It’s easy to understand how a potential buyer might feel intimidated.

It’s an exciting time for digital cameras, as many of them are adding more bells and whistles by the minute. You’ll have to grasp some new features this spring, like the wide adoption of image stabilization technologies to fight blurry pictures, in-camera editing, and new ways of playing back your photos right on the camera, for sharing with friends.

But try not to be wooed by superficial features. A digicam that can make a revving engine sound every time its shutter closes might gain cool points for a little while, but that feature will be quickly forgotten if your graduation pictures are washed out and blurry.

To help choose, here’s our annual digital camera buyer’s guide. We aren’t reviewing specific models here, but instead we’re explaining the important features that mainstream buyers — not serious hobbyists or professional photographers — should be familiar with when shopping. We’ll touch on both the basics, and the newest features.

• Pick a Size, Any Size. Thanks to improvements in technology, the newest digital cameras are thin and light enough to slip into a pocket or small purse. These hipsters are called pocket cameras, and are usually less than an inch thick and less than four inches long. They earn points for style and are often available in colors, making them fashion accessories. But, unlike the smallest cameras of the film era, these digital compacts are packed with features and take pictures that can be as good as those from larger models.

Email photos from the camera. The $400 Kodak EasyShare-One (top right) uses Wi-Fi to email images right from the camera. Larger LCD screens. The LCD screen on this $500 Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T30 (bottom left, available in May) is three inches.

If small isn’t your bag, and you’d rather have a camera that’s easier to hold without worrying about covering a tiny lens or flash with your thumb, point-and-shoot cameras will suit your needs. These cameras are generally bigger and heavier than pocket cameras, and they often are carried in a case or hung around your neck. They don’t necessarily have more features than the pocket models, or take better pictures, but they often cost less.

Considerably larger are those cameras most popular with hobbyists and professionals — often referred to as digital SLRs (single-lens reflex). The price tags for these models can reach the thousands of dollars, and they include many manual controls and add-on lenses. Though camera companies continue to market these types of cameras to average users, they are far more complex than the average pocket or point-and-shoot camera.

• Megapixels.The number of megapixels, a measure of the maximum resolution that a camera can capture, tends to grab a lot of attention in the store. But it’s important that you be wary of any camera that advertises a super high megapixel count — more than eight megapixels — with a low price tag, say, in the $200 to $300 range.

Companies reach these lower prices by combining high megapixels with smaller image sensors, resulting in pixels that are smaller and thus contain less image information. Like a big house without any charm or character, the images produced by these cameras can be severely lacking.

Look for cameras with about six megapixels, which camera companies say is about the entry level now for a good digicam. This is more than enough for any mainstream user, as higher megapixel counts usually only come in handy if you’re blowing up a photo to a huge size or doing extensive editing, neither of which are things that average users usually do.

• Zoom — Optical Matters. When looking at a camera’s zoom, ignore the digital zoom and overall zoom; focus instead on optical zoom. Digital refers only to computer-generated magnification, a work-around which makes pictures grainier. Optical refers to zoom as it relates to the physical movement of the camera lens. Overall zoom is a sneaky industry trick — companies multiply digital and optical zoom to get a more impressive-sounding number (2x digital multiplied by 3x optical equals 6x overall zoom). Ignore this and concentrate only on optical zoom.
• Speed. Early digital cameras were notoriously slow. They were slow to start up, slow to actually capture a shot, slow to record it in memory, and slow to be ready for the next shot. That meant you might miss action shots like the baby’s first steps and the Little Leaguer’s home run.

Today, luckily, most consumer cameras have gotten much faster. But we advise you to pick up the camera in the store and try to fire off several shots as quickly as you can. Bring along a friend who can move around while you try to photograph him. If action shots are important to you, this should help you choose the right model, even if it costs more.

