A: So, you're walking down the street and you notice something that makes you go, "huh." Worth sharing? Probably; the barriers have been knocked down, right? It's as simple as pulling out your smartphone, snapping a picture and uploading it to Twitter. Or, if it's quirky enough -- or could be with just a little help from a layer or two: a soft glow, a sepia tone -- you might post it to your Instagram account instead. Facebook? Picasa? Flickr? Wait a minute, after the barriers were knocked down, after we made it so easy to share and to post and to create, we just reconstructed them. Now, all of your photos are all over the place, with some on the Web and others on your desktop. It's hard to bring them together.

A new-ish service, Pictarine, hopes to correct that. (It was founded two years ago and was quietly made available to public users in May.) Pictarine is a Web application that pulls together all of your photographs and organizes them in a single browser. Better still, the app allows you to pick and choose from those photos to build a Zest, Pictarine's name for a virtual album, and share it with friends and family. You can even add friends to a Zest, allowing you to browse through their photo collections and decide which you might want to download to your computer. If you're only interested in pictures taken by you or of you, this allows you to find all of those images that your friends captured with their cameras and uploaded to various services.

Tools mentioned in this entry:

• PICTARINE
  

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Image: Pictarine.