Print the photos you want (use the brand of photo paper your printer manufacturer recommends, since printer performance varies greatly with paper texture) and store them, but keep in mind that the inks used in your home printer may not have the lifespan of photos printed professionally. Really avid photographers might think of investing in serious inks and archival paper, but given the ease of reprinting photos and constantly improving technology, that doesn’t make sense for casual shutterbugs.

After you’ve made prints, back them up digitally somewhere other than your hard drive. The easiest method is to copy all those files to a blank CD. Sites like the Google-run Picasia can walk you through the process if you haven’t done it before; it’s not much more involved than using an old floppy disk. Store the CD with the prints (assuming you keep your them in a climate-controlled space). Given the size of hard drives these days, you probably have plenty of room to keep a backup there as well. In the digital age, it costs practically nothing to have copies of your most precious photos all over the place — just be sure you have a method that’s consistent every time you take pictures.

Now comes the fun part: Make your photos available to your loved ones. Quite a variety of online services exist for this purpose, none quite like the others.

There’s the free and fun flickr, which is versatile for grouping images, viewing different resolutions, and linking your pics to related ones taken by people you’ve never met. (As of this writing, for instance, the site offers more thanh 150,000 different views of the Eiffel Tower.)

Flickr is geared more toward artsy or travel photos than family snapshots, but is remarkably hassle-free for browsers, and offers them lots to explore once they’re done reminiscing over your Yuletide fun.

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