The once-frustrating process of sharing digital photos and videos has noticeably improved over the past year, thanks to seamless Web-based programs that work like desktop applications. But many of these sites give all the power to whoever created the album, leaving invited guests to simply look at photos or add comments.

Shwup by muvee Technologies gives friends a common album in which to share digital photos and videos.

This week I tested shwup (www.shwup.com), a free Web-based application that’s available starting Wednesday from muvee Technologies and works as described above with only a few pitfalls. The concept is simple: Anyone who signs up for a shwup account can create an album filled with digital photos and videos, and this album can be shared with anyone else via email whether they have a shwup account or not. Recipients of these email invitations can click on an embedded link to view and add content to the album. Or users can completely skip visiting the site and instantly upload content by replying to the email invitation with attached photos and videos.

Muvee Technologies is best known for selling software that automatically creates short movies, or muvees, by blending digital videos and photos with music and transitions. Muvee’s namesake technology is a part of the free shwup site; a few muvees are automatically generated in each of the albums and everyone who is invited to the album can create muvees using its content. But shwup’s main focus is making sharing easier for everyone. It differs from most of the company’s software programs in that it’s free and completely Web-based.

A shwup album takes just a few minutes to set up and even less time to share. It works on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 browsers but won’t work on Apple’s (AAPL) Safari until the fall. Shwup is available Wednesday but is still technically in its beta, or testing, phase, and I ran into a few kinks. I had trouble getting its useful reply-to-email uploading capability to work when two friends and I tried to upload content to my album using attachments in email replies. My friends had to visit the site to upload content. Muvee couldn’t figure out what went wrong when I asked the company about it.

I did, however, add content to someone else’s album using the reply-to-email method, uploading a digital photo in seconds. And in another instance I received a shwup email invitation on my BlackBerry and replied to it with an attached photo, which — in seconds — sent that photo from my BlackBerry to the specified shwup album.

Shwup automatically makes muvees, or short movies with music and transitions, using album content.

A glaring omission from shwup is the ability to view photos in full-screen view, a feature that most photo-sharing programs offer in slideshow mode. A friend of mine said he would use shwup over other photo-sharing Web sites that require user names and passwords if only it had full-screen photos. Muvee recognizes this as one of shwup’s biggest issues and says it will add this feature in August.

I uploaded over 60 high-resolution digital photos into my first shwup album, noting that the only limitation on files is that no individual file can be larger than 100 megabytes. These images can come from your computer, Flickr, Facebook or any Web site. Out of curiosity, I plugged www.cnn.com into the Web site entry box and shwup automatically grabbed images from the site that were available for me to use. I checked two of the images and they were added to my album in seconds.

Shwup automatically made and added three muvees to my album, using my photos put to music it chooses with dramatically timed transitions. These short clips looked really well-done, and were labeled as “sample muvees” so as not to be confused with my content. I followed a few simple steps to create a muvee of my own for the album by dragging photos into a tray, choosing from seven different layout styles and a handful of stock music licensed by shwup.

An option lets you upload your own music to play with your muvee, which I did. Seconds later, my homemade muvee played with transitions that were perfectly timed to the beats of a Fountains of Wayne song. After filling an album with digital photos, videos and muvees that I made, I invited friends to my album using emails generated from shwup.com. Within each album, a clear list of whoever was invited to the album can be seen on the top right side of the page. If someone hasn’t shared content yet, he or she can be “poked” by anyone invited to the album, sending them yet another email invitation.

Everyone invited to an album receives notifications from shwup whenever someone contributed content to the album and everyone can change the layout of the album to one of three settings: Grid, Simple or Mosaic. Moving my cursor over an album’s images showed data about each file including who contributed the photo or video, when it was captured and how many comments it had received in the album. (Comments are readable after clicking on an image to see a bigger version of it.)

Digital videos are labeled with small Play icons to distinguish them from digital still images. But a friend who uploaded a video to my album pointed out that the still image representing his video was a gray square rather than a still of the first scene as it did with the other videos — perhaps because this is where the camera was focused at the start of the video. Without an image to illustrate what the video was, it wasn’t as appealing as the other videos and images. Muvee explained that the ability to select a still image to represent a video was available in its pay software, but not yet in shwup, though the company plans to add this to shwup in the future.

