Share is a media sharing service that finally makes it easy for you to upload, manage and share your media such as photos and videos.

Share is for people who need a way to share and organize their digital media. People who have camera phones and don't know the first thing about what to do after they've snapped the picture. People who clog each other's email inboxes with 5mb attachments. You know who you are.

Unlike traditional online photo album sites, Share incorporates many elements of "social networking" sites, allowing you to create and maintain relationships through the process of sharing your media. People are connected to each other as a result of direct sharing, tagging and commenting on each others' media, and creating lists of favorites.

Share also solves one of the most pervasive problems with media sharing. Most people share media via email, a system that was never intended to deal with the crushing load of the files from today's multi-megapixel cameras. With Share, you can continue to share your personal pictures and videos via email, but without the hassle. Clogged inboxes, rejected attachments, and lost media are now a thing of the past. Simply email your media to Share on Ovi. We capture it, store it, and send out attractive, compact notifications to the recipient by email. When they click on the notification, they see your media on Share on Ovi immediately. No sign-up, no 20 questions, no hassle.

We provide a basic level of service for free. For the grossly inflated price of $0, you get unlimited storage and unlimited uploads.

It depends on your perspective, really. Some people like being able to snap photos on their camera phone and have them transmitted immediately to a place where they can accumulate and be shared. Others like peeking in everyone's lives and enjoy rummaging around on Share on Ovi, using the social network to explore the relationships among our members. Still others want a better way to share without the hassles associate with email. And finally, there are folks who just want a media sharing system that is actually designed with them in mind.

Nothing really. We just think it's a cool-sounding name! Seriously, it is a term used by guitar players to refer to a certain style of twangy-sounding guitar music. You might call it a kind of "cowboy surf" sound. There's a pretty cool band here in Seattle called Django Share that plays Share music.

Randy likes to fly fish. Jim likes to fly sailplanes. Mike likes to play tennis. But Serena, Philip and Don are total geeks and live only to bring you the very best media sharing service in the world!

We're working on it. Our API will make it possible for third parties to create tools that upload and manage media, create visualizations of Share relationships, geolocate media and more. We also support the ATOM API, so you will be able to use your existing blog client to upload media directly to your Share channels. For information on the API, please go to the developers forum.

You need a password to prevent others from accessing your Share account.

Your upload secretword prevents others from uploading media to your channels from email. For example if your User ID is johnd, you have a channel called travel, and your upload secret word is fish, you can email media to the channel by addressing it to johnd.travel.fish@share.ovi.com. You can change your upload secretword by selecting the account tab from edit profile.

You can allow Share members to contribute directly to one of your channels by giving them contribute access on the channel settings page. In addition, you can permit non-members to upload media to one of your channels using that channel's guest secretword. This option is useful when you want to invite people who are not Share members to upload media to a specific channel and you don't want to expose your upload secretword. For example, you could put a card on every table at a wedding reception asking people to upload any photos they take. The email address might look like johnd.wedding.date@share.ovi.com, where date is the guest secretword for johnd's wedding channel. The guest secretword is unique to each channel and can be activated from the channel settings page.

Our basic free account provides unlimited storage and unlimited uploads.

The most common reason for not seeing a confirmation email is that it has been incorrectly tagged as spam by your mail program and sent to your junk mail file. To find the mail, just check in your junk mail folder. If you don’t find the confirmation email, please contact us.

While signed in, select "edit profile" from the top right corner of any page. Then select "Delete my account" from the "Actions" list.

Unfortunately, no. This would seem easy to do until you explore all the ramifications. After you've been a member for a while, you will have shared media with any number of people and have these notifications floating around with your old User ID embedded in links, etc. If you were to change your User ID, you would render those links unusable. Sure, we could keep some kind of history and map back to your original User ID somehow, but Share has a pretty complex database and doing so could bring a performance penalty. So choose your User ID with care!

In the upper right of most pages on the Share site, you will see a link to "edit profile" above your member name. Click on this link and you will be taken to a page where you can edit your member profile. On this page, you can select who gets to see your Share activity, your contact information, your location and other information about you. For each of these items, you can select the following options: Only me (private), My Contacts only, All Share Members, or Anyone (public).

You can upload individual files up to 100mb in size.

Share fully supports the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Instructions on how to report a copyright violation can be found in our Terms of Service (TOS). A link to the TOS can be found in the footer of each page. But in truth, the only way to prevent others from using your media without permission is to keep them off the Web. Whenever you exhibit stuff publicly on the Web, whether it’s your artwork, writing, or media, you take that risk. You can also control who sees your media by placing them in private channels.