• Bigger and Better Screens. Since last year, many things about the digital camera have changed. Most notably — and most regrettably, in our opinion — is the loss of the optical viewfinder in most digital cameras. Instead of including a peep-hole and LCD screen for viewing the photo subject, most of these cameras now offer only LCD screens.

Without the optical viewfinder taking up space, these viewing screens have grown in size to measure about 2.5 inches diagonally — some are as large as three inches. But with only an LCD screen for viewing, you’ll have to frame pictures in glaring sun with a washed-out screen, and you’ll have to hold the camera at a shaky arm’s length, which could result in sloppier pictures.

Companies have made two improvements to balance out these problems: brighter, more glare-proof LCD screens and image stabilization technology, or anti-shake. Casio Inc.’s $300 EX-Z600, for example, offers an LCD screen that it claims is three times brighter than previous models. Sony Electronics Inc.’s $500 DSC-T9 includes built-in Super Steady-Shot optical image stabilization.

• Stable Images — Digital or Optical? If you have the option, choose optical rather than digital image stabilization in your camera. This means that the camera physically corrects shaking, while digital stabilization — like digital zoom — changes the image with a computer, not with a physical feature in the camera. Many companies are using the blanket term “image stabilization” to describe their camera’s anti-shake technology; be sure to get the full story.

Optical image stabilization usually costs more money, but if your camera lacks a viewfinder and you have a shaky hand, this might be a feature that’s worth the investment. Some people will find that holding their breath while snapping the shutter button is all it takes, but it’s good to have the option.

• New Ways of Viewing. Many digital camera companies have started to acknowledge that we share our pictures with friends or family by passing around the camera, often right after snapping hundreds of pictures. This instant gratification is one of the most satisfying features of digital, especially with larger viewing screens, yet it’s not uncommon for the camera owner to have to show each person how to skip ahead and back through photos.

To solve this problem, many cameras now offer slideshow or movie modes — some even include music — to make sharing easier. Without going near a computer, you can set your camera so that others can simply hold the camera and watch. This also prevents anyone from pressing buttons and accidentally deleting your images.

Casio’s $300 EX-Z600 (top) has an LCD screen that is three times as bright as screens on previous models (bottom).

• In-Camera Editing. Now that screens are larger, some cameras come with in-camera editing features, allowing you to edit out red eye, for instance, or stitch together multiple shots into a panorama. This avoids the need to edit on a computer, but it also can be cumbersome. If you think you might like in-camera editing, try it out in the store first.
• Storing and Transferring Images. Many types of memory cards are available for use with your digital camera. These are now available in very high capacities; one gigabyte of memory will only cost you about $60, providing more memory for photos and digital videos, which most cameras are now capable of capturing.

Transferring images from your camera to your computer has always been somewhat of a hassle, including finding the camera’s USB cord and attaching it to the computer and camera before transferring. Some cameras come with a dock, making the transfer process a little easier, but it’s still a little cumbersome.

Cameras are starting to take advantage of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (short-range wireless) technology to eliminate the extra step of wires or docks. The $400 Kodak EasyShare-One camera uses Wi-Fi to email images directly from the camera, using EasyShare Gallery, Kodak’s online photo sharing software. More products like this will continue to hit the market throughout this year.

• Battery Life. Be sure the camera can handle a typical day’s worth of shooting on a single charge. For some consumers, that might involve only 20-50 shots. For others, that might be 100-200 pictures, on vacation. Read the manufacturer’s claims for this, and reduce it by 20%, then compare it with your typical shooting volumes. If you do mostly indoor shots with flash, the battery capacity will be much less.

Whatever your situation, it’s a good idea to buy a spare battery. Most cameras use costly proprietary batteries, but some models allow you to substitute common drugstore batteries in a pinch.

So be sure to do your homework, be skeptical of extra features with extra cheap price tags, and look into some of the new technology that is being offered in digital cameras. As features grow and prices come down, the consumer will keep winning.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Pocket-size digital cameras keep getting slimmer and more powerful, with larger viewing screens and added features. But there are some trade-offs. For instance, the optical viewfinder has largely disappeared from these models, as bigger and bigger screens have claimed more of the limited real estate available.