Another hitch: If you invite someone to your album and then add something to the album you’d rather they not see, you can’t un-invite the person. Muvee says it plans to add the ability to un-invite members in July. Individual contributors have the ability to delete or “unshare” the content that they added to an album, while album creators can unshare and delete all pictures or entire albums. Album creators also are given the authority to merge albums.

Along with shwup, muvee also announces a new version of its downloadable pay software Wednesday: muvee Reveal. This $100 software has much more detailed features that specifically tweak your videos to become extra personalized.

When it works, shwup serves as a neat, artistic way to share photos quickly. Friends and family will be relieved that it doesn’t require any forgettable usernames and passwords, and the email-uploading tool will make anyone who knows how to attach something to an email feel like he or she can contribute to a photo-sharing Web site without a second thought. After shwup adds its full-screen photo-viewing option and clears up the glitches of its email-uploading feature, I’ll be using shwup for many group events to come.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Most shoppers would admit to, at one time or another, looking for an item based on seeing it worn by a celebrity. No matter that most of us don’t remotely resemble celebrities, nor do we share their shrewd fashion sense or Hollywood budget. We know that the objects seen on camera start trends.

But without the superstar luxury of a personal shopper, most of us don’t know where to begin looking for the necklace we saw Jennifer Aniston wearing at her latest movie premiere.

Starting today, a new Web site called Like.com (www.like.com) hopes to help solve this problem. It displays recent photos of about a thousand celebrities (mostly female), with a focus on their purse, jewelry, shoes or watch — but not their clothing. Beside a close-up of the celebrity item, Like.com shows similar products with different price tags and/or different brands, along with a link to buy the product online.

Like.com, by Riya, is a visual search engine that lets you search for products such as those worn by celebrities.

The idea behind Like.com is simple enough, but the technology that makes it possible is quite complicated. Like.com comes from a visual search engine called Riya, which works by studying one image and finding others that match it. Like.com also lets you pinpoint the specific part of the image that you like, and can search with extra emphasis on color, shape or pattern.

Like.com is a free site that runs on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Mozilla Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0. The company also says it will most likely work on Apple’s Safari browser. It worked well for us on these browsers.

For the past week, we’ve been dodging glances from suspecting co-workers while shopping online using Like.com, testing its ability to find products like those last seen with our favorite luminaries. We like its clean setup, and it makes great use of technology that lets the site act like a software program all its own. We even found watches and handbags that we might buy down the line.

But we did have a few complaints. You can’t click on any picture anywhere on the Web to start your visual search; you have to start with the limited supply of celebrity photos on the Like.com site. The company says it is working on a browser toolbar that will allow you to use any picture on any Web page, and will soon allow you to upload a picture of your choice as a starting point.

Also, the small images of some celebrity products made it hard for us to know whether we liked the watch or jewelry enough to start a search for something like it.

Today, Like.com displays about four million product images. We started in watches and found a photo of Kate Moss wearing a handsome watch with a black leather band and a square, white face. A box drawn around the watch in the photo meant that it was an item we could search for on Like.com. The phrase “Likeness Search” also appeared below each watch, and when selected, this link started a new search for watches similar to that above.

Selecting the box took us to a new Web page, where Kate Moss’s watch was displayed on the left with its price ($150) and brand name (Croton). On the right, watches similar to Kate’s were shown, including a $75 Kenneth Cole, a $750 Gucci and a $2,000 New Longines DolceVita watch. The price and brand were listed below each, along with a link to a Web site where the watch was sold.

We used our cursor to draw a box around the feature in Kate Moss’s watch that we liked — its face. A pop-up window asked if we wanted to focus on the shape, color or shape and color of our boxed image; choosing shape generating 8,721 results for watches with square faces.

The Like.com page contains a lot of data, but is clean and uncluttered. At the top of each page, three sliders can be adjusted to narrow the search’s focus on color, shape or pattern. Along the left side, another slider can adjust price range and a color grid helps you to find products in the right hue. A Show Only section narrows your search to show only certain brands, styles, sizes or sites where the products are sold.

