I have a 3GS iPhone. Is there a way to connect it to the Internet cable found in hotel and motel rooms?

A:

Not that I know of. But you can do this indirectly by creating your own Wi-Fi network from the wired connection in the room. There are two ways to do this.

One possibility is to carry a small portable router. These are small devices that plug into the wired connection and propagate a Wi-Fi signal in the hotel room that the iPhone (or other devices, like laptops and tablets) can use. A second option is to plug a laptop into the physical connection and use it as a Wi-Fi base station by setting up what’s called an “ad hoc” or computer-to-computer Wi-Fi connection. Steps for doing this, which can be a bit techie, differ depending on whether you use a PC or Mac.

Q:

I have been struggling with a hard drive space shortage for at least a year. I have deleted duplicate emails. I have deleted videos and word files and put them on a stand alone hard drive. Do you have any other suggestions?

A:

If you don’t want to, or can’t, replace your laptop, and don’t want to be tethered to your external hard disk, you might look into buying a new, larger, internal hard disk.

Many stores and consultants can sell and install larger hard disks, and even transfer the data from your old one.

Q:

I have thousands of photos on my computer and external hard drives. I’m in the process of trying to organize them on one hard drive and noticed that there are many duplicates between the different devices. Is there one program that you recommend that reliably detects and allows the removal of duplicate files?

A:

You might try using Google’s Picasa to sweep the drives, locate the photos, and display them.

The program has a feature that can avoid importing duplicates. Once imported, if there are still duplicates, Picasa offers methods to hide or actually delete them from your disk. Information on this is at http://bit.ly/8YKTzy.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

So Pixable has endeavored to create a slideshow application called “Photofeed” that gives users a way to search and sort through photos, and see which of them are most popular.

New York City-based Pixable’s secret sauce relies on users allowing its application deep access to their Facebook profiles, so it can look for factors like whether a user has historically “liked” a friend’s photos, whether they’ve attended events together, and whether they share a last name. Then it ranks and sorts photos into large-format slideshows.

Unfortunately, in my very brief usage so far, the Photofeed app was rather unpolished, but I do think there’s an interesting opportunity for someone to develop alternatives to the Facebook album format. However, I’d imagine Facebook itself would have a leg up if it built something natively.

Highland Capital-backed Pixable–which will de-emphasize previous photo-printing and video-creation products–may prove to have value as it extends Photofeed to other platforms, so that becomes a way to reminisce about photos scattered on various services and sites. But as Pixable CEO Inaki Berenguer points out, Facebook is the Internet’s photo juggernaut, with more than 100 million photos uploaded per day. “Every month on Facebook you build a new Flickr or Picasa,” is how Berenguer put it.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Although he later clarified, “I wasn’t making a value judgment,” maintaining multiple identities, whether it’s as simple as publishing some photos to Picasa and others to Facebook, is becoming a big trend in online life.

Even as Zuckerberg’s Facebook extended its dominance in 2010 to the point where it seems to have a social Web monopoly, it was still a landmark year for social network competition.

Where in the past, tech industry watchers derided new start-ups for launching “yet another social network,” ever more users seem to be constructing multiple online presences that utilize the strengths of various platforms and networks.

And this splintered approach is only going to increase.

Internet users now have plenty of outlets for self-expression. They can prioritize individuality and choose to post on the highly customizable Tumblr, or instead value the comprehensiveness of a network and post on the blander Facebook.

A big part of this shift toward understanding the private online self versus the public online self has been the rise of Twitter. On Twitter, regular users make the sort of decisions celebrities do: What to share about their private lives with their public audience of followers.

Another shift has been the rise of smartphones, along with their quality broadband connections, good cameras and mobile apps.

As an early adopter of various social apps, I’ve recently been confronted with the choice of whether to post a picture taken with my Apple iPhone on-the-go to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path or Picplz.

Each of them has different audiences, different associations with my personal or professional identities, and different expectations for how people will view and interact with my snapshot. (And I suppose there’s also the option of keeping the pictures to myself on my phone storage.)

