Now there’s a way to upload photos that are already labeled with their exact latitude and longitude using geotagging, the fancy name for labeling data with information on its geographic origin. Photos with “geotags” have coordinates embedded invisibly in them. Some programs or online photo services use these tags to generate maps showing just where each photo was taken, or to label or organize the images. Not long ago, this capability was mostly done through manual labeling or with costly equipment.

The $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card from Eye-Fi Inc. gives people the ability to wirelessly send geotagged photos from a digital camera.

This week, I tested the $129 Eye-Fi Explore Card (EyeFi.com), a special two-gigabyte memory card from Eye-Fi Inc. that adds a photo geotagging feature to Eye-Fi’s original functionality: the automatic wireless uploading of photos, straight from a digital camera to a home computer or photo-sharing service. If all goes well, users can capture and upload what are essentially geographically prelabeled batches of digital photos — with minimal effort and time.

But after days of testing, I found myself more frustrated as I used this wireless memory card in various places and situations, and found the tagging to be unreliable in one scenario. (Eye-Fi Inc. said my experiences weren’t typical.) At home in Washington, D.C., and while on a business trip to California, I tried it using a two-year-old Kodak digital camera and two different Vista laptops, though it also works on Macs.

Eye-Fi introduced the Explore Card as a follow-up to the company’s original wireless memory card, which it introduced last fall. Once set up, the first Eye-Fi card initiated the transferring of photos to a computer or Web site whenever the digital camera was turned on and as long as it was near a pre-associated wireless network.

Through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the Explore card can automatically label photos with their latitude and longitude using data from the Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system. As long as a photo is captured within the Skyhook coverage area, which the company says covers 70% of North America, and the geotagging is enabled, each photo will be coded with data identifying where it was captured.

The Explore Card turned otherwise normal photo-sharing sites into mini maps showing where I had traveled while on a business trip in Silicon Valley. I set my account up to work with Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Picasa Web Albums, though only one will work at a time. Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and Smugmug make use of geotagged photos by tagging shots with their location data, such as “Downtown Palo Alto, California.” I used Flickr and Picasa Web Albums to instantaneously generate a map showing where I was when I took photos.

On Flickr, each image was represented by a pink dot associated with one of several photos displayed in a horizontal bar below the map. This map can be searched for specific tags (photo labels) or locations and can be narrowed to show images from everyone who uses Flickr, just your own photostream, or only photos from friends or contacts. My searches returned results in seconds, finding shots that were geotagged with “Palo Alto” and tagged by me as containing flowers. I enjoyed looking at other Flickr users’ photos when I searched everyone’s images, specifically in cities where I recognized landmarks.

Picasa Web Albums showed each geotagged image on a map by placing tiny versions of each photo on the map. In certain cases, when I had multiple photos taken at the same spot, photos appeared with lines drawn from them to a spot, much like spokes of a wheel. I also looked at my Picasa photos on maps in Google Earth; a quick link to the program is conveniently found at the top of the Picasa Web Albums screen.

Another key feature of the Explore Card is its hotspot connectivity. The card is capable of working in any Wayport location, which includes McDonald’s (MCD) restaurants and certain airports and hotels. Though using Wayport locations normally requires sign-ins and/or payment via a computer screen, the Explore Card works as soon as the camera is turned on in these locations. This service is free for the first year, but after that, it costs $19 annually to continue.

Finally, the Explore Card notifies users via SMS or email messages when photos have either started or finished uploading; or if these uploads are interrupted, which happened to me a few times. This is useful in Wayport wireless zones, where the camera has no real way of signaling when an upload is finished or when a computer isn’t handy.

In a hotel with a flaky Wi-Fi network, the Explore Card was crippled, though I blame the hotel for this inconvenience. But even when I traveled to a local McDonald’s, where Eye-Fi’s maker has a deal for free Wi-Fi for its cards, the Eye-Fi stuttered and couldn’t consistently upload photos. When I plugged the card directly into my laptops, the results weren’t much better.

If you aren’t within Wi-Fi range while taking a photo, it won’t be geotagged. I ran into this issue in one instance: On California’s highway 101, I took a handful of photos, but when I checked my Eye-Fi account later, none of these photos was automatically geotagged.