Searches can also be started the old-fashioned way, by typing text into a box. You can also search for items by starting with a specific celebrity, or by just browsing through products.

Like.com was missing a few simple things. We couldn’t adjust our search results to view products in ascending or descending price range; instead, the items most similar to your searched item appear first. And as we searched through product after product, we found ourselves wanting to bookmark our finds; placing them into a folder that we could return to later, but this isn’t yet possible.

We searched through Like.com’s jewelry, shoes and handbags, finding that jewelry had the least-accurate results. But we were pleased with handbags, after doing some tweaking and finding numerous satchels, like a $260 Monsac handbag shown with actress Angie Harmon.

The Like.com site is only in a testing phase and is still being fine-tuned, meaning improvements can be made quickly. This Web site won’t turn you into a celebrity, but it gives you the ability to see something you like in a photo and find it online quickly. We think shoppers and gift-buying friends alike will find Like.com useful.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Web site Like.com mostly displays items for sale that are similar to those shown in celebrity photos. This column implied that the site identified and offered for sale the actual items worn by model Kate Moss and actress Angie Harmon. The company says its site gave the impression that it was displaying the actual items rather than just similar items and will post a clarification.

Most of us know the frustrations associated with using someone else’s computer — whether while traveling for business without your own laptop, pausing in the computer lab at school or just fiddling around on our sister’s PC during a visit. Using someone else’s computer offers a temporary solution, but you’ll most likely find yourself hunting around the foreign PC for your favorite programs, grumbling under your breath about why a newer version of Microsoft Word isn’t installed and wondering why a 35-year-old still has teddy bears on her desktop background.

What if you could use another person’s computer with the settings, applications and data from your own PC? You would have your files and could use your applications to open and work on those files, along with the convenience of your personalized settings, favorites and desktop designs.

This week, we tested a new product from RingCube Technologies Inc. called MojoPac. This software program gives you a way to pack up your computer’s digital “mojo” and take it with you on any USB storage device, including a small thumb drive or even an iPod. You use the hardware, operating system and Internet connection of the host computer, but run everything else from your USB device.

A view of the computer screen before MojoPac takes over your host computer.

A few other products, including one called Migo, offer similar functionality. But, unlike Migo, MojoPac lets you carry around your own programs, not just data files.

MojoPac sounded too good to be true, but for the most part, it actually worked as promised. Privacy is a big plus for MojoPac, as your files remain on your thumb drive or iPod, and never transfer to the host PC’s hard disk. Similarly, your entire browsing history and all cookies remain on the portable device.

There is a catch, however: A few aspects of this program are a little too geeky for the average person, it is slow to perform some tasks, and it crashed one of our computers during a test. Also, it doesn’t support making Microsoft Office portable, unless you have a corporate or institutional license.

But the company claims it is hoping to make the geekier parts of MojoPac more user-friendly in its next software update, and is working on allowing average consumers to carry their copies of Office with them. MojoPac only works with Windows XP programs as of now.

Another limitation: the storage space available on a portable device. A small thumb drive is unlikely to hold many programs, or a lot of space-hogging data. A large-capacity iPod would be roomy, unless it is crammed with music and videos.

MojoPac can be downloaded from www.MojoPac.com using a free 30-day trial period. Before Nov. 16, MojoPac costs $30 with up to three additional licenses for $15 each; after this introductory period, the cost goes up to $50 and each of the three additional licenses is $25.

We tested MojoPac first by using one of the most common USB storage devices available: an Apple iPod, specifically the two-gigabyte nano. Your iPod must be formatted for manual use, which is easy enough to do in iTunes. The idea is to use the leftover space on any iPod, the part not occupied by music and other media, to store your portable programs and files.

But RingCube also suggests that you optimize, or speed up, the iPod for use with MojoPac. Though this adjustment only needs to be done one time, it’s a five-step process of digging through menus on your PC that most normal people would be too intimidated to open. We couldn’t even find our iPod listed to optimize it in one test.