Although the people noisiest about privacy on Facebook have at times been the media, publicity of the company’s highly confusing privacy settings seems to have led to many more people being aware of them and perhaps even changing them.

Perhaps that’s why I see an increasing–but still quite small–portion of my Facebook friends using pseudonyms on the service. And when I asked them why, I heard a variety of reasons.

One is a teacher, another prefers to go by the moniker he uses artistically. Yet another is a college student who is applying for jobs and who wants to be more anonymous for a while. Like many of today’s young people, she has become highly conscious of balancing the freedom to be herself online with the way she is perceived by professional contacts.

(A representative for Facebook declined to comment on whether the company has recently been more permissive about allowing pseudonyms, something it has traditionally frowned on.)

Of course, very little of what’s posted online can be trusted to never get out or never be linked to its originator. If you really want to keep your thoughts private and impermanent, of course, keep them in your head.

But there are now many more options for more private communication, many of them having first come out in 2010. They include small-group coordination tools like GroupMe, Fast Society and Beluga. There’s also Path, a start-up from a former Facebooker that is perhaps too limited by design, but is exploring the world of more intimate and personal communications.

For many people, their Facebook network is far from a direct match with their real-world friends, so it will be increasingly important to use these tools to dice circles up and make them more accessible. (Facebook is also trying to address that need with its own Groups tool.)

To be sure, that Facebook map of connections is a highly valuable asset, one the company has fiercely protected, as Google reformulates its approach to the social Web.

Splitting your users into an entirely new social graph will certainly hamper growth. For instance, another early Facebooker launched Jumo, a social network for people connecting with nonprofits that seems to risk being redundant with, and isolated from, similar efforts on other platforms.

And Foursquare, despite its zeitgeisty innovation for sharing real-time location updates, has accumulated only about five million users in the last two years.

However, the speedy growth of new social networks like the addictive Instagram–which is like Twitter for pictures and got one million users in its first two months–shows that there’s still an opportunity to take an independent path.

What seems particularly notable about the current moment is that many people are evolving their approach to expressing themselves online, and they now have many tools and contexts to do so. And it’s up to them if these multiple identities will be unified anywhere except in their heads.

(Image collage at top of post courtesy Flickr user shannonkringen.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

I’ve got 54,220 photos on my computer, including a few would-be National Geographic covers but far more out-of-focus portraits and poorly exposed sunsets that I’ve never bothered to fix or delete.

Thanks to plummeting prices on digital SLR cameras, amateurs like myself can now experiment freely with artistic shots, taking hundreds of photos without spending a small fortune in film. But those experiments generate a lot of homework by way of virtual stacks of photos in need of processing.

Lightroom’s dense panels of options.

Adobe Systems Inc.’s (ADBE) Photoshop is famous for helping photographers extract the most out of their shots in a digital darkroom. But at $699, Photoshop costs as much as a new camera and takes a graduate course to master. Moreover, Photoshop was designed to edit a single photo at a time, not for sorting through a collection.

A new generation of software from Adobe and Apple Inc. (AAPL) has emerged to fill the gap between Photoshop and entry-level photo-management software like Apple Inc.’s iPhoto and Google Inc.’s (GOOG) Picasa. For people who have graduated from point-and-shoot cameras, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299) and Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199) offer tools to organize large collections and tackle the nitty-gritty of digital developing and re-touching.

I’ve been testing Lightroom (for Mac and PC) and Aperture (for Mac only) to organize, process and share photos I took at my friends’ recent wedding. While both programs were designed with professional photographers in mind, I found they were effective at helping a hobbyist like myself whittle 400 photos to just 40 in less than an hour.

The programs also let me edit photos far beyond the basics of brightness and contrast. One shot moved from the reject to the favorites pile after Lightroom let me take advantage of my Canon camera’s advanced image format to boost the exposure of an image taken during a dimly lit reception.

