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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

The online photo service–oops, I’m sorry, it’s “an Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service”–posted Q2 revenue of $35.4 million and a GAAP loss of 16 cents a share, coming in at the low end of its revenue guidance range of $35 million to $38 million, but reporting a smaller loss than the 19 to 24 cents the company had forecast.

For Q3, the company sees revenue of $33 million to $36 million, with a GAAP loss of 15 to 30 cents a share, and a non-GAAP loss of 25 to 30 cents. The Street had been looking for $39.7 million in revenue and a non-GAAP loss of 15 cents.

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Now Shutterfly, a leading online photo service, has integrated simple photo sharing into personalized Web sites, which serve as a more permanent and collaborative place to communicate. This new offering is appropriately called Shutterfly Share (www.shutterfly.com/learn/newshare.jsp), and the sites are free of charge and without advertisements, for now.

Shutterfly Share offers condensed views of multiple photos; Compact View is shown.

Shutterfly created this souped-up arm of its company early this year after acquiring Nexo Systems Inc., a company that makes straightforward, clutter-free sharing sites. Shutterfly Share caters to groups, like families and softball teams, as well as to friends, who use the sites as home bases where photos and news can be posted.

Overall, this site-creating program does a nice job with minimal work on the user’s behalf, though it currently lacks a few useful features and its security-related member permissions when setting up the site can be a bit confusing.

One of Shutterfly Share’s best features is its emphasis on photos, particularly the ability to quickly see multiple images simultaneously on the site’s home page. Various other categories of information dot the page, like links to favorite sites, calendars or team rosters. But Shutterfly Share is still in its beta (testing) phase, and leaves room for improvements, some of which will be made upon its official release planned for Aug. 12. For example, a few features stuttered or didn’t work the first time around. One photo that I added to the top of my page froze when I tried to open it for editing, and embedded video links wouldn’t play during one test.

But some Shutterfly Share faults won’t be fixed by the launch. It doesn’t yet have the ability to upload personal videos; instead, users can only add links to videos already available on a public site like YouTube. Nor does Shutterfly Share have a way to show you when other people last signed on, a feature groups who share Web sites tend to like. The company hopes to fix these two issues by early next year.

I created a site on Shutterfly Share called “middleground” for the purpose of staying connected with a handful of friends in various cities around the country. Our site let us digitally catch up by sharing photos, gossip and general news about one another’s lives. I even added news feeds from my favorite sites at the bottom of the page.

Shutterfly obviously wants users to be able to quickly start a site, condensing this process to just a couple brief steps (the process is made faster if you’re already a Shutterfly member). I chose a category and style for my site; categories included Family, Photo Journal and Baby while styles ranged from yellow lattice to artistic black backgrounds.

Privacy is a priority, for good reason, and I protected my site with a password. But I mistakenly assigned each friend with limited permissions as “Contributors” instead of “Editors.” It turns out that Contributors can view, comment, add and edit their own content, but not that of others; the Editors can do so. After my grumbling friends alerted me to my error, we were in business. Still, too many security options can be confusing during setup.

Shutterfly Share tries to make posting photos to the site as easy as possible by offering various ways to do so — even by simply emailing attached photos to a special address, which could be helpful for relatives intimidated by the process of uploading photos. But every person who adds photos to the site, whether via upload or email, may do so only if he or she is a member of Shutterfly. Though many people already have Shutterfly accounts, this could deter some who just want to add photos without becoming a member of the service. Shutterfly says it will allow non-members to post to the site by early next year.

People who aren’t Shutterfly members but are invited to be members of a Shutterfly Share site (by the site’s owner) can post anything other than photos, including comments, calendar entries and polls.

Film Strip View

Shutterfly Share organizes recent images on the site’s home page using one of seven display patterns, including a really great-looking Film Strip view and Compact view; the former shows a horizontally moving ribbon of photos flowing across the screen while the latter condenses multiple photos into thumbnails so many can be displayed at once.

Up to three large, artistically arranged photos can be shown at the top of each site; I added two shots of my friends (both members of the site) and another of the Washington Monument at sunset. This gave it a personalized and professional feel.

I missed having the ability to post my own videos, but searched for clips on YouTube, Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) using a built-in tool that easily adds videos to the site. I posted a scene from the television series “Mad Men,” along with a “Saturday Night Live” skit; thumbnails representing each showed up on the site. I added a calendar on which I noted my birthday, to alert any forgetful friends, and in a Favorite Links section, I added a list of URLs that I like. Every item on the site can be dragged around and rearranged.

Daily emails update members on site activity, such as newly posted photos and comments, so as to keep each member in the loop on site happenings.

