Do you remember those packets of little pictures that used to arrive in the post? You'd been on holiday, shot three or four rolls of film, sent off the rolls in that colourful envelope and anything from three days to three weeks later you'd have your holiday memories in your hands ready to show all your friends what a wonderful time you had.

Where did it all go?

An eight inch, thick, £200 electronic photo frame that cycles through my snaps and that needs plugging into a power supply doesn't quite do it for me.

Viewing digital photographs on a computer monitor is great, they are bright and big and colourful - much better than those old-fashioned slides where you had to drag the projector out and set up a big screen. But you can't tuck your monitor in your pocket or your bag to show your friends at work.

Prints from your digital images are available and they are excellent value for money. And guess what, most of them are real photographic prints on photographic paper, so they are just as good as the ones created from film. One huge advantage of printing your images, rather than viewing on a monitor is that they will look sharper. Monitors display images at low resolution. Prints are printed at high resolution, so they look sharper.

There are a whole host of suppliers like:
Snapfish - FREE online digital photo sharing with Snapfish.co.uk today!
Clark Color Labs
PhotoWorks - 25 FREE prints from PhotoWorks.com
Kodak - Great deals at the Kodak Online Shop. Buy now
Pixum - 12 inch Mega-Poster for free! Click here!
and Photobox...

...who will all happily take your digital photos and turn them into photographic prints. And the costs are incredibly low. Frequently there are free print offers for new customers to take advantage of, as well as a whole host of gifts that can be personalised with your own images. Many digital photo printers provide free services for customers like, storing digital photos online and even organising them into photo albums, or allow family and friends around the world to view your images on-line so that you don't have to mess around with big e-mail attachments.

And the turnaround is usually very fast. I've had prints delivered the morning after I uploaded them and ordered my prints. Some suppliers even have the option of collection from an affiliated local store, giving you the option of saving on the postage. I had 30 prints from Snapfish, completely free, because I chose to collect them from my local Jessops camera store.

One of the big advantages over film, when ordering digital prints, is that you only print the pictures that you want. All the duds you can just delete. So the cost of printing your digital images is reduced even further.

One of the things you need to be aware of before you use on-line photo printing services (especially if you have a dial-up modem) is that digital photo files are huge. And nowadays it's getting difficult to buy a digital camera with much less than 7 megapixels. So, even with a broadband connection it can take quite some time to upload 30 or 40 digital photo files. And to upload several hundred holiday snaps might take a day or two. So you want to be sure you aren't uploading anything bigger than you absolutely need to. If you need to check have a look at my article on re-sizing images you'll find the details there.

So have a look at what some of these photo printers have to offer, take advantage of a few free prints to see what the quality is like, and while you're at it, order a mug with a picture of your partner, kids, dog, or even your best holiday memory. Don't leave them sitting on your hard drive, get them out into the world where others can enjoy them too.