Some people worry about privacy settings when it comes to uploading geotagged photos directly to a sharing Web site. Settings within the Eye-Fi Manager make it easy to adjust permissions to determine who can see your photos within each of about 25 sharing sites.

Users can opt to share photos only to a home computer through their own Wi-Fi network, and a special card is designed for just that: the $79 Eye-Fi Home. This is meant to serve as a shortcut for transfers.

The original Eye-Fi, which costs $99, was a useful tool as a wireless memory card, but I didn’t have as much luck with the more expensive Eye-Fi Explore. Still, when it did work, I found geotagging to be a great way of automatically labeling and organizing my photos. Instead of just being neatly stored in a folder on your computer, geotagged images are given a spark of life and relevancy when plotted out on a map.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email: mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week I took a look at some options for people who want to get rid of old electronics, one way or another. The good news is that there are a handful of Web sites that make it easy to do this — and some of them may even pay you for your old products. The bad news is that you’ll likely receive only a fraction of what you originally paid, especially if you waited a while to get rid of it.

Some sites, like Gazelle.com and VenJuvo.com, offer cash for your items and/or will recycle products. Another site, TechForward.com, lets people pay a fee to “lock in” a value for how much the site promises to pay for the product in the future. MyBoneYard.com accepts only laptops, desktop PCs, cellphones and flat-panel monitors, and gives Visa (V) gift cards rather than cash.

I was surprised to receive significantly different value offers from Gazelle and VenJuvo when trying to sell the exact same products on each site. In one instance, VenJuvo offered me $30 more than Gazelle for a digital camera; another time, I got $15 more from Gazelle for an old Apple (AAPL) iPod. It’s worth the extra step to shop around at more than one of these sites before getting rid of something.

Both ask a few questions about the item, including its condition and whether or not it still has the accessories that originally came with it. Gazelle determines a product’s value using retail — think Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) — and wholesale channels; VenJuvo uses similar criteria and also looks at competitors’ prices.

If you worry about someone stealing your digital data, you’ll likely not feel comfortable dropping something in the mail that’s chock full of personal information, especially if it no longer powers on to allow the owner to wipe this information.

Both Gazelle and VenJuvo accept at least some types of digital cameras, laptops, MP3 players, GPS devices, camcorders and gaming consoles. Gazelle also accepts cellphones. But they don’t take everything. Gazelle doesn’t take LCD TVs and VenJuvo doesn’t accept satellite radios and portable hard drives or any smartphones or cellphones other than the iPhone; neither accepts desktop PCs.

I took the closest look at newly released Gazelle, owned by Second Rotation Inc., and walked through the simple start-to-finish process of selling a gadget and receiving money from the site. After pulling up the site, people can find their product and its value by choosing from a list of nine categories or by typing some part of the product’s name into a search box.

I sold Gazelle a first-generation iPod Mini with four gigabytes of memory for which my boss paid $249 in 2004. I answered a few questions about the product: Yes, it still powered on; no, I didn’t have the original AC adapter, manuals or software installation CD, and it was in “excellent” condition, according to my assessment. Gazelle placed its value at $25.

At this step, I opted to add the iPod to my box and check out, but users can also add other items to a box, including electronics for recycling. Gazelle’s policy is that it pays 100% of shipping costs for any box shipped to the company, so long as there’s at least one item in the box worth $1. Eighty percent of transactions qualify for a free box; the rest can be sent with printed-out prepaid shipping labels, but you must find packaging.

Gazelle lets users receive payments via a mailed, paper check or using PayPal; money is received either way within five business days. People can also donate their money to one of 23 causes, including the American Red Cross and World Vision. I opted for PayPal, and the $25 amount was deposited shortly after Gazelle received the iPod.

I sent the old iPod to Gazelle in a brightly colored, empty box that arrives at a customer’s door a few days after he or she sells the device to Gazelle. I secured the old iPod in the box using balled up paper, and sealed it with packing tape. A prepaid shipping label was already stuck to it, and I needed only drop it off at UPS.

If Gazelle receives a product and decides that it isn’t worth what you said it was — either more or less — and you’d rather not sell, the company will ship the product back, free of charge. But while Gazelle’s site guarantees users that they’ll receive their money, and that personal data are safe with the company, no money-back guarantee is offered.

Gazelle hopes to calm nerves by posting detailed instructions on the site about how to wipe a device of all private information. But the company hasn’t yet done this, and numerous users will remain skeptical even with such instructions.