Share staff does not monitor, screen or pre-approve content provided by users. Share members have the ability from the website to identify content they feel is inappropriate within the context of a particular channel and flag it. If any media is flagged within a specific channel by 5 or more members, the Share service automatically removes it from the channel. On each flag the channel owner is notified but we do not disclose who set the flag or any associated comments. After the content is removed the channel owner may appeal the action. We urge members to exercise tolerance when flagging media and will promptly deal with any abuse of this feature. More details are included in our Terms of Service.

See "How does Share monitor and remove inappropriate media?"

Share responds to notices of alleged copyright infringement in a manner compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). To provide or respond to notices of copyright infringement, you will need to take the DMCA steps outlined in section 11 of our Terms of Service (TOS) agreement. A link to our TOS can be found in the footer of each page.

The more ways the better, as far as we're concerned! There's no shortage of ideas here at Share regarding new and better ways for our members to upload their stuff - and we're working on new ones all the time. We can't do everything at once, but here's what we've got so far:

• From the website: Drag and drop files or folders into the uploader.
• From the website: Select up to 5 files at a time from your local computer.
• Directly from Windows Explorer: Use the Web Publishing Wizard.
• Via email: Each 'Channel' you create on Share on Ovi has a unique email address that you can use to send media directly into that channel.
• From your camera phone: Okay, we're stretching it with this bullet point, since what we're talking about is basically using your camera phone's messaging features to email a photo or video directly to one of your Share Channels.

Check out the new "Order prints, gifts" command available on any photo page. You can order prints in various sizes and a variety of gifts.

Channels are containers that help you organize and share your media. For sure, some people will use channels like photo albums. But we had a different idea in mind when we designed Ovi Share. You see, we look forward to the day when your mobile phone is truly a little production studio. We're waiting for the day when you can stream video directly from your camera phone. So we look at channels as these dynamic pipes with media moving through them. Even though most people are shooting stills on their camera phones today, we expect that people will be sending regular streams of media to their channels. We chose the channel metaphor because it conveys a sense of dynamic content and speaks to our vision for Ovi Share.

You can create channels for different types of media, specific topics, or any other classification system you can dream up. For example, you might create a channel that contains photos of your family, sports or trips. Or you could create a channel for each specific trip or event, or one just for humor.

Channels can be public or private, and how users interact with them is dynamic and interactive. As a channel owner you can determine who gets to view your channel, contribute media, add comments or tags, get hi-resolution originals of media, and see the channel participants list. And the best thing about channels is each one has a unique email address that you can use to send media directly into that channel from any device capable of sending email. Use the Create New Channel command on the signed in homepage to make a new channel.

People who do not have access to your private channels will never even know they exist. Private channels are only visible to people who can view them. If you are not on the invite list for a given channel, you never even know it's there. Members can give access to a private channel to non-members at any time. In addition, we wanted to come up with a way for you to send media to a Share private channel, notify a non-member, and allow them to see the shared media without forcing them to sign in.

As always, there is a tradeoff between security and ease of use. We gave this a lot of thought, and what we ended up doing is to generate a notification email that links to the media by an obscure URL that contains the invitee's email address and what we call a “Guest secret word”. With these credentials, the "Invited Guest", as we call them, can then access your private media.

You can give any member contribute access to your channel, which allows them to upload media. For non-members, we have this really great concept called a "guest secret word". Using this secret word as a kind of back door, non members can upload pictures to your channels. You can activate or change this secret word at any time on the Channel Settings page.

The most common reason for a Share email not being delivered is that it has been incorrectly tagged as spam by your friend’s mail program and sent to their junk mail folder. Have your friend check their spam folder in case it is there. Your friend can add Ovi Share.com to their non-spam list so they will receive future emails.

Basically, the idea is that you put media into these containers we call "channels". Why the channel metaphor? Well, we envision that Members will use Share to sort of produce their own personal channels that people will watch, mark as favorites and "tune in" to regularly. Grandma will no doubt tune in to her family channel regularly to see little Johnny's progress. And the voyeurs out there (you know who you are) will tune into Barbie's beach channel to catch tantalizing shots of Barb and her friends living the real Baywatch.

Putting your media into these "channels" gives your files some degree of rough organization. From there, you can tag your media so it's searchable. Share even reads any existing data that's embedded with your photo, such as camera, exposure, captions, tags and lets you edit it. And guess what? You don't have to do all the work, because Share allows - with your permission, of course - other people to tag and comment on your media! You can move your media around from channel to channel, or have one item appear in several channels at once. We even provide some basic features to enhance your photos such as rotate, brightness, contrast, etc.

