Answer: There are a number of sites on the Internet to store and share pictures. Many of them are free, some charge a minimal fee.

Places to store video on the Internet are fewer. Some limit you on the length or size of the video. They may be free or charge minimal fees.

Places that you can store and share your pictures free on the Internet include picassa.google.com, shutterfly.com and photoworks.com. They make their money by selling prints of your pictures or through advertising. Picassa is part of Google. Shutterfly and Photoworks claim to offer unlimited space. I have put many pictures out at both locations and not run out of space yet. Photoworks keeps your pictures in a larger format (makes better prints if a friend downloads the picture) and Shutterfly will let you keep limited videos. You can see the number of pictures I have uploaded and shared at Shutterfly at http://dwightwatt.shutterfly.com Shutterfly and Picassa let you set up nice share pages. KodakGallery.com stores your full size images but requires a minimal purchase every 12 months.

YouTube.com is a popular site to store video on and is a part of Google. MyPhotoAlbum.com lets you store a large amount of video and also pictures. They set up a share web page similar to Shutterfly. You can look at my share page at http://dwightwatt.myphotoalbum.com They will give you a 30 day trial usage for free and then charge $20 per year. They do reduce the size of the videos for efficiency.

These sites all make good places to share your pictures, however you need to keep the originals on your computer or media (generally CD or DVD) and on a second media as a backup so you always have your pictures. I have mine stored on my hard drive, a removable hard drive and most stored on CD also.

Check the different sites out and find the one that works best for you. Pictures will take a while to upload to the picture sharing site depending on the size of your files and your Internet connection. Usually I leave mine uploading when I quit the computer for the night.

Send me your questions about computers to me at the paper or to my e-mail dwight@dwightwatt.com and tell me you read this in the paper. I will pick a question to answer each week.