After entering some data about ourselves on the MojoPac Web site, we downloaded a copy of MojoPac, making sure to save it onto our iPod rather than the computer’s hard drive.

A Data Copy feature walked us through a straightforward process of deciding what we could copy over to the MojoPac device; we simply check-marked files that we wanted to copy. The transferable data included browser settings for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, as well as common files and folders for My Pictures, My Music and My Videos. Files and folders that weren’t listed by default could also be transferred.

As we checked off the files that we wanted to copy to our MojoPac device, a small pie chart showed how much space was taken or still available for storage. Even without music, our iPod filled up fast, preventing it from holding our large My Music folder.

When we tried this with a two-gigabyte USB thumb drive, we also had to ditch any thoughts of carrying our music. But we were surprised when the program warned us that the 1.2 gigabytes of programs and files we planned to copy was a “HUGE” amount of data and could take a long time to transfer. Indeed, the copying process took 12 minutes.

Things were speedier on the iPod, which had been stripped of its normal music files for this test. In just five minutes, we copied just under two gigabytes of data onto our iPod nano. We entered our username and password for MojoPac and in a few seconds, the whole screen was taken over by a new desktop with the MojoPac “M” label. A special toolbar at the top of the screen read “Switch to Host”; when selected, we suddenly flashed back to our old desktop where the toolbar read “Switch to Mojo.”

The MojoPac view is meant to look and feel like a different computer from the normal look of the borrowed machine, and it does. Instead of the machine’s usual stuff, it held our own familiar data, including the My Pictures folder and Internet Explorer settings. And you can add new stuff to it without affecting the underlying computer. While in MojoPac view, we downloaded and installed the Firefox browser.

When you exit MojoPac and remove the thumb drive or iPod on which it resides, the borrowed computer returns to normal, without any of your own programs or files.

But there were a few downsides to MojoPac. Because space can be a problem if you have a lower-capacity USB drive, it would be helpful if the program offered a quick-glance view to show how much space you’ve used and how much remains.

Another issue sprouts up whenever you plug an iPod into a PC with iTunes installed because iTunes will automatically open. Therefore, to start MojoPac, you must dig into your My Computer folder, open the drive and open the MojoPac file. An automatic work-around would be much easier for most users.

At one point during testing, MojoPac crashed our computer. While it rebooted without a problem, this isn’t a good thing. In another instance, on a different host computer, MojoPac refused to quit. After 15 minutes of waiting for it to exit, we physically removed the thumb drive on which it was loaded. But that corrupted some files and made it work poorly thereafter.

Also, we found it annoying that the company bundled a program we didn’t want, a messaging application for gamers, placing it on our iPod.

If you have any security programs like Zone Alarm installed on your host PC to warn you whenever a program wants to go online, you’ll get pop-up warnings from the host, even when you are in MojoPac’s environment.

The core of this product is smart and quite useful, but it needs some work to be as simple and reliable as it should be.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Two of the biggest phenomena in pop culture have been the “American Idol” TV show and the plethora of Web sites that depend on user-generated content, such as eBay, Craigslist.org and YouTube.com. People love to try out for “Idol,” and to vote for those who make it. And they love to submit entries to Web sites.

So, what if you could combine those two forms and create performance contests on the Web instead of on TV? That way, anyone could enter, or vote, or even create a contest, without the need for a TV network, judges or any other barriers.

This week, we had a fun time testing a Web site that does just that. The free site, called Bix.com, officially launched today. It hosts contests that include “American Idol”-style stuff like singing, but can range beyond that into comedy, photography, art, lip-synching or even writing.

Bix.com, a free new Web site, lets you enter a competition by choosing from a list of existing contests or by creating your own contest.

The Bix strategy is rather simple: You can either create a contest yourself or participate in an existing contest, and Bix members can vote for you using a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. All you need to view entries and vote is a computer connected to the Web. To enter the singing or comedy contests, only a Web camera and microphone are required — devices that are increasingly being built into new computers.

We fooled around with the Bix.com Web site, creating contests of our own, joining existing contests, voting for participants and easily emailing links for certain entertaining entries to our friends. Each process — signing up, creating a contest, entering a contest — only takes a minute. This means you can pay full attention to the site’s entertainment factor, and we think this will make users really enjoy using it.

