yeah, i knew that was a great price. and i also knew she was wanting it, so i grabbed the last copy & she repaid me. i didn't even realize that elements had add ons you could buy. there are tons of plug ins made for regular ps- i guess i never thought about the fact that they could work with elements, too. i don't know if you can change brush tips in elements, but if you are a halfway serious user, go to adobe's website and look through the user forums. people make all these neat actions, tips and brushes and you can download them for free. i've gotten some indispensible stuff on there i use every day in cs2. i'm not as familiar withelements, because i only use it when i'm at mom's 3 states away from home and have no other way to edit/look at my digi pix from when we're there. at home i use cs2, all the way. i was really impressed with how much elements has in it for a fraction of the price. and, i assume they've had some updates since the version i gave mom that came with my camera.

GreenieBeanie, I tried the .Mac service and was actually very disappointed in it - but that is a completely personal observation here. On June 18th I instead registered the domain name http://www.myblogpix.com (aptly named) and use it for hosting all my blog pix on my blogs (I maintain three blogs at present). For $11.95 a month I have 2 Gig's of storage, 25 Gigs a month in transfer allocated, and can have up to 25 email addresses that will hold 2 Gigs each. It works for me. I love iPhoto too BTW. It has been my primary means of keeping my photos organized on my Mac. Since I moved to Louisiana on March 15th of this year I've taken over 2,200 photos! Yes, that's a lot, but I figure a digital camera is such a wonderful thing and years from now the photos will still be in pristine condition - no fading, cracking or crumbling. And of course - I make regular backups to DVD to insure I never have to worry about losing my precious photo collection. A few days ago I started writing a Mac Software blog. I plan to add a brief review and link regularly to some kind of useful Mac application I run across. While some may be commercial (shareware) I am planning to try and cover only freeware applications as a rule of thumb. I'm finding my passion for gardening and my passion for computing work so well together it's as though that's how it all was meant to be from the get-go. I am Borg. You will be assimilated... Here is a link that might be useful: My New Mac Software Blog

http://www.resizr.com/ http://snipshot.com/ those are two sites I use often to do a quick resize of pictures on my pc. But there is a super free little windows power toy you can go get from the microsoft power toys site called Image Resizer This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click It is wonderful! you just right click on the picture and select resize and you get a box you can pick sizes from or set up a custom size. Here is the link to the power toys page just look for the Image Resizer download on the right. Here is a link that might be useful: Image Resizer

Owbist - you articulated the decision factors beautifully. And that is what makes it difficult. Presently, all I do is load it on the camera and crop. I know I would like to be able to do some color/contrast/tone/brightening adjustments, be able to edit out troublesome aspects. Eventually, I would like to be able to clean older photos and change colors (I know I would have loved to have been able to change the colors of the walls in my house to assist with paint color choices). Whether I'd ever get to something like swapping heads or filters, I don't know (I don't even know what filters are). Another aspect that is important to me is good photo organizing tool. I've been reading reviews of software editing programs (many free), and the reviews don't even mention organizing photos. I'm not sure if that's bc. they all do it, so it's not the feature worth reviewing, or bc. they don't do it. By the way, this review site is very useful - for all kinds of digital photograph questions. I'll post the link here in case others are interested: http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/4488.aspx. Now if I knew how to make a tiny url of this, I would have done that. I think I even have that firefox addon, but don't know how to use it yet. I think I'm going to try Photofiltre first. Paintnet also looked good, as did photoscape. All are free. Does anyone here know photoscape? A couple of more questions, if that's okay. 1) why would someone want to resize a picture? 2) what's the advantage to having a card reader get the photos on the computer, rather than just connecting the camera to the computer via USB? Thanks everyone. Lynn.