Let’s face it: we all have a folder full of digital photos that never get viewed, shared, or worst of all - never backed-up. Local apps that manage photos never quite get the job done and typically only accomplish one thing - moving that digital shoe box into a fancy user interface where photos never get viewed, shared, or backed-up. Granted you could probably accomplish those task individually with multiple local apps, but as the complexity increases our desire to follow through with an action diminishes. Fortunately, there’s a plethora of photo web apps that act as an all-in-one solution.

Facebook is a social networking platform, or so they say. Over 70 percent of monthly Facebook visitors spend their time viewing or uploading photos. And with over 21 billion photos uploaded, Facebook has undoubtedly become the de-facto standard for photo sharing on the Web. The team over at Facebook have done a phenomenal job in making the experience as simple as possible.

Flickr is another popular photo web app, and it’s the app of choice for many pro and pro-consumer photographers. Flickr offers a compelling set of features - simple but powerful editing tools, geotagging for photos, and versatile sharing tools. But the biggest draw for Flickr is it’s large community of users. It’s an amazing arena to share and showcase photographs to friends, family, and other photographers. And of course, with unlimited storage it’s a quick and easy way to do back-ups for your photos.

Fotki was built with a similar premise as Flickr. What started as a photo sharing site for a close circle of friends has blossomed into a photo printing, selling, and blogging site. The interface is slick and streamlined and makes browsing public photos fun.

SmugMug offers unlimited photos, unlimited storage, no ads, easy uploads, and sharing - it’s easy to see why it’s an up and coming web app. There’s an option for a Pro account where users can even sell photos as stock art.

Web applications, or web-apps, are full applications that can run in the browser, accessible from any computer with Internet access. Everybody here at DeviceVM is a firm believer that this is the future of applications. If you take a quick glance at the applications I have open, a majority are web-apps - Gmail, Twitter, Google Docs, Mint, and Flickr. I do use Photoshop quite often and as of this time I’m unaware of any web-app powerful enough to replace it, but I’m sure I’ll find something someday. In the meantime, I’d like to share some cool web-apps that I’ve come across while stumbling around the Net.

Although Splashtop is on millions of computers already, instant-on is still a new thing, and we often get asked about how and when people use Splashtop. So we thought we’d share some user stories. Take a look at this photo:

(thanks @chiropractic from http://www.adiola.com for letting us use your photo!)

As you see, this chiropractor in the sunny Los Angeles has an ASUS EEE Box with Splashtop running in his office. You’re probably wondering why would a chiropractor do that. Turns out that he wants to give his patients access to the Internet while they are waiting. He told us: “it’s great for giving public access to net w/o getting on our office network. Runs silent too.”

Besides being instant-on (or off), Splashtop protects the PC from… its users’ inadvertent mistakes. With Splashtop, you aren’t going to break your PC, infect it with malware, or accidentally erase some important file. Of course, you can still spill coffee on the keyboard, but you get the point: no maintenance. And you do not need a Computer Science degree to set it up - it comes pre-installed on the computer.

As for “runs silent”, Splashtop will save you energy, since you can turn it on and off quickly. No need to keep the PC running while you are… working your chiropractic magic. But kudos to ASUS and Intel for designing this energy efficient nettop with the Atom processor.

If you have your own Splashtop stories or photos, we would like to hear about them! You can give me a quick message over at Twitter, @kevintu, or just shoot me an email kevin.tu AT devicevm.com