When Shutterfly Share is officially released, it will build contextual advertisements into the sites. But early next year, the company plans to offer a premium subscription version of Shutterfly Share that would remove all ads and allow access to special features.

The launch version of Shutterfly Share will also give users the ability to view and digitally page through coffee-table photo books that people have assembled using their digital photos. If you like someone else’s book, you can (with permission) order a copy for yourself.

Shutterfly Share is a step in the right direction for people who want photo sharing to be more long-term and user-friendly than email invitations. And Web sites built with Shutterfly Share deceivingly look like they took a long time to create. When Shutterfly cleans up its permissions and makes posting via email easier, this program will be even better.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at 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

• Kodak Gallery
  (www.kodakgallery.com)

This is a solid site for sharing albums with friends in a few straightforward steps. Though its options for editing photos tend to feel a bit clumsy, they’re probably the best out of the five sites. Most sites expect users to edit images before sharing them. Earlier this year, Kodak introduced a new version of its EasyShare desktop software program with richer editing features, such as images that expand to almost the entire screen.

In addition to its $25 a year Gallery Premier account, you can opt to pay twice as much for the account and a discount on Kodak prints — 10 cents each rather than 15 cents. Paid accounts let you download high-resolution versions of each photo and give you a unique Web address for sharing photos that can be password protected. But the other four sites offer personal Web sites as free features, rather than just with paid accounts.

• Shutterfly
  (www.shutterfly.com)

Shutterfly seemed to be the simplest site, though it isn’t the most attractive or user friendly. All of its features are free. Shutterfly does away with two conditions that Kodak Gallery and Snapfish have: It doesn’t require any purchases in order to keep your account from being deleted nor does it ever require your friends to sign in before viewing a shared album.

But Shutterfly’s simplicity can also be a hindrance. It doesn’t let you upload videos to share, nor can you download high-resolution versions of each photo or send photos to the site via email or mobile device; the other sites do these things either for free or with a paid account.

• Snapfish
  (www.snapfish.com)

Snapfish is Hewlett-Packard Co.’s photo-sharing site, and it stands out because it has the most restrictions. Along with its requirement that you purchase something at least once a year to keep your account, guests who view your albums must always sign in; you can’t change this setting like on the other sites. To skirt this issue, Snapfish emphasizes its Group Rooms, or personalized sharing Web sites that users view with a specific URL and a password (if you choose to have one).

Snapfish and Shutterfly both have Web sites on which photos appear too small for my taste, though Snapfish does offer generously sized images in photo slideshows — a plus. I’d prefer the site itself showed larger images in other instances. High-resolution version of photos can be downloaded for a fee of 25 cents for one and five cents for more than one.

• Flickr
  (www.flickr.com)
• Photobucket.com
  (www.photobucket.com)

Of the two community sharing sites, I preferred Flickr over Photobucket. The site felt cleaner, with fewer distractions and one less advertisement than Photobucket. For people who aren’t used to these more progressive sites, Photobucket and Flickr may seem extreme. They offer things like tagging and use terms that can be confusing. Flickr uses “sets” in place of “albums,” and photos are organized within “batches.” Photobucket organizes albums, but then lets you create sub albums within an album.

Neither site requires annual purchases, and both allow free high-resolution downloads of photos. Instead of one-time sharing, the sites use photostreams, or constantly updated photo blogs that friends can check.

Flickr and Photobucket make it easy to post photos to blogs in one step, including Blogger and Typepad. Photobucket also lets you post to MySpace and Facebook in one step.

In Flickr, you can meet people who have interests similar to yours by searching through Groups. I joined a group that shared photos of tennis courts around the world. Digital photos suddenly offered ways to socialize online without chatting or leaving overused messages for strangers.

Among other things, Photobucket lets you create a Remix — a presentation made of your photos and/or videos after they’re dragged into a storyline and mixed in with music, transitions and graphics. The result was entertaining and professional, though it took just seconds to make.

Ideally, I’d like to combine a favorite feature from each of these sites to make one great photo-sharing Web site. I found something wrong with each one, but Kodak Gallery and its EasyShare software program offer a good combination of editing and sharing. Flickr was my preferred community photo site, though it and Photobucket both offer fresh ways to share digital photos.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

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.

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.

This week, we tested a new way of sharing digital photos, using a new service from Smilebox Inc. The real difference between Smilebox and most other sharing services is its emphasis on two things: design and ease of use. It offers templates for creating attractive virtual scrapbooks, slideshows, photobooks, postcards and greetings using your photos, which automatically load into blank image space holders. Once finished, a simple step lets you email a Web link of your Smilebox creation to anyone.

We spent this week making various themed photo collages commemorating everything from baseball-game photos to pictures of a family pet to vacations, and we sent them to friends and family. Everyone enjoyed the Smileboxes, and the creative formats — including photos, text, background music and background designs — were attractive and unique.