This week, we took a look at three pocket-size models that will hit shelves next month. They are the Olympus Stylus 710 and the Nikon Coolpix S5, each $350, and the $400 Canon PowerShot SD630.

These cameras are impressively svelte. All three are less than four inches in length, a little more than two inches wide and only four-fifths of an inch thick. The Olympus weighs in at just 3.6 ounces, the Nikon at 4.8 ounces and the Canon at 5.11 ounces.

Yet they all have plenty of power to take very good pictures. The Nikon and the Canon boast a maximum resolution of six megapixels, while the Olympus can reach 7.1 megapixels. That means all three can take images that can fill a large, high-resolution computer screen or be blown up to large sizes when printed. Each has a 3X optical zoom.

The Nikon and the Olympus, which feature curved or tapered bodies, have 2½-inch screens. The Canon, which is squarer, squeezes in a three-inch screen. In our tests, all the screens remained usable, if somewhat washed out, in bright sunlight. But only one of the cameras, the Olympus, has any form of image stabilization, which can prevent blurring of photos caused by a slight shaking of the camera when holding it at arm’s length to frame a shot using the screen.

Two of the three models, the Nikon and the Canon, offered iPod-like navigation controls: dials or wheels that scrolled through menus and photos. The Nikon S5’s wheel has tiny ridged marks for easier turning and can also be pressed down in three places. Canon calls the SD630’s wheel a touch control dial — it doesn’t physically turn but instead comes to life when your thumb rests on it, displaying an on-screen icon of the dial and its functions.

We tested the three cameras indoors and out, at parks and shops and in houses and offices. We found all three easy to use and got good pictures from each. But we preferred the photos from the Canon and Nikon to those from the Olympus. The Olympus seemed weaker at handling dark areas and shadows in our outdoor tests, and its indoor flash pictures were too washed out. The Canon and Nikon pictures seemed about equal outdoors, but the Canon was slightly better at indoor flash shots.

Overall, we preferred the Canon. In addition to its superior pictures and larger screen, the Canon had a much cleaner user interface than the others. Many things about the Canon felt more like a tiny computer than a digital camera. Selecting an option, such as no flash, automatically moved that icon from the center to the edge of your screen. And when the touch control dial was used, the function upon which your thumb was hovering would suddenly be magnified on the viewing screen.

Also, when viewing images in playback mode, the Canon automatically rotates them if you merely turn the camera vertically or horizontally.

Our first impression of using the Nikon Coolpix S5 was how quiet it was. It turns on almost unnoticeably and zooms in and out without much sound at all — quite a switch from the typical whir of most zoom lenses. Unlike the Canon and Olympus lenses, the S5’s lens doesn’t protrude from the camera, even when zooming.

A special portrait button is positioned on the top ridge of the Coolpix S5 so that whenever you’re taking pictures of people, which happens often, you can press that button and automatically set the camera for the best portrait results. A Mode button on the back of the camera generates a circular on-screen image labeled with eight different modes, and the scroll wheel easily navigates around these options.

The Nikon also has some nice features, including a special setting that can combine 10 of your pictures into a little movie, complete with music. Unfortunately, you can’t play back these movies on a computer — they only play on the camera itself or on a TV using included AV wires. Nikon also provides an adapter that allows the S5 to dock with Kodak’s EasyShare printers. But, in our tests, the Kodak printer couldn’t locate the pictures stored in the Nikon.

One big downside of the Nikon: It’s the only camera in this group that requires a cradle to connect to a computer or TV. The others can be connected from ports right on the camera body.

The Olympus Stylus 710 has the best combination of specs and weight among the three. For instance, in its continuous-shooting mode, it can take 3.7 frames per second, versus a bit more than two frames for the other cameras.

