Anyone who owns a digital camera or a scanner will know the excitement of putting their own pictures on the internet. It's a great way of sharing pictures with friends and family - and indeed with total strangers.

But before you go about spending hundreds of pounds on expensive photo editing software, it's well worth investigating some of the shareware and freeware applications available that will do just as good a job.

Most original image files - be they straight from your digital camera, or just scanned in - will be too big to put on the net. Big in terms of file size, not actual size.

The art of successfully putting photos on the net is about getting compromise. You have to reduce the file size without adversely affecting the quality of the image.

A lot also depends on exactly how much detail you want people to see, and whether you are a semi-professional photographer or just someone who wants to put holiday snaps on the net for their friends to see.

If you are in the latter category, there are plenty of excellent tools for editing and managing your photos.

For Windows users, a company called Trivista (www.trivista.com) makes two very good programs, called A Smaller Image and A Square Image.

The latest version (2.0) of A Smaller Image costs around 20 dollars to register but is a worthwhile investment. It allows you to quickly and simply crop, rotate, and remove red-eye, and also reduces file sizes so your pictures are ideal for web publishing.

If you'd rather not spend any money at this stage, take a peek at the bottom of the Trivista.com downloads page - there you will see an inconspicuous link to A Square Image, which is free software.

It does many of the jobs A Smaller Image can do, and is a great way to try things out before committing yourself to spending money.

The results from both software packages are impressive and you'll soon want to put them on the web for everyone to see.

Which brings us to the next reason for hunting down software.

Building HTML pages to display more than a handful of pictures by hand is a long-winded and fairly dull process. If you have dozens of pictures to publish, it will be one that soon has your wrists aching through over-use of your computer keyboard.

What you need is a facility that will take a folder full of images and make the HTML pages for you. Thankfully there are many programs like this, so it's well worth tracking some of them down to find out how they work.