I also poked around on VenJuvo Inc.’s Web site of the same name, www.VenJuvo.com, which is derived from two Greek words meaning “support, assist and delight sellers,” according to the company. This site, too, buys products back from people, though it pays via check, PayPal or Kmart (SHLD) gift card. Users fill out similarly simple questionnaires on each product to help assess value. Unlike Gazelle’s style of mailing boxes to users, VenJuvo gives users only prepaid shipping labels to print out and stick on a box that the customer must supply.

One notable difference between the sites is Gazelle’s broader range of products. In the case of digital cameras, for example, Gazelle accepts 80 brands while VenJuvo takes only Canon (CAJ), Sony (SNE), Olympus and Kodak (EK). Unlike with Gazelle, if you send VenJuvo a product that isn’t worth what you said it was, the company won’t return the product free-of-charge; instead, it will charge you for shipping.

If users choose to receive a gift card, they get a 10% added value. While VenJuvo doesn’t let people donate a product’s value to a cause, it will add this feature next week and will include different causes (like Ronald McDonald House and Big Brothers Big Sisters) than those found on Gazelle.

Unlike Gazelle, VenJuvo will always take items for recycling and will pay for the shipping, regardless of whether you traded something in for a value.

A useful resource for general electronics recycling is the Consumer Electronics Association Web site, www.MyGreenElectronics.org, which locates nearby electronics-recycling centers according to ZIP Code. And almost every computer manufacturer has a recycling program in place; some will even recycle computers that aren’t their own brand.

One way or another, it’s time to clean out the old junk drawer. Just be sure to do some comparison shopping if you want money for your old products.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.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

Most users know how to upload photos, but don’t want to hassle with USB cords and slow upload speeds when transferring images onto a computer or photo-sharing site. Camera docks and memory-card readers built into PCs have attempted to alleviate these transferring problems, but these so-called shortcuts still require a certain amount of dedication to the process.

In the past couple of years, a handful of companies have gone a step farther by introducing Wi-Fi enabled digital cameras, notably Nikon Inc. and Eastman Kodak Co. But this capability works only in certain cameras and even then requires users to walk through a number of steps to send the photos through a service created by the company instead of sending them to a computer or Web site.

Little Effort Needed

This week, I tested a refreshingly simple gadget that solves this problem and does what most technology products don’t: It works in existing devices and requires next to no effort. The $100 Eye-Fi Card by Eye-Fi Inc. (www.eye.fi) is a two-gigabyte SecureDigital memory card with a built-in wireless chip. It slips into any camera with an SD-card slot, and whenever the camera is turned on, looks for a familiar Wi-Fi network and uploads your photos to your Mac or PC and one of 17 photo-sharing sites. After a quick, one-time setup, the user does nothing more than turning on the digital camera.

I thought this thing was too good to be true and set out to find its flaws. But after using it with two digital cameras (one brand new and the other over three years old), three different computers (each with different operating systems) and five photo-sharing sites, I’m convinced that the Eye-Fi is a terrific little tool. It works quickly and is a no-brainer to get going. The only people who won’t like it are those who enjoy razzing their lazy friends for forgetting to share digital photos.

Minor Inconveniences

The Eye-Fi’s flaws are minor enough to dismiss. For one thing, it doesn’t work on Wi-Fi networks that use log-in pages like those in Starbucks; instead, it’s meant to work on home networks or other “open” networks. Secondly, there’s no way to know when Eye-Fi finishes transferring photos unless you check your computer. Finally, your digital camera must stay on for the duration of the wireless transfer, which slightly taxes battery power, and slower networks and/or transferring numerous higher-resolution photos will require a bit more juice. Likewise, Eye-Fi looks for Wi-Fi networks whenever the camera is on, though the company says this only uses a minimal amount of the camera’s battery power.

The Eye-Fi Card comes in a small, colorful box that reminded me of a pop-up book: Pull one side and a quick-start guide appears on the right while the left swings out a piece holding the Eye-Fi card reader and SD card. This reader is only needed for the initial setup on each computer, which only took a few minutes per system.

