Crop, Sort and Share

Preclick was least useful in this role. On the other hand, it's the only program in this bunch that still claims to run on pre-2000 versions of Windows.

Picasa and Photosmart gave the most help with printing by clearly previewing their page-layout options. The other programs took a less obvious, menu-driven approach.

Avoid Photosmart for e-mail, though; it didn't scale down photos before sending, resulting in three-megabyte messages. EasyShare and Photoshop Album also had issues: The former required sending photo messages through the EasyShare site instead of my mail program, and the latter wanted to convert attached photos to Adobe's Portable Document Format.

For Web sharing, these five programs only offered three choices among them. Preclick and Photosmart both publish photos to HP's Snapfish site, EasyShare and Photoshop Album Starter connect to Kodak's EasyShare Gallery, and Picasa uploads photos to Google's Picasa Web Albums.

If you're already attached to one of these sites, that factor alone may determine your choice of program. (In this category of software, programs typically link to only one photo-sharing site.)

If not, bear in mind that Snapfish requires every visitor to sign in to view your photos while EasyShare and Picasa don't demand that potentially annoying step.

EasyShare provides unlimited storage but will erase your online albums if you don't buy something off the site once a year. No purchase is required at Picasa, but that site caps your use at one gigabyte; storing more photos online will cost you $25 a year or more.

Beyond the lack of a dominant competitor, the other interesting aspect of this market is the simple looks of these programs. Photosmart seems nearly interface-free, with only a few, big buttons on most screens. Preclick abandons traditional menus, and even EasyShare, Photoshop Album Starter and Picasa barely resemble most image editors.

Too many commercial software developers compete over how many features they can shove in the user's face instead of who can present the essential tools in the most elegant manner. Those firms could learn from photo-sharing programs.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com.