Many professional photographers have a strong preference for one of the two programs. I preferred the overall aesthetic and photo-editing tools in Lightroom for extracting the best from my photos. Nonetheless, Aperture’s strengths lie in some nifty organizational tricks, and I would recommend it for people interested in three specific uses: upgrading from a large iPhoto collection; taking video with an SLR; or tagging photos with locations.

At their core, both Lightroom and Aperture are databases, but don’t let that scare away your inner Ansel Adams.

Lightroom’s database gives you tools to organize your photos into folders on your computer, create collections from across folders, and tag photos with keywords, star ratings, and other features. For people like me who are lazy about applying tags to describe photos, Lightroom offers a spray-can tool to virtually “paint” keywords on bunches of photos at one time.

Aperture’s approach to cataloging is borrowed from iPhoto. You put your photos into “projects” (known as “events” in iPhoto), which the software will suggest when you import images from your camera based on groups that were taken around the same time. You can also add keywords, ratings and other tags.

But Aperture has two more tricks up its sleeve. You can tag photos based on the people in them, using the same technology Apple built into iPhoto to recognize faces. While that’s a good idea, I found that Aperture (like iPhoto) didn’t do an ideal job at distinguishing faces, especially in profile.

Apple says the face-recognition function works best if you identify both a couple of front-on and profile photos for any person, and also let it finish going through your whole collection before using it.

More useful is Aperture’s ability to tag photos geographically. Some new cameras collect GPS data with each shot and Aperture charts that info with pins on a giant world map, making it fun to track a journey or search for all the photos taken in one place.

Unfortunately, the majority of cameras don’t capture GPS data, but Aperture does offer some tools for adding in location data after the fact, such as importing it from a photo taken by an iPhone at the same site. Lightroom can also record GPS data for photos, but you have to work with third-party plug-ins to get the same functionality as in Aperture.

It’s in the digital darkroom that both programs earn their keep. The biggest reason an SLR-owner should upgrade beyond a basic photo editor is so he or she can work with so-called RAW files, sort of digital negatives that use extra data from the camera’s sensor to give you artistic control over factors like exposure long after you’ve shot the photo. Both programs work well with RAW, and moreover, editing photos on both programs is nondestructive, which means you can undo any changes you make—all the way back to your original photo—even after the photo has been saved. Sometimes the sky really can be too blue.

I found Lightroom’s editing features to be the most intuitive. It uses a three-paned screen clearly showing all of the available adjustments, your photo, and a history of the changes made to the image. I felt Aperture made me hunt for some of those features, but some users may prefer its optional floating palettes to Lightroom’s dense panels of options, and also its elegant system for brushing changes onto an image.

Lightroom boasts some cutting-edge editing features, such as the ability to adjust photos based on profiles of the lenses used to take them. That’s especially useful if you are working with a wide-angle lens that can distort images. With the click of a button, a warped wall at the edge of a wide-angle photo is made vertical again. The lens profiling wasn’t automatic with my older-model Canon SLR, but still worked.

To be sure, there are well-known Photoshop tricks that neither of these programs can do, such as stitching two or more photos together. They also can’t digitally cut your ex’s head out of photos. But if you really need to do that, finding the right photo-editing software is the least of your problems.

And to my disappointment, both programs are missing an increasingly popular service called HDR, or high dynamic range, where you merge photos taken at different levels of exposure into a new photo that takes the best aspects of them all. To make these sorts of images, you have to download external plugins. That’s the occasion I most missed Photoshop.

Finally, the programs both offer tools to showcase shots in professional-looking books and prints as well as on websites like Facebook and Flickr. Lightroom has the most options for producing Web galleries.

Aperture will appeal to users with cameras that do the newest trick in digtial SLR photography: take video. Such videos, which can feature beautiful photographic characteristics like short depth of field, can be imported and edited right in Aperture. The videos can be included in the software’s handsome mixed-media slideshows without the need for a separate video-editing program.

Either Lightroom or Aperture is a worthy upgrade for any semi-serious photographer. Both are available to download for free limited trials and I’d suggest testing the workflow of both before committing your photo collection.

Walter S. Mossberg and the Mossberg’s Mailbox will return Sept. 16. Email Geoffrey Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com.