Adding tags to images helps to catalog them. If more people to do this we will have a very nicely catalogued database of ZHS images that can be searched FAST.

Tips:

• People have to be members (i.e., they have to sign up) and be signed in to do tagging.
• Multi-word tags, like Mr. New York, for example, should be enclosed by quotes, like: "Mr. New York"
• Separate tags with spaces. For example: Tess Jim "half pint" "Zaragoza High School"

Never. At any time, you can click through to the original version of your photo, which you can download to your computer.

No. You can use Share from any PC or Mac with a browser. But if you do have a camera phone, Share makes it really easy to share the media captured on your phone with anyone who has an email address.

Most camera phones have the ability to snap a photo and send it to an email address. Each of your Share channels has its own special email address, and when you send a media file to that email address, it goes into the channel. Cool, huh? Now, lots of services do a similar thing; but with Share you have more control, because any photos you put into a channel inherit any security or invite settings that are applied to the channel. So, if you email a photo to your private family channel, only those who you allow to see that channel (your family, in this case) will be able to see it. Here's a hot tip: Create an entry in your phone's address book for each of your Share channels. Then, when you go to upload a photo, video or audio clip, you won't have to type in the channel's email address every time.

If you've done a lot of sharing via email, you've no doubt felt the pain. Your friend sends you a full resolution photo from his new 5 megapixel camera and you cringe as your email client reports: "Downloading 256kb of 4mb..." Or you receive a bunch of photos of the nieces and nephews at Disneyworld from your sister, followed by a note from your ISP that your email account is over the limit.

But even with all the hassles, people still use email because it's easy. Share allows you to keep sharing pictures, video and other media using email, but without the problems. You simply create an email as usual, with the photo or video included as an attachment, and address it to one of your Share channels. Each Share Channel has its own unique email address. You can also specify one or more recipients, who will receive small email notifications with a link to the media you just shared.

A really cool by-product of this is that all the media you share goes into a channel, where it aggregates. So, if you're adding a new relative to a family mailing list, the first time you share with them, and they click the link to go see your stuff, they will also see media that was previously shared.

Since we're not going to take over the world right away, a lot of people will still be sending you media via email. These eventually end up scattered throughout your email inbox, and eventually they become hard to keep track of. So here's a cool tip: Simply forward those emails to one of your Share channels! That way, they'll all be kept together in one place so you can get to them easily, using any computer connected to the Web.

Each of your Share channels has a specific email upload address and when you email media to that address, any attached media get uploaded into the channel. Neato! So, for example, my Share member name is "Jim". I have a channel called "adventure". My secret word is "think". To send media to my adventure channel, I simply address it to:

jim.adventure.think@share.ovi.com

That gets the media into your adventure channel.

Let's say I also have a channel called "family". To upload to that channel, I would send my media to:

jim.family.think@share.ovi.com

I also want my brother and sister, Joe and Maria to be notified that there's something new to see. If you want people to receive a notification, you simply use the .Share (.s for short) command. For example, if you wanted bob@comcast.net and susie@fooboo.com to be notified, you would type the following in the message body:

.s bob@comcast.net ; susie@fooboo.com

Now, Susie and Bob will get a nice looking (and lightweight) notification email with links to the media on Share on Ovi.

Learn more about uploading media via email.

Yes. You can use your film camera with Ovi Share. Simply have your film processed and scanned onto CD by your photofinisher and upload to Share on Ovi from the CD. Or, you can scan your photos yourself with your flatbed scanner, or one of those nifty slide scanners. We really like the Nikon Coolscan scanners.

Right off the bat, we decided that we would never use any nefarious tactics to trap our Members' photos on Share on Ovi. The original version of your media is always available for download. Just click on the photo in 'media view' and the original appears in your browser window. Just right click and save it to your hard disk from there.

You can download music by using our Podcasting feature. To subscribe to a channel via a Podcast, simply click on the Podcast button at the bottom of the page.

If you prefer to use an alternate podcaster, you could hover over the podcast button on the page, copy the url by right-clicking and then change the itpc:// part of the url to http:// for your favorite alternative podcaster.

To submit your podcast to the iTunes store, please use the url from the PODCAST icon.

For example: feed://share.ovi.com/feeds/podcast/channel/yourname.podcast

MP3s cannot be downloaded but all other audio files types can be (for the non-owner). The owner can always download their original audio, no matter the file type.

Uploading and sharing copyrighted music is illegal and a violation of the Share terms of service. You may not share copyrighted music on Share on Ovi unless you are the copyright owner or you have secured a license from the copyright holder to do so. For more information, read: share.ovi.com/terms