This week I tested a solution that might have made my quest for boots a little simpler. Snipi, which became available as a free download from Snipi.com on Monday, helps you organize your online-shopping results by gathering, or “snipping,” product information from Web pages and saving the information to lists.

These lists are stored on your personalized Snipi page, where you can access them later. Snipi also can save photos and videos to lists. And it has a coordinating iPhone app that shows up-to-date versions of the lists created on the computer, so you can have them with you on the go.

The Snipi Toolbar collects and displays the user’s online research.

To do all this, you use the Snipi Toolbar, a horizontal window that pops up within your browser so you never have to navigate away from the site where you’re shopping. If you see an item you like, simply drag and drop an image of it into the toolbar, where details about the item — including its title, price and image — are automatically filled in. If the item was previously snipped by another Snipi user, a description box will be filled with whatever that person wrote or pasted in from the product page; you can fill in the box yourself, too.

Snipi has a partnership with Shopzilla Inc., so the Snipi Toolbar also has comparison shopping built in: It displays links to Web sites where your snipped product, or products like it, can be found at lower prices.

One of the big drawbacks to Snipi is that it currently works only as a browser plug-in with Mozilla’s Firefox, not Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer or Apple’s (AAPL) Safari. Snipi says it plans to introduce versions of its toolbar — though less functional ones — for IE and Safari by early to mid-June. Even so, downloading and installing a browser plug-in isn’t yet a routine thing for most people. And often, people who use plug-ins forget to keep them up-to-date.

Another downside to Snipi is that its comparison-pricing feature failed with apparel. The feature only really worked when used with “hard goods” like electronics, which are sold at retailers that participate in price-comparison networks. Yet Snipi still makes pricing suggestions for clothing and shoes, however irrelevant. For example, when I snipped a $150 Banana Republic dress, a link to $16 eye shadow sold at Sephora.com appeared in the Price Compare column. To reduce confusion, Snipi shouldn’t make such suggestions for apparel.

A handy feature built into the Snipi Toolbar lets you immediately share items via email or post them on Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress blogs. This would have been useful while I was shopping online for boots because I could have more quickly shared my finds with friends, rather than copying and pasting URLs into emails.

While browsing on BestBuy.com (BBY), I found a Sony (SNE) Cybershot DSC-W220 with 12 megapixels and a 4x zoom lens for $199. Selecting a small icon in the Firefox browser’s bottom right corner, I opened the Snipi Toolbar and created a “Digicams” list, including the Sony. Snipi suggested alternative prices for this camera, including $159 for the same thing on Amazon.com (AMZN).

I got an early start on bathing-suit shopping by browsing Web sites for J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret and Macy’s. As expected, the price-comparison suggestions didn’t make sense. For one $58 Victoria’s Secret bathing suit, Snipi suggested a list of alternatives, including a $170 Kohler shower door, $203 Giorgio Armani glasses and an $82 corded telephone. I assure you that the bathing suit looked nothing like any of those items.

Confusing alternatives aside, I liked using the Snipi Toolbar as a place to gather my online research. It displayed images of items neatly lined up in a row, and when I selected an item, the description appeared. Someone like my sister, who is planning a wedding, might enjoy using the Snipi Toolbar for saving photos of various locations in a list she could call “Wedding Venues.” She could then share the entire list with me in one step. Or she could go visit some of the places and bring an iPhone with the Snipi app to see her list.

I tried the iPhone app, and it was a cinch to tap My Lists to see the online research I’d gathered. Here, as on the browser toolbar, visuals make it easy to glance through many products.

The toolbar can save various lists that you name and categorize into Shop, Photos or Videos, and these can be kept private, shared with friends or made public. Public lists are seen by all other users on Snipi.com, which is also a social-networking site. I wouldn’t use it as such, because I already rely on other social-networking outlets, but some people might.

Snipi, which uses a guessing algorithm to fill in details like a product’s price, says its toolbar will improve as more people use it. If you do a lot of research or online shopping or you simply want an online tool for saving images and videos from the Web, Snipi will work well for you. Its price-comparison suggestions need some improvement, but I felt more organized after using the Snipi Toolbar for a week’s worth of browsing.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

When the moment comes to take the perfect picture of a snowy mountaintop, Fourth of July fireworks or soccer goal in midkick, most people forget about these features or don’t know how to use them. And while many digital cameras can now detect faces and make sure they are in focus, they can’t tell whether that face is smiling or not. The results aren’t bad, but they could be much better.

Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-W170 uses Smile Shutter Mode to snap pictures when a subject smiles.

This week, I tested three new digital cameras that claim to do the thinking for you. Some digitally analyze the scene you’re about to capture, automatically choosing the setting that would take the best picture. Others can detect when a subject is smiling so as to automatically know when to snap the photo. One camera even attempts to digitally alter frowning faces into smiles, with amusing results.

I tried out Sony’s $300 Cyber-shot DSC-W170, Kodak’s $250 EasyShare Z1085 IS and Olympus’s $200 FE-340. Only the Sony (SNE) includes all three of the aforementioned features; the Kodak (EK) has scene detection, and the Olympus (OCPNF.PK) camera has built-in smile detection. I found the automatic scene detection offered in the Sony and Kodak cameras to be the most useful feature for everyday photos. It improved my photos and didn’t require any extra adjustments. I handed the cameras to other people to take pictures, without having to change any settings.

The automatic smile detection offered in the Sony and Olympus cameras was fun to use and could be especially helpful for families whose young kids never seem to smile at the right moment. But it didn’t work consistently and had trouble detecting my bearded boss’s smile and even that of a beard-free colleague.

I found Sony’s frown-fixing tool, which is called Happy Face Retouch, to be rather unusual. It took already captured images of my friends’ faces and turned their frowns or ambivalent looks into smiles, but didn’t adjust the subjects’ eyes. Though this was good for laughs, the eerie-looking grins pasted on faces reminded me of painted-on clowns’ mouths. And some attempts to retouch a face couldn’t detect the face to alter it. But a handful of the Happy Face Retouches looked somewhat natural.

Similar Specs

These cameras boast many similar specifications. All three use 5x optical zoom lenses, and the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W170 and Kodak EasyShare Z1085 IS each have 10.1 and 10 megapixel image sensors while the least expensive Olympus FE-340 has 8 megapixels. The Sony and Olympus both have generous 2.7-inch viewing screens and almost identically sleek builds, though the Sony is the only one of these three cameras to have an optical viewfinder.

The Kodak’s viewing screen is slightly smaller than the other two digital cameras, measuring 2.5 inches, but its build isn’t nearly as compact as the others. It reminded me more of small, high-end SLR camera, with its comfortably large hand grip, a settings knob on the top edge of the camera, and a protruding zoom lens.

Sony’s Happy Face Retouch feature digitally changes facial expressions into smiles, but all it did was make me look unnatural and awkward.

Kodak’s EasyShare Z1085 IS takes Secure Digital (SD) memory cards, which are more common than the Memory Stick and xD cards that work in the Sony and Olympus cameras, respectively.

The Kodak and Sony digital cameras have different names for their automatic scene-detection features. By default, the Kodak camera works in Smart Capture Mode, which includes intelligent scene detection, capture control and image processing. I focused on the camera’s scene detection, which automatically determines whether the photo should be taken in Macro, Text (for shots of text in a book, for example), Face, Landscape or Night settings.

Icon on the Screen

I snapped pictures around Washington, D.C., noting a tiny icon on the camera’s screen that indicated which of the five scene modes was being used to capture the photo. A flower icon indicating Macro appeared on my screen when I stooped to get a close-up shot of a tulip, and an icon of a dark sky and stars showed on the screen when I took photos at night. The camera’s flash, focus and exposure changed according to the type of photo.

The Sony camera uses what it calls Intelligent Scene Recognition to decide which settings should go along with certain photos. Like the Kodak, icons on the Sony’s screen indicated the scene settings that were automatically deemed appropriate, including Backlight, Backlight Portrait, Twilight, Twilight Portrait and Twilight Using a Tripod.

The Sony’s Intelligent Scene Recognition isn’t on by default like Kodak’s feature. Instead, it must be turned on from within a menu, but once on, it stays on until you turn it off. ISR can be used in either Auto or Advanced mode; Auto takes a single photo with automatically determined settings, while Advanced takes two shots — one with manual settings you can choose and another shot immediately following the first with automatic settings according to what the camera thinks is best.

I experienced surprising results with the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W170 and Olympus FE-340 while testing their automatic smile-detecting functions. My friends thought I was joking when I told them the camera would take their picture only if they were smiling. When the flash went off multiple times as they kept smiling, they were intrigued by this feature.

