These sites now offer services that let people upload, edit, share, store, buy, and even sell their photos online. Their initial popularity was fueled by the wizard-driven slideshows they offered, which allow people to quickly organize, package, and email photo albums.

And now, as digital cameras approach market saturation, and online photo storage and publishing services reach maturity and become tightly integrated with cameras and phones, consumers seem ready to leave prints behind.

The print's last stand?
When I started in the online photo sharing business six years ago, we printed about half the images uploaded to the dotPhoto Web site. That's down to about 21% today, and the number is steadily shrinking.

The growing convenience and quality of digital photography is helping people forget their old affection for physical prints. Even in the instances when digital photography isn't replacing traditional methods, it's making them better.

For example, digitally published photo books (known as "books-on-demand") let anyone upload their digital photos, design a layout, and print a nicely bound, high-quality album with glossy pages and personal captions. These books-on-demand are a great way to move important photographs out of the digital realm and into the physical world.

Homemade greeting cards are also becoming a robust business. Hallmark should be worried. Now that consumers have the cameras, computers, online services, and easy-to-use tools, they're skipping the card shop to create and print customized cards online.

Outside of these niche areas, however, traditional prints have declined by almost 40% since 2000, according to PMA marketing research. Sure, some of this decline is because digital photographers print only their best photos, without having to develop a full roll of film for only a few good pictures.

But more and more casual and professional photographers alike are foregoing traditional prints, and opting instead to upload their work to a Web-based photo service, which has the added benefit of serving as a backup to their PC hard drives.

And instead of buying double-prints to share with family and friends, people are sharing their favorite moments with custom slide shows online, as well as CD's and DVD's. In an overwhelmingly wired world, prints simply don't cut it. [When Denise and I got married in January, we simply mailed a ZIP file containing our wedding picture JPEGS to our parents and sent all our friends a pointer to our pictures on one of the photo sharing sites. -- Ed.]

The personal media revolution
These trends are converging to foster a true personal media revolution. Photography is storytelling, and photo enthusiasts want to document their stories instantly, edit them personally, and share them globally.

The most powerful photo sharing sites and editing software let you do just that, with your own background music for photo slide shows, and your own written or voice-recorded captions.

And, the more tools that become available online, the better your storytelling becomes. This truth doesn't only apply to editing photos that have been taken, but to taking pictures in the first place.