But its user interface seemed old and clumsy, and its picture quality fell short in our tests. Also, the Olympus uses the oddball xD storage cards, rather than the more common SD cards found in the Canon and the Nikon.

The Stylus 710 offers 23 different scene modes, including such specifics as Night + Portrait, Self Portrait, Fireworks and Cuisine. But we were dubious about who would take the time to choose the correct scene setting before taking a picture. We tested a few of these scene-specific settings, including one called Night Scene, but we waited a full five seconds for our photo to appear on the screen after it was captured. When it was displayed, it looked blurry.

Without a clever scroll wheel, like those found on the Nikon and Canon, the Olympus was more of a pain to use. For example, when we looked through the 23 scene options, we had to press down the control arrow 23 times. Scrolling would have been nicer.

Each of these cameras has its strengths, but we like the Canon SD630 best in this group, followed closely by the Nikon Coolpix S5.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

So, most digital photos never get printed, and many of those that do are produced at kiosks in retail stores, and ordered from online photo services like Shutterfly and Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery. That’s bad news for Hewlett-Packard Co., the leader in home printers, which makes a lot of money selling ink and paper to consumers. Now, H-P has come up with a new printer design for homes that it hopes will entice consumers to do more of their own printing.

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I reviewed H-P’s speedy new $199 Photosmart 8250 Photo Printer, a product that the company hopes will change the way you think about printing photos at home. In its fastest mode, the company boasts, the 8250 can churn out a snapshot-sized 4×6 photo in just 14 seconds and all-black-print text pages at 32 per minute — much faster than its 20 color or black-print page-per-minute claims for older home inkjets. Our tests showed the new model to be very fast, but not quite as speedy as H-P’s claims imply.

In addition to its speed, the Photosmart 8250 also boasts a new type of water-fast ink and a new ink-cartridge system for home printers. Instead of lumping all of the printer’s colors together in one large cartridge, this printer stores each of its six inks in a separate cartridge. That way, if you use a lot of one color — say lots of green, taking pictures of baseball games — you only need to replace one color when you run out, not all of the others, which still may be in good supply.

These new cartridges cost about $10 for each of the five colors, and $18 for the solo black cartridge, which holds about twice as much ink as any one color. By contrast, on H-P’s older printers, the single color cartridge can cost as much as $35, and the black cartridge about $30.

The longevity of these new individual tanks varies per color and depending on what is being printed. H-P estimates that with typical pages of mixed text and graphics, the new black cartridge will print 480 pages, and color cartridges range between 350 and 490 pages. The cartridges in the old system last for 450 color and 450 black pages.

This idea of individual ink tanks is nothing new. Some H-P rivals, such as Epson and Canon, have relied on that type of design for years, and H-P itself has sold inkjets for business with individual ink tanks. But the company claims its new home system is engineered to use more of the ink inside each tank before it requires replacement, cutting down on waste.

To give us some perspective on H-P’s more traditional printer cartridges and speeds, we also tested the 8250’s year-old predecessor — the $149.99 Photosmart 8150 Photo Printer. The 8150 works with the old cartridge system — using just two larger cartridges at a time.

These two silver printers are similar in appearance — each is designed with a useful four-card media-card reader and a 2.5-inch color LCD screen centered on its top side. This combination of features makes both printers useable without attaching to a Mac or Windows PC; the LCD serves as a preview panel for images on your memory card, thus allowing you to zoom, lighten, or remove red eye in photos before printing.

But as we easily set up these two printers, we took note of how, under the hood, they appear rather different from one another. The older 8150’s two large cartridges have built-in printheads that slide from side to side during printing, then over to the right side for reloading and resting.

Under the 8250’s lid, we took a bit more time to snap each of its six cartridges into place. This rainbow of yellow, light and regular magenta, light and regular cyan and black cartridges fit smack in the center of the printer’s guts.