Sony’s version, which it calls Smile Shutter Mode, is easy to switch into by turning a dial on the camera to a smiley face. Once this setting is chosen and the camera’s shutter button is pressed, the Cyber-shot will search for smiles in its subjects, and will take photos whenever it detects a smile. Settings within this mode can be set to specifically detect an adult’s smile or a child’s smile, and the degree of smile can be set to low, medium or high; I kept things simple by leaving the smile detector on default settings.

Capturing Smiles

Olympus calls this feature Smile Shot, capturing three rapid shots in a row to make sure everyone’s smiling. The idea of taking three shots would be extra helpful with an indecisive baby, but most of my friends were able to hold their smiles, which produced three almost exactly identical shots each time someone smiled. Smile Shot is harder to get to in a pinch compared with the Sony: it’s buried in a list of 13 settings on the Olympus when the camera is set in Scene mode.

The Olympus seemed to be a bit slower than the Sony when it came to detecting smiles, but both had trouble with bearded men and even some folks without beards. And people felt silly standing around with a smile on their faces waiting for the camera to finally work. Closed-mouth, no-teeth smiles were harder for these cameras to detect, but not impossible. In group situations, the Olympus camera will focus on whoever’s face appears largest, which could mean the person closest to the camera, while the Sony takes a picture whenever anyone in the group smiles.

Putting a Happy Face On

If someone isn’t smiling, Sony’s Happy Face Retouch tool can come in handy, but don’t count on liking the results. In a group shot of five friends, two people who weren’t smiling put a bit of a damper on the whole shot. I used Happy Face Retouch, but it picked up on only one of the nonsmiling faces, turning a confused look into a smile that looked passable. But other results weren’t usable. A serious-looking shot of me deliberately not smiling looked freakishly unnatural after the touch-up, mostly because the rest of my face didn’t join the smile. I looked more like someone who had received too many Botox treatments.

Sony says that, in group shots, it can detect and change up to eight faces, but in my tests it usually changed only one. This retouching tool is also difficult to find: It took me 16 button presses to change each image into a smile — or what Sony calls a smile. A few times, Happy Face Retouch couldn’t identify a face in the photo, even when just one person stood in the frame.

These digital cameras took good photos, overall, and are fun to use because they take pressure off the photographer. I found the automatic scene-detection tools of the Kodak and Sony to be the most realistic and useful offerings, and I’m sure it won’t be long before automatic scene detection becomes as commonplace as an automatic flash.

The chart below compares features of the three cameras described. Click on it to make it larger.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Searchme

This week, I tested two applications that turn searching into feasts for the eyes. Instead of showing search results in lines of text, these results are visually based. One, called SpaceTime, displays search results in three-dimensional views that make images look as if they are flying onto the screen. The other, an actual search engine called Searchme, spreads image results out in fan-like patterns. Both SpaceTime and Searchme encourage people to search by choosing what looks visually familiar or accurate, rather than trying to discern what the text in a link might mean.

The idea of improved search isn’t a new one. Many have tried, ranging from Ask.com’s media-rich result pages to Mahalo.com’s human-powered search engine. But Google’s (GOOG) simplicity and experience have made it hard to beat, and competitors know the importance of relevant and reliable results. Rather than comparing these sites with the big G, I looked at them as add-ons that could be especially useful for certain searches.

Searchme, a search engine built from the ground up, is technically in private beta — meaning that it is still a work in progress and users must be invited to use it. The company gave me access to the site and created a link so that readers of this column could also use it: www.searchme.com/wsj. This Web-based tool works on Windows and Mac operating systems and in any major browser, and it tries to improve search by asking users to choose a category for their search terms.

For instance, when I typed “US Open” in the Searchme box, categories appeared to the right, including Tennis, Squash, Gambling & Casinos and Golf. Since I was looking for the tennis-related grand slam, I chose the Tennis category and saved myself some typing. The more I used Searchme, the more I came to rely on these categories for faster, more-refined results.

SpaceTime

Searchme’s visual search works by displaying snapshots of Web sites, each of which has the search term highlighted on its page. These pages fan out from the center to look like Cover Flow in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes, visually sorting images like album covers in a jukebox so they can be flipped through until the best Web page is found.

By moving a cursor along a horizontal scroll bar below these pages, I skimmed through 10 to 15 Web sites in a matter of seconds, quickly weeding out unwanted sites. But these pages don’t allow interaction like scrolling down or playing of embedded videos. A button below these images reveals a list-view where text and links relating to the images are listed, but I kept this option hidden more often than not.