We’re a retired couple who travel in and out of the U.S.A. and need to keep in touch with our e-mails and Schwab account on line. Please recommend a netbook or laptop for this that we can use all over the world. We’d prefer to spend under $500.

A:

Since Wi-Fi works all over the world, and all netbooks and laptops today that I’ve seen have Wi-Fi, and your needs are modest, any sub-$500 laptop or any netbook would do. If you want to connect when you’re not near a Wi-Fi hotspot, look for one with a built-in data modem that supports the GSM standard which works world-wide and with AT&T (T) and T-Mobile in the United States. Make sure it covers all the various frequencies used overseas, not just those used in the U.S. Or, you could simply buy an external USB cellular data card that meets these criteria.

Q:

I just got my iPad and am wondering whether the more powerful iPad charger will work with my iPhone 3GS without damaging it, or whether the smaller charger that came with my iPhone will charge my iPad.

A:

According to Apple, the smaller iPhone charger will work with the iPad, although charging will be slower. I have tried this, and it works. As for the reverse case, Apple says you can also use the larger iPad charger with the iPhone, without harm, though it won’t charge the phone any faster.

I have tried this, and it works. As for the reverse case, I have charged my own iPhone using the more powerful iPad charger with no apparent problems, but I don’t know if Apple officially approves of this.

Q:

I have a new Dell Inspiron with Windows 7. My photos are all over the place—I still haven’t figured out this file and library thing. Can you recommend a program to find, organize and eliminate duplicate photos. Some have been renamed and are in various folders.

A:

I’d suggest you download the free Picasa desktop program for Windows, made by Google It will scour your computer for photos, allow you to organize them, and it includes an “experimental” features that hunts down duplicates so you can eliminate them.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital website, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

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

“The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting the safe flow of Internet information, actively guides people to manage Web sites in accordance with the law and use the Internet in a wholesome and correct way,” the paper reads. “The Decision of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee on Guarding Internet Security, Regulations on Telecommunications of the People’s Republic of China and Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services stipulate that no organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or disseminate information having the following contents…”

What follows is a list so broad and vague it could easily be applied to nearly any speech Beijing finds undesirable: “subverting state power…propagating superstitious ideas…spreading rumors…and other contents forbidden by laws and administrative regulations.”

But steer clear of those and you’re free to say what you like because “Chinese citizens fully enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet”–according to this white paper, anyway.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China confers on Chinese citizens the right to free speech. With their right to freedom of speech on the Internet protected by the law, they can voice their opinions in various ways on the Internet. Vigorous online ideas exchange is a major characteristic of China’s Internet development, and the huge quantity of BBS posts and blog articles is far beyond that of any other country….The Chinese government has actively created conditions for the people to supervise the government, and attaches great importance to the Internet’s role in supervision….The Internet provides unprecedented convenience and a direct channel for the people to exercise their right to know, to participate, to be heard and to oversee, and is playing an increasingly important role in helping the government get to know the people’s wishes, meet their needs and safeguard their interests. The Chinese government is determined to unswervingly safeguard the freedom of speech on the Internet enjoyed by Chinese citizens in accordance with the law.

And if “safeguarding” freedom of speech involves, say, blocking YouTube, Picasa and a bunch of other services offered by Google (GOOG)? Well, I guess that’s just the Chinese government “voicing its opinion” in this “vigorous online ideas exchange.”

This week, HP (HPQ) is rolling out a new line of touchscreen printers with Web access and their own email addresses. The company’s pitch: If you can email it or store it in the cloud, you can print it. Email a document or photo to one of its new ePrint printers and the device will automatically print it. Alternately, users can print Google Docs or Picasa photos directly from the cloud without using their desktop computers.

“What we believe is whereas in the old world where you had a PC and a printer and a driver, the new world is all about the Web-connected devices,” Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, said at a launch event yesterday. “This is all about how we can create that content and print anywhere, anytime. What we want to do is add cloud-aware capabilities to our core printing business.”