Currently, the Bix Web site is ad-free, depending for revenue solely on corporate-sponsored contests, which run alongside contests users can start at no charge. These contests are created when a company pays Bix to use its site to host a competition, and the contest winner gets a cash prize paid by the sponsor — not Bix. (Normal contests needn’t carry a prize, and most don’t.) Bix says it will seek alternative revenue sources, including advertisements on its site and user-generated ringtones — yes, this could mean hearing yourself sing when your cellphone rings.

Some contestants were truly talented, while others definitely should keep their day jobs. The types of contests revealed some of the creativity that Bix is tapping, including a beauty contest for “Cutest Pet,” a photography contest for “Funniest Sign” and a comedy contest for the funniest 60-second act. Anyone can view the Bix contest entries, but only Bix users can vote or add comments about an entry.

Songs and lyrics are loaded onto the site for karaoke competitions.

For one of our favorite Bix examples, see: http://www.bix.com/entry/383. It’s an amateur rendition of the Martina McBride song “My Baby Loves Me,” done with plenty of heart and style.

Bix provides the tools for lip-synching and karaoke competitions: music and lyrics for about 2,100 songs are loaded on the site and can appear on-screen, karaoke-style, while you sing along. A built-in application automatically opens to record audio and/or video using Mac or Windows operating systems and their browsers — Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

We signed up easily by entering only our email address, a Bix user name and a password. The site offers simple options to enter or create a contest. If you choose to enter a contest a list is opened, revealing all existing contests (past contests also can be accessed). These were organized in a smart email-like format with a preview screen below so as to display thumbnail images of the entries for a selected contest.

Walt found and entered a photography contest called “Cars!” that was filled with 13 different images by simply choosing an Enter Contest option, uploading a photo of his favorite car, and adding a title and description of his photo. In a second, his image appeared alongside the others in the contest, where anyone could see it and other users could vote or comment on it. Now, images on the Bix Web site can’t be enlarged by selecting them, but Bix hopes to improve this.

Voting can be done by selecting an up or down thumb image near the contest’s description, and positive results are shown after you vote (each user is limited to one vote). Here, you can see the user names of those who vote positively for your entry. Your user profile, on another page, will show you a tally of the negative votes for contests that you’ve entered, but not the names of the users who gave you negative votes. We can understand that Bix wouldn’t want to reveal the negative voters by name so as to keep the peace on its site.

Katie also entered a contest called Lip-sync Idol, lip-synching to Celine Dion’s passionate song “I Drove All Night” using an iMac G5 with an Apple iSight camera on top. The software program within Bix automatically turned the iSight on and Katie could see the words and an image of her video recording as she went. She was able to play it back or rerecord it afterward before submitting it to Bix for the contest.

The problem with Web cameras is that even expert lip-synchers might look bad because of audio transmitting faster than visual movement. This happened at a few spots in Katie’s recording and in that of other users in the contest, making their lip movements look a beat behind the audio.

Creating our own contest was uncomplicated, too. We chose from a list of formats that included lip-synch, karaoke, dance, a cappella, comedy, art, photography, beauty, writing and other. Next, we chose whether to keep our contest private, by entering a limited list of email addresses, or to open it to the public. We then gave our contest a title (Scenic Photography) and a brief description before setting the start and end dates.

At any time, you can select your user name from the top right corner of the Bix.com site to see information about your profile, the contests you’ve entered and the contests you’ve started. You can also remove an entry when you don’t want it online anymore. Another option allows you to export your entry to your MySpace page or other Web site, so everyone can see your talent — not just those voting on Bix.com.

For now, winning a contest started by a regular user — not a corporation — just means earning satisfaction. But users who have created some contests already are giving away prizes of their own. Bix just announced a karaoke contest of its own with a $50,000 cash prize.

If you think you’re talented, or if you get a laugh just looking at those who think they are, you’ll enjoy Bix.com. It’s easy to get the hang of, and it has a lot of potential to expand. We think people of all ages with enjoy this user-friendly Web site.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.