These cartridges differ from the older type in that they are separate from the printhead, the device that moves left to right while spitting color onto a page. Each container of color stays in place, and is connected to the moving printhead through its own tube. H-P says this system enables faster printing while also making it possible to replace just one color at a time.

Katie and I tested the 8250 for speed and quality by printing full-page color photos, 4×6 color photos, color Microsoft Word documents and black text-only Word documents. We sent documents to each printer from its corresponding computer, as well as directly from an inserted memory card. We ran the same tests on the 8150, just to get an understanding of how much faster the 8250 was, and how — if at all — the quality differed. Our results showed the 8250 to be much faster, but we couldn’t detect any quality difference. Both the old and new models produced very good, but unexceptional, prints.

Unsurprisingly, the 8250’s fastest results came from printing the color and black Word documents, each of which was finished in just 10 seconds, about 13 seconds faster than the 8150. Printing 4×6 color photos took 32 seconds on the 8250, about a minute less than on the 8150. And it took about eight more seconds to print a full-page photo on the 8250. The full-page photo on the 8150 took around four minutes.

H-P is selling new “Advanced” photo paper to use with its new ink. The company claims that the combination of paper and ink will lead to water-fast prints that dry faster, and that the new paper also contributes to faster print times, which we found to be true. We used a sheet of HP Premium Plus Photo Paper instead of the HP Advanced Photo Paper to print a 4×6 on the 8250, and it took 70 seconds, over twice as long.

H-P’s fastest result — the 14 second 4×6 photo — is achieved by printing on Advanced Photo Paper, in fast-draft mode with borders, and H-P times the print according to the second page out, after the printheads are already in place for printing. By contrast, our tests attempt to approximate real life. We start timing when the print button is pressed and count the first page out.

Occasionally, the 8250 performed some noisy “device maintenance,” according to the message on the LCD screen. H-P explained that this is the printer’s way of recycling the ink it uses to clean its printhead, whereas many printers clean printheads using ink, but never re-use that ink.

The individual ink cartridges might be enough to sway you into buying the 8250, especially if you print items with certain colors regularly — like documents with your company’s all-red logo. You might also be drawn to its speed, which had us hooked, but its quality, while good, wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to offload the pictures from your digital camera while traveling, without lugging along a laptop? And, when the trip is over, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to show people your digital photos, again without the aid of a laptop, or any other computer?

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I reviewed two products that aim to solve those problems. Both let you keep a collection of your digital photos with you at all times, on a pocket-size device. And one also doubles as a high-capacity storehouse that can directly offload pictures from a camera.

We tested Kodak’s new $150 EasyShare Picture Viewer, which will hit store shelves on May 20, and Apple Computer’s $29 iPod Camera Connector, which came out in March and works with the iPod Photo music player — either the 30-gigabyte ($349) model or the 60-gigabyte ($449) version.

Apple’s Camera Connector turns the iPod Photo into a portable repository for digital photos rather simply. While companies like Belkin had previously introduced gadgets that enabled the use of a regular iPod’s hard drive for storing photos on the go, this adapter is much smaller and simpler. And because it works with iPod Photo, you can instantly view the images that you upload. It’s just a small, white adapter that plugs into the base of your iPod Photo on one end and has a USB port on the other end, therefore allowing you to attach your digital camera via a USB cord.

Katie tested the Camera Connector with a 30-gigabyte iPod Photo, which Apple estimates can hold as many as 25,000 images. She downloaded the latest software update for the iPod Photo from Apple’s Web site. Then, after she attached our camera’s USB cord and turned on the camera and iPod, the iPod’s screen showed the number of photos on our camera’s memory card (21) and the total size of those files (38.1 megabytes).

iPod Camera Connector, Price: $29; For more info: www.apple.com/ipod

Though we couldn’t see the photos before importing them, after we clicked “Import” we saw thumbnail images of the photos as they loaded onto the iPod. After importing, an option on the screen offered to erase our memory card, but we opted not to do so. Our new “roll” of film was listed underneath the Photo Import menu as “Roll #1 (21).”

