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One of the great promises of digital imaging lies in its immediacy. One minute, you snap a picture; the next, you send it across the world, to friends, family and enemies alike.

The reality is, considering limitations of technology, it’s rarely that quick. Sending photos via e-mail contains several time consuming steps.

First you have to get the pictures from your camera into your computer. Then you have to open your e-mail program, find the picture you want to send, figure out how to attach it and hit send.

Recipients of photos share the pain. It chews up a lot of time to open a picture sent as an attachment, and sometimes the photos don’t come in the correct format.

And if you’re on a dial-up modem (and many of us still are), you might as well go cook dinner, particularly if you’re sending more than one picture at a time.

But now software developers are coming to the rescue with new programs designed to speed the transfer of images from one computer to the next.

Consider the Hello! program offered by Picasa Inc., a company recently purchased by Google Inc. Available via a free download at www.Hello.com, the program aims to do for pictures what Napster did for music – only in a much more private and direct and controlled way.

Hello! opens a so-called peer-to-peer network that allows users to instantly share and chat about their personal pictures. In layman’s terms, that means the pictures go out over your phone or cable modems directly to the computers of the people you want to have them. There is no middleman in the form of an e-mail service or photo storage site or memory consuming attachments to contend with.

Unlike Napster, however, you’re not opening your computer to anyone else on the Hello! network at the same time. Only the people you choose will receive or see images.

It’s pretty simple, too. All you have to do is choose the pictures you want to send, click the Send to Hello button and choose your recipients. The pictures will instantly appear on the computers of the friends and family you choose in the Hello! window. If you’re online at the same time, you can even chat about your pictures in real time.

But Hello facilitates photo sharing in other forms, too. Hello has been integrated with Blogger, a separate software program that speeds the creation of weblogs. This means Blogger users can more quickly post photos and captions to their personal blogs. The process is nearly automatic – the so-called Blogger Bot resizes photos, uploads them and publishes them within seconds.

Other developers are following Hello!’s approach, such as OurPictures Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up. OurPictures ($20 a year via www.ourpictures.com) also relies on using peer-to-peer computing technology to take the pain out of e-mailing photographs.

For your money you get access to the OurPictures software. The software allows for some basic editing, such as rotating images, adding captions and removing red eye. 

Once you’re ready, you pick the photos you want to send, type in e-mail addresses and hit send. The pictures go directly from your computer to the PCs of your friends and family.

In one unique feature, OurPictures users can set the software to automatically print pictures as soon as they are received. The company is also working on building a network of retailers who can provide prints, to be picked up in the store within four hours of ordering.

A variation on the sharing theme is the PhotoSite digital photo service, (various prices, available via www.photosite.com ) which aims to streamline the process of compiling images into a web-based photo album.

The service says it can help digital camera owners upload photos 10 times faster than competing methods and share their albums in less than five minutes.

It does this through a variety of advances, such as the company’s trademarked “SmartSizing” technology. SmartSizing puts photos into the format that’s best and quickest for on-screen viewing and desktop printing.

The program’s developer, Homestead Technologies, extended the concept to PhotoSite To Go. That program allows digital camera users and friends or family to e-mail photos from computers or cell phones and have them instantly appear on their personal PhotoSite.

PhotoSite To Go works by creating a PhotoSite inbox. Photos e-mailed to the inbox are automatically placed on the owner’s PhotoSite page.

Homestead got into digital imaging software with the notion that digital camera owners wanted an easier way to exchange pictures.

“Photo sharing is one of the most important reasons for buying a digital camera, yet neither e-mail nor existing online photo services ... address this need,” Homestead Chief Executive Officer Justin Kitch said. He cited results of a study showing that two-thirds of people who have e-mailed photos have encountered problems.

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