Organizing and sharing digital photos has never been simpler. Neil McManus looks at the best reasons to clear your memory card

On the train ride from Santiago de Compostela to Pontevedra, Spain, my wife and I took stock. Between our two digital cameras, we had room for another 90 photos over the next three days. Which meant that in the previous four days, we'd taken roughly 520, plus some two dozen mini-movies.

The massive amounts of memory in today's digital cameras—we each had one-gigabyte memory cards—create a new problem: how to store and share travel photos without overloading both your camera and your friends' patience.

Thankfully, there are a raft of new ways to get organized: online albums, homemade color prints, DVD slide shows with sound tracks, and even self-designed albums.

Once we returned home, the first and smartest thing we did was to edit. To start, we culled our photos down to the best by jettisoning duplicates and the you-had-to-be-there shots of the Galician countryside and Madrid government buildings. We favored photos that told our personal story: people we met, food we ate. By editing our umpteen pictures of the Santiago Cathedral down to one, we made room for our favorite Madrid wine bar. With this abridged set of 106, we created a hardbound album and a DVD slide show for ourselves and our hometown friends and family. For loved ones farther afield, we sent a link to an online photo gallery and mailed out home-printed postcards.

Alas, the bulk of our digital images will go unseen, though there's always a chance somebody will ask to see our complete "Spain 2005" collection. Just in case, we'll keep all 611 photos on our PC's hard drive.

To help manage your own digital deluge, here are a few of our favorite programs, Web sites, and products.

Photo Software
Whatever happened to that great sunset shot of Monterey Bay? It's somewhere on your hard drive, with a name like IMG_3046.jpg. Photo-organizing software promises to clear the clutter. For starters, most programs display thumbnail images of pictures in chronological order, letting you scroll through a year's worth in minutes. Then, depending on how many bells and whistles your software has, the real fun begins. Three excellent programs are Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 (www.adobe.com; $90), Google's Picasa 2 (www.picasa.com; free), and Apple's iPhoto (www.apple.com; free with newer Macs or sold with the $79 iLife Suite). Each is simple to use, loaded with editing tools (features for sharpening or blurring the image, enhancing color, and so on), and capable of handling tens of thousands of pictures. All three let you create albums and publish them on photo-sharing sites.

Online Albums
Among the most popular photo-sharing sites are www.shutterfly.com and www.snapfish.com, which provide basic editing tools and allow you to upload photos and assemble them into galleries for free. On the downside, the sites are plastered with advertisements. More elegant and innovative are www.imageevent.com and www.smugmug.com, where you can create and share promo-free albums for annual fees of $25 and $30, respectively. On www.imageevent.com, you can also store and play videos.