I tried my Eye-Fi first on a Windows XP machine, plugging the card reader and card into a USB port. The software setup walks users through clear, quick steps like testing the computer’s firewall to be sure it can work through it and asking which folder should be designated to receive wirelessly transferred images. Here, I also typed in my account information for sharing images on Kodak Gallery; later I added Shutterfly, Snapfish, Picasa and Flickr. Other online destinations included blogs like Vox and TypePad, along with social-networking giant Facebook. The last step instructed me to insert the Eye-Fi SD card into my camera to snap the first test photo of myself, making sure it was working properly.

Managing Your Photos

Transferred photos are all reflected in the Eye-Fi Manager, a Web-based, password-protected site that tells which images were uploaded to photo-sharing sites and the computer. Users can opt to only upload from the Eye-Fi to one or the other or both, but only one photo-sharing site and one Mac or PC can be selected at a time. Account information for any of the 17 sharing sites can be saved within Eye-Fi, making it a cinch to switch where you want to send photos.

Around the office, within my registered Wi-Fi network, I took photos that showed up seconds later on my computer screen. At home, I entered my password-protected network’s information one time and watched as captured photos transferred wirelessly from my camera to either my Mac or Windows Vista laptop.

Quick Transfers

On average, it took about 40 seconds to upload each image to a Web site and about 40 seconds more after that for a photo to transfer onto my hard drive. I got home from a friend’s cocktail party and set my camera on a table with its power on. Ten minutes later, I turned on my computer to check the transfer and 12 photos from the party were uploaded to my Kodak Gallery account and my iMac’s hard drive.

Images upload in JPEG formats using their original, full resolutions. Some sharing sites change the formats for photos, but this varies between sites and isn’t related to Eye-Fi.

Eye-Fi won’t do absolutely everything for you, so for certain photo-sharing sites, you’ll still need to log on to send out emails for sharing albums with friends. But double clicking on any of the images in the Eye-Fi Manager takes you directly to wherever that image lives — whether on Picasa, Flickr, or your own hard drive.

I swapped the Eye-Fi SD card from one camera, an older Konica-Minolta Dimage X50 that still works well, to a new Kodak EasyShare V1253, which ironically has built-in photo emailing capability that isn’t nearly as easy to use as Eye-Fi. The Eye-Fi didn’t miss a beat and operated the same way in both cameras.

The Eye-Fi Card is as simple as it sounds and works with most cameras that use SD cards (for a complete list of compatible cameras, see http://support.eye.fi/compatibility/). If someone you know is constantly taking pictures that are never seen again by anyone else and they use a Wi-Fi network, Eye-Fi will serve as a carefree solution that takes the aggravation out of transferring photos to share with others.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

It’s a good time to be in the market for such a camera. According to research from Olympus, unit sales for these gizmos has grown about 30% in the past two years, while dollar sales grew at about half that rate, indicating declining prices and improved technology. In fact, digital-camera prices have dropped an average of $30 over the past 12 months.

This guide offers an overview of the basics that you’ll need to know when buying a digital camera. It also explains many of the fancy features that are popping up on these devices, such as facial recognition — a camera’s ability to detect when faces are being captured in photos, thus appropriately adjusting exposure, focus and flash. This guide isn’t geared toward hobbyists, but rather toward average users who want good quality photos but don’t want to struggle with confusing product specs and promotions.

Point and Shoot, or Flaunt and Pocket

As you begin looking for a camera, selecting a preferred size and shape will help narrow your choices. Like iPods and cellphones, stylish pocket cameras are fashionable accessories; some come in shades like Precious Rose or Noble Blue. These pocket models, designed with emphasis on small size, are as easy to carry as they are to use for taking good photos: most offer seven or eight megapixels each, a 3x or better optical zoom lens and a stunning viewing screen. Good examples include Sony Corp.’s $400 Cyber-shot DSC-T100 or Nikon Inc.’s $300 Coolpix S50.

If you don’t mind sacrificing style for a camera that’s sturdier in your hand but bulkier in your purse, point-and-shoot models will be more your speed. On average, these cost less than their showy cousins. They’re more likely to have protruding zoom lenses that don’t collapse entirely into the camera body and often feature larger buttons. More point-and-shoots offer optical viewfinders, which have become practically extinct on pocket digicams where real estate is scarce. Examples of point-and-shoots with optical viewfinders include Eastman Kodak Co.’s EasyShare C653 and Canon Inc.’s PowerShot A460-both cost $130.

