A Clearer Picture of You

Unlike OurStory, Tabblo does not plan to show ads on its free Web photo displays.

"We are making a big and bold bet that personal content is not about eyeballs that can be sold in quite the same way news and stock quotes are," said founder and chief executive Antonio Rodriguez.

Rodriguez thinks Tabblo's artistic collages (called "tabblos") will appeal to the blogging generation because people crave design tools to make their blogs and personal Web sites look better. Any collage you create on Tabblo, for example, can be displayed on a blog published elsewhere. People can also mix and match others' photos into collages, depending on the privacy level set on images.

As Rodriguez sees it, people will pay to obtain versions of their collages that they can preserve offline on CDs or on paper for public display. Tabblo also aims to make money by charging to print its photo collages on such products as coffee mugs, puzzles, calendars and cards.

Tabblo and OurStory are hardly alone. Many other new sites are vying to become your personal Web photo archivist. SnapJot ( http://www.snapjot.com/ ), for instance, recently revamped itself to help people tell personal stories using photos and videos through a collaborative online process it describes as "scrapbooking." And last month, Pickle ( http://www.pickle.com/ ), an Arlington-based start-up, launched a service for sharing photos and videos online using a special e-mail format it calls PickleMails and an album format it calls PickleBoxes.

One site that drew a ton of traffic almost overnight was Riya ( http://www.riya.com/ ). After launching in March as a Web photo storage service using special face-recognition technology to automatically identify and tag pictures of the same person, Riya drew 7 million photos in its first seven weeks on the Web. People were eagerly uploading their personal photo collections and using Riya to search them.

But as founder Munjal Shah closely watched how people were using the site, he realized that they were spending even more time searching photos of other users. Now he's revamping Riya to be a visual search engine for the entire Web.

The online photo business is growing too competitive, he said. "My big issue is that everybody is doing the same thing" by letting people store, display and print their images.

It's anyone's guess which -- if any -- of these new sites will survive. But I do believe Tabblo and OurStory are doing a fine job of experimenting with new visual storytelling tools and novel ways to communicate using our digital snapshots.

Leslie Walker's e-mail address isleslie@lesliewalker.com.