We browsed through our imported images by turning the iPod’s scroll wheel and scanning through each of our photos on the iPod Photo’s 2-inch diagonal color screen. The next time we attached the iPod to our computer, it offered to automatically synchronize those photos with our computer’s collection, or you can also manually move them over to the computer, which we chose to do. The Camera Connector is as simple as the device it complements, and we didn’t have any trouble using it.

The Kodak EasyShare Picture Viewer is also white, like the Camera Connector, but that’s where the similarities end. It’s a handsome credit-card-shape device that measures a half-inch thick and weighs just 2.4 ounces. It has a bigger screen than the iPod, but very little internal memory, so it’s mainly for viewing pictures, not for offloading them from a camera. In fact you can’t connect it directly to a camera.

A gorgeous 2.5-inch display screen takes up most of the device, and control buttons are positioned directly to the right of the screen, making it easy to hold and operate in one hand.

You can view — but not offload — photos from a memory card by inserting SecureDigital (SD) or MultiMedia Cards (MMC) in the slot positioned on one long side of the Picture Viewer. A small power button is next to this slot. Katie pushed the SD card from her digital camera into the Picture Viewer, and a message on the screen read “Reading memory card,” before displaying the card’s photos. Later, I popped in a memory card from my Treo camera phone. Both worked fine.

A number in the top right of the screen showed us how many images were on the card, and she paged through them using left and right arrow buttons. The “up” arrow shows you a 2x magnified view of a selected photo, while the “down” arrow displays the photos in up to nine thumbnail images on the screen at once.

Pressing the “menu” button lets you adjust settings or start a slide show of the images. This allows friends or relatives to just sit back and hold the tiny viewer as pictures flash on the screen for intervals that can be set to last anywhere from three to 60 seconds per photo.

Kodak EasyShare Picture Viewer, Price: $149.95; For more info: www.kodak.com

Unlike the way Apple’s Camera Connector works with the iPod Photo, you cannot directly offload images from your camera or memory card onto the Picture Viewer. To load photos from a computer, Katie installed Kodak’s EasyShare software on her Dell PC and dragged and dropped the photos that she wanted on the Picture Viewer into the “Favorites” folder. She hooked her PC to the Picture Viewer using its USB cord and selected “Update” to send the images to the smaller gadget.

You can also opt to automatically send photos from your Mac or PC to the Picture Viewer whenever you connect the two via a USB cord.

Katie loaded about 30 high-resolution photos onto the Picture Viewer’s internal memory, but Kodak estimates that it can hold about 150 at full capacity. Adding a memory card can expand the device’s measly 32 megabytes of internal memory, but this might be costly if you don’t already have a high-capacity card.

The Picture Viewer’s screen is very impressive, and we noticed that images in the device’s internal memory appeared quickly as we scanned through the photos. Images from our SD memory card, however, took longer to display and some were blurred before coming into clear focus.

Kodak explained that EasyShare software sends reduced resolution images from your PC to the Picture Viewer’s internal memory, while images on memory cards aren’t reduced and tend to have higher resolutions. Therefore, it takes a bit longer to open and view each image on a memory card. The lower resolution of the transferred pictures didn’t affect the quality when the photos were viewed on the Picture Viewer’s small screen.

If you’re away from your computer, you can “tag” all or certain photos on the Viewer for printing or emailing, and the images will perform the desired action when you connect to the computer again. The Picture Viewer charges by attaching to your computer or certain EasyShare docks, and its battery is supposed to last up to three hours.

There’s no doubt that using the iPod Photo with a Camera Connector offers greater versatility for storing and viewing photos than the Kodak EasyShare Picture Viewer. But if you can’t afford an iPod Photo and you’d like a way to bring your digital memories with you on the go, the Picture Viewer is a less expensive, lightweight option. Just don’t count on it for heavy photo storage, especially without expanding the memory with an SD or MMC card.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com