Smilebox comes in Basic and Premium versions. The Basic version is free, but includes ads. Premium is ad-free but costs 99 cents or $1.99 a design, depending on the format. The paid version also lets you view the design in full-screen view and lets you, or the recipient, print the entire project; neither can be done with the Basic version.

Though still in beta, or prerelease mode, Smilebox worked for us with just a couple of glitches. It is due to be launched officially on June 1, and the company continues to add about 10 new designs weekly to its current 144 different designs; the total will be up to 190 by June 1, according to the company.

Smilebox’s logo is a cute box with a giant smile on its front and a jack-in-the-box-like crank. On the Web site, this box is used to illustrate how Smilebox works — photos drop into the top of the smiley box while the crank turns, spitting out a finished product. The service was, surprisingly, almost that simple.

Smilebox ( www.smilebox.com) uses a simple interface and assembles your photos in attractive projects, such as the Best Friends Forever scrapbook.

We downloaded Smilebox software free from www.smilebox.com, and got started. (For now, the software only works on Windows PCs, but a Macintosh version is in the works.) Its clean interface was refreshing — the familiar smiling box logo sits in the top left corner and a vertical panel running down the left of the screen serves as the area where your photos are held. Three simple categories are listed across the top: Design Catalog, My Designs and My Creations.

A handful of our Windows PC’s digital photos were already loaded into the photo panel — Smilebox says your most recently added images autoload, but in our tests, we found a handful of older digital photos in our photo panel. However, we could easily select Get Photos or Remove All to add or delete the images that were automatically added to our photo tray.

Every template within the Design Catalog section of Smilebox is organized into different category types within the larger categories of Scrapbooks, Slideshows, Photobooks, Postcards and Greetings. We started with a scrapbook that was appropriately titled “Cherished Memories.”

Before loading your images into a design, you can see a screen shot of the design. By selecting Show Me, you can see a mock-up of the entire design, as it would look when you emailed it to someone. Both the screen shot and mock sample use images loaded by Smilebox, but they give you a good idea of what a finished product looks like. After we selected Personalize, the design loaded into our My Designs category, and after a few seconds, the photos in our tray automatically loaded into the image spaces.

The four-page Cherished Memories scrapbook gave off the old vibe of one that was homemade. Images of tiny clothing buttons and fabric bordered each page, along with words like “Remember” and “Legacy” written in artsy print. Eleven photos can fit into this particular scrapbook, and space labeled Add Your Text Here was available beside many of the pictures for adding personal notes.

Each image could be moved, rotated or zoomed in or out to fit the page’s layout — and all of these adjustments were made right on the page. At any time, the project can be saved and closed, or previewed in Basic or Premium modes. After tweaking to our scrapbooking heart’s content and selecting “Upbeat” music to accompany the album, we pressed Send at the top of the page, entered multiple email addresses and waited a few seconds while our design was uploaded to the Smilebox server, making it viewable for our recipients.

First-time users must enter an email address and create a password, and if you opt for the Premium version you must enter credit-card information before buying. But all of this was done within the Smilebox software, so we never felt like we left the program. Every time you email a project, a copy is sent to your email account, and a receipt for Premium purchases is also emailed.

We tried Smilebox’s postcards (one-screen shot); photobooks (a mock book designed to show two pages at a time with a crease down the middle); a slideshow titled Whizzy (20 animated photos whizzed in and out of view); and a greeting titled Spring (moving words and a beautiful cherry blossom border around a photo).

Once or twice an image or a text box didn’t show up in our final product; instead, a white box showed where the photo or description should have been. Smilebox says this will be ironed out in the June final release. We also noted that Smilebox doesn’t offer editing options, such as removing red eye in shots, like many online photo-sharing services do. But for now, the simple method of just loading photos with minimal editing seems to work.

The final release will give recipients the ability to download the photos so they can save them individually. Smilebox also plans to offer a $4.99 monthly subscription for unlimited premium designs.

We found Smilebox simply enjoyable. It jazzed up our photos with fun designs, gave us the ability to see the final product during any stage of our creating process, and didn’t take long to use. If you’re looking for a new way to share digital photos, this company’s Web site is well worth a look.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

So, most digital photos never get printed, and many of those that do are produced at kiosks in retail stores, and ordered from online photo services like Shutterfly and Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery. That’s bad news for Hewlett-Packard Co., the leader in home printers, which makes a lot of money selling ink and paper to consumers. Now, H-P has come up with a new printer design for homes that it hopes will entice consumers to do more of their own printing.