A third category of digital cameras, the single-lens reflex or SLR, continues to be marketed to regular consumers rather than to the photography enthusiasts for whom they were originally intended. SLR prices have dropped a couple of hundred dollars in the past year, but many models still start around $800 and come with detachable lenses and flashes. Average users can steer clear of SLR cameras.

Megapixels

Most cameras today offer anywhere between six and 10 megapixels; cameras with four megapixels or fewer are rather rare. But while higher megapixel counts are easy to find for less money, such as Hewlett-Packard Co.’s $300 PhotoSmart R967 with 10 megapixels, such intense resolution is really only necessary if you plan to heavily edit or blow up your photographs for jumbo prints, which most people won’t be doing.

Zoom Confusion

While most camera makers offer clearer marketing strategies now than a year or so ago, some still try to dupe consumers by listing only a camera’s total zoom — the optical and digital zoom multiplied together to create a larger, more impressive number. The truth lies in optical zoom, an enhancement made by a physically moving lens, not digital zoom, which instead magnifies a photo using the camera’s digital circuitry.

This year, companies also created a new category for cameras with 10x or 12x optical-zoom lenses — these are often referred to as high zoom digital cameras. In reality, a camera with about a 4x optical zoom is sufficient for most people.

Facial Recognition

This category is likely to become more popular. Facial recognition makes the camera smart enough to recognize that the subject contains a face and must be captured with the correct balance of color and lighting. Sony’s Cyber-shot G1 can detect up to eight faces in one image; Canon’s technology can detect up to nine per shot.

Image Stabilization

Image stabilization, or IS, was once only available in high-end SLR cameras. Now, almost all of the top-name consumer digicams offer this because without optical viewfinders, users must shakily hold cameras out to look through viewing screens. Referred to as antishake or vibration reduction by some manufacturers, there are three kinds of IS: optical and mechanical image stabilization, which physically steady a camera even when your hand is shaking, or digital image stabilization, which can improve a shot when the photographed subject is moving.

Some cameras, like the $250 Olympus Stylus 760, offer dual IS. This means the camera is equipped with both digital and mechanical or optical image stabilization, the best of both worlds. If you’ll be using a camera specifically for shots of moving objects, digital IS will work.

Storage — on Your Camera or on a Web Site

The cost of memory cards has dropped by half compared with last year: one-gigabyte memory cards now only cost about $30, and $50 two-gigabyte cards are even more popular thanks to people who want to record videos for uploading and sharing on Web sites. Data can be transferred from these cards by plugging them into a computer using an adapter or a card slot, or cameras can be connected to PCs with USB cords.

Now, Kodak, Nikon and Sony offer cameras with wireless Internet connection capabilities, or Wi-Fi. This allows you to take pictures and, when connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, upload them directly to a Web site for sharing or storing, saving you the step of transferring the images to a computer first. These cameras are the $200 EasyShare One from Kodak, Nikon’s $350 Coolpix S50c and Sony’s $600 Cyber-shot DSC-G1.

Although using Wi-Fi in a digital camera is a smart idea, it could be a real drain on your camera’s battery. Wi-Fi is by no means a necessary feature, but some people will find it a useful add-on.

Battery Tips

Camera battery life can be affected by new features like extra-large screens — especially those that can play slide shows of your photographs — built-in Wi-Fi and even in-camera editing, which requires your camera and LCD screen to be on for longer periods. If you rarely take shots indoors, your flash will likely be used less, which might help your camera’s battery life. A spare battery is useful, and some cameras will work with drugstore batteries for the sake of convenience.

In-Camera Editing

The large, bright LCD viewing screens on cameras — some of which measure up to three inches or even three and a half inches diagonally — encourage everyday photogs to share their shots. To make even these images look better, camera manufacturers are incorporating in-camera editing for fixing mistakes on the spot, without a computer.

Cameras from all of the major manufacturers now enable red-eye fixes either as the photo is captured or after the fact. Companies such as Kodak offer zooming, cropping and panoramic shot stitching, while H-P cameras offer touch-ups like blemish-removing and ways to make a subject look slimmer.

* * *

The digital camera category is exciting right now, as these portable devices become more like computers thanks to in-camera editing, greater memory and built-in Wi-Fi. But remember that your photos come first, no matter how many bells and whistles are added to a camera.

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.

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