Though Searchme’s categories are helpful and I liked using visual searching, I did notice many more results, overall, while performing searches through Google and Yahoo (YHOO). A Google search for the Regency Hotel in New York City returned accurate links to the hotel’s Web site — and a map. Searchme’s first result was a defunct Web page for the Regency, and the younger search engine doesn’t yet have maps, news or stock quotes like Google.

Settings can be adjusted for Searchme, including one option to filter out adult content and another to open up new windows whenever a Web page is selected, so as not to lose the current page.

SpaceTime (www.spacetime.com) differs from Searchme in that it doesn’t try to be its own search engine. Instead, it is a browser that works with established search engines and Web sites. It isn’t Web-based, like Searchme, and must be downloaded to a Windows (MSFT) PC (it doesn’t yet work on Macs). The intense 3-D graphics of this program work best on a computer with at least one gigabyte of system memory and 256 megabytes of dedicated video memory.

At first glance, SpaceTime appears to be a normal browser. It has the usual URL line where specific Web sites can be entered and a search box at the top right that can be set to search Google, Google Images, Yahoo, Yahoo Images, eBay (EBAY), Flickr, YouTube, RSS feeds or Amazon (AMZN).

But using this search box starts the fun of the product. Search results appear as images lined up on the screen, floating through space and descending into the distance in a 3-D visualization akin to that of Windows Vista’s Flip 3D. SpaceTime’s dark background gives it a dramatic edge, and each object is reflected in an artistic, glass-like surface. Results can be tweaked, turned, magnified and moved within this 3-D space.

When I performed normal Google or Yahoo searches, the returned results appeared as images of each Web site on which the searched term appeared. When I searched for images on Google, Yahoo or Flickr, the results came back in image-only fashion — not images embedded in Web sites — that looked stunning lined up in 3-D. Searches of eBay are especially useful on SpaceTime because each item up for bid zooms onto the screen as its own object along with its current price, number of bids and remaining auction time. YouTube searches return videos lined up in SpaceTime’s 3-D environment.

With all of these images flying in and out of the screen, things can get a little overwhelming. One pile of search results is called a stack, and each stack is automatically saved in a dock at the bottom of the screen, labeled with a thumbnail image of where you last left off. Searches can be saved and snapshots of screens can be captured and saved in the dock.

To return results as fast as possible, SearchTime says it will pull up just 10 at a time for image, product and video searches, or five pages at once for content-heavy sites. But in my tests, using two different Vista computers with 2GB of RAM each, I usually never saw more than five results at a time. The next five or 10 images can be retrieved by choosing a “Next Set” button at the bottom of the screen.

On-screen Web sites and objects are interactive, meaning that I could scroll down within a Web page or play a YouTube video within the SpaceTime screen. A clever magnifying glass pops up on the screen to pinpoint the original search term on each page.

SpaceTime allowed me to rapidly flip through tens or even hundreds of images and Web sites in a very short time, but it wasn’t perfect. Some search results took a while to load, only displaying the first object while the other lined-up objects appeared as empty frames because they were still loading. YouTube seemed sluggish and wasn’t as easy to navigate as some other searches, and Flickr was especially slow to load in a few of my tests.

SpaceTime is working on a Web-based version that won’t rely so heavily on each user’s PC specs, and Searchme is still in its testing phase, working to return more relevant results. But for now, these two sites turn search into a different, much more visually stimulating experience. After using these programs for a little while, I started to search differently — moving through results faster and clicking on fewer links that returned unwanted results. Though I’ll still rely on Google for basic searches, visual search can save time and turn searching into a fun process.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week, I tested a product that marries prints with the digital frame: Hewlett-Packard’s $249 HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center.

The A826 is the latest in H-P’s series of compact countertop home snapshot printers, meant to turn out small photos quickly. But it has an unusual form, with a large seven-inch screen that also allows for images to be displayed in slide shows, like a digital picture frame. This touch-screen also lets users edit shots using a finger or stylus. Pressing one button prints the image in about a minute and a half.

HP Photosmart A826 Home Photo Center

This new model, due in stores this weekend, is meant to work as a home photo kiosk, so it’s a bit bigger than H-P’s compact photo printers, which have built-in handles for portability and take up less space. The A826 is also pricier than these smaller printers — $70 more than the newest model.