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I reviewed H-P’s speedy new $199 Photosmart 8250 Photo Printer, a product that the company hopes will change the way you think about printing photos at home. In its fastest mode, the company boasts, the 8250 can churn out a snapshot-sized 4×6 photo in just 14 seconds and all-black-print text pages at 32 per minute — much faster than its 20 color or black-print page-per-minute claims for older home inkjets. Our tests showed the new model to be very fast, but not quite as speedy as H-P’s claims imply.

In addition to its speed, the Photosmart 8250 also boasts a new type of water-fast ink and a new ink-cartridge system for home printers. Instead of lumping all of the printer’s colors together in one large cartridge, this printer stores each of its six inks in a separate cartridge. That way, if you use a lot of one color — say lots of green, taking pictures of baseball games — you only need to replace one color when you run out, not all of the others, which still may be in good supply.

These new cartridges cost about $10 for each of the five colors, and $18 for the solo black cartridge, which holds about twice as much ink as any one color. By contrast, on H-P’s older printers, the single color cartridge can cost as much as $35, and the black cartridge about $30.

The longevity of these new individual tanks varies per color and depending on what is being printed. H-P estimates that with typical pages of mixed text and graphics, the new black cartridge will print 480 pages, and color cartridges range between 350 and 490 pages. The cartridges in the old system last for 450 color and 450 black pages.

This idea of individual ink tanks is nothing new. Some H-P rivals, such as Epson and Canon, have relied on that type of design for years, and H-P itself has sold inkjets for business with individual ink tanks. But the company claims its new home system is engineered to use more of the ink inside each tank before it requires replacement, cutting down on waste.

To give us some perspective on H-P’s more traditional printer cartridges and speeds, we also tested the 8250′s year-old predecessor — the $149.99 Photosmart 8150 Photo Printer. The 8150 works with the old cartridge system — using just two larger cartridges at a time.

These two silver printers are similar in appearance — each is designed with a useful four-card media-card reader and a 2.5-inch color LCD screen centered on its top side. This combination of features makes both printers useable without attaching to a Mac or Windows PC; the LCD serves as a preview panel for images on your memory card, thus allowing you to zoom, lighten, or remove red eye in photos before printing.

But as we easily set up these two printers, we took note of how, under the hood, they appear rather different from one another. The older 8150′s two large cartridges have built-in printheads that slide from side to side during printing, then over to the right side for reloading and resting.

Under the 8250′s lid, we took a bit more time to snap each of its six cartridges into place. This rainbow of yellow, light and regular magenta, light and regular cyan and black cartridges fit smack in the center of the printer’s guts.

These cartridges differ from the older type in that they are separate from the printhead, the device that moves left to right while spitting color onto a page. Each container of color stays in place, and is connected to the moving printhead through its own tube. H-P says this system enables faster printing while also making it possible to replace just one color at a time.

Katie and I tested the 8250 for speed and quality by printing full-page color photos, 4×6 color photos, color Microsoft Word documents and black text-only Word documents. We sent documents to each printer from its corresponding computer, as well as directly from an inserted memory card. We ran the same tests on the 8150, just to get an understanding of how much faster the 8250 was, and how — if at all — the quality differed. Our results showed the 8250 to be much faster, but we couldn’t detect any quality difference. Both the old and new models produced very good, but unexceptional, prints.

Unsurprisingly, the 8250′s fastest results came from printing the color and black Word documents, each of which was finished in just 10 seconds, about 13 seconds faster than the 8150. Printing 4×6 color photos took 32 seconds on the 8250, about a minute less than on the 8150. And it took about eight more seconds to print a full-page photo on the 8250. The full-page photo on the 8150 took around four minutes.

H-P is selling new “Advanced” photo paper to use with its new ink. The company claims that the combination of paper and ink will lead to water-fast prints that dry faster, and that the new paper also contributes to faster print times, which we found to be true. We used a sheet of HP Premium Plus Photo Paper instead of the HP Advanced Photo Paper to print a 4×6 on the 8250, and it took 70 seconds, over twice as long.

H-P’s fastest result — the 14 second 4×6 photo — is achieved by printing on Advanced Photo Paper, in fast-draft mode with borders, and H-P times the print according to the second page out, after the printheads are already in place for printing. By contrast, our tests attempt to approximate real life. We start timing when the print button is pressed and count the first page out.

Occasionally, the 8250 performed some noisy “device maintenance,” according to the message on the LCD screen. H-P explained that this is the printer’s way of recycling the ink it uses to clean its printhead, whereas many printers clean printheads using ink, but never re-use that ink.

The individual ink cartridges might be enough to sway you into buying the 8250, especially if you print items with certain colors regularly — like documents with your company’s all-red logo. You might also be drawn to its speed, which had us hooked, but its quality, while good, wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

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