I liked the idea behind this photo printer, editing station and digital frame. Its large screen, 5.6 inches of which are used for the photos, was a welcome change to most photo printers with preview screens that can’t be seen without squinting. But I was disappointed by some of the A826’s features. The newly added ability to draw on images, for example, yielded results that looked fine on-screen but printed out looking like scribble. Removing red eye didn’t seem to improve images on the screen; only when printed did these shots appear red-eye free. And the touch-screen wasn’t as sensitive as I would’ve liked, requiring a few tries to get some buttons to respond.

I couldn’t help but compare the A826 with standalone digital frames. Unlike almost all such frames, the A826 lacks internal storage meaning that in order to keep a slide show going, a memory card, USB drive or camera would need to be plugged into the device. Some digital frames also come with built-in wireless networking to pull images from the Web; the A826 doesn’t have this capability.

This device is hard to miss. Its rounded edges are covered in a stylish white plastic, and the screen is surrounded by black and a pretty shade of pale blue, making it look like a prop from the Jetsons cartoon. It measures roughly the same width as H-P’s compact photo printers, but stands more than twice as tall with the screen at the top so users don’t have to bend as far down to see images. Photo paper measuring 4 by 6 or 5 by 7 inches feeds into the back of the printer in a neat, enclosed compartment that holds up to 100 sheets.

A tiny speaker on the front side of the A826 emits cutesy chimes whenever the device powers on or finishes printing a photo, which I liked. It also uses its large screen for illustrating how to perform tasks like loading paper or inserting a print cartridge.

I got started using the HP Photosmart A826 for its digital frame capabilities, inserting my digital camera’s SecureDigital memory card into a slot below the viewing screen and queuing up about 400 images from my memory card. Images appear on the screen six at a time and in the bottom left corner of each there is a white circle, which can be touched to give it a red checkmark, putting it in the slide-show queue. Tapping the center of any shot magnifies it for editing.

I marked about 30 photos and played them in succession by touching a Slideshow button on the far right edge of the screen. This touchscreen button and others — representing Menu, Back, Print, Scroll Left and Scroll Right — line the left and right black borders of the screen. Only the buttons that make sense to choose at any given time will glow, so users know which ones can be selected and, therefore, can navigate a little easier. For instance, in the Get Creative editing menu, only the Scroll Left, Scroll Right and Back buttons glow.

I folded up a flap that covers the memory-card slots and left my slide show playing for a while on my kitchen counter. It worked like a digital picture frame, for the most part. If the A826 isn’t used for about 10 minutes, it will automatically switch into slide-show mode — a feature I found useful for moments when I didn’t remember that I left it on. This automatic slide show switches over to a black screen after about an hour, though programmed slide shows stay on until turned off.

Touching the screen when an image appears, mid-slide show, will pause the slide show for editing or printing. I used my finger to do simple editing, and most options are offered in large touch-screen buttons, though in more than one instance I had to press buttons with my finger a few times to get them to work. A small white stylus helped, especially for drawing on photos.

I drew cartoon bubbles coming out of people’s mouths and wrote little messages like, “Hey y’all!” bubbling from a Texan friend in a shot from her trip to Europe. These touches can be done in different colors and line thicknesses, and mistakes can easily be erased. They looked good on-screen, but when printed, turned pixilated and detracted from the photo.

I tried some more normal photo editing, such as cropping photos, enhancing a photo’s brightness and removing red eye. The last of these options didn’t work so well in my photos, seeming to leave eyes glowing on the screen. When I printed these shots for the sake of testing, I realized that red eye was actually removed in almost all instances. But this is confusing for users who don’t want to waste ink and paper finding out whether or not the image was corrected.

I found the A826’s most useful photo-enhancing option to be the ability to add captions to shots. These can be entered by using an on-screen keyboard, choosing from five fonts and six colors. The caption can be dragged around the screen to test where it will look best. These typed fonts looked professional and neat, especially compared with my own drawn-on editing.

Printing on the HP Photosmart A826 worked without a problem. It comes with five 5-by-7-inch sheets of paper enough ink for 20 4-by-6-inch prints. Value packs of paper and ink for 120 4-by-6-inch prints cost $35. The printer automatically detects whether it’s loaded with photo paper measuring 5-by-7 or 4-by-6 inches, and prints accordingly. A 5-by-7-inch shot takes a bit longer to print, but looked rather good.

The HP Photosmart A826 seems like it was designed with good intentions, and its large touchscreen is an improvement all on its own. But too many features of this device didn’t work the way they should, from red eyes that didn’t appear fixed on-screen to the touchscreen that didn’t always respond right away. H-P will find an eager audience with this home photo kiosk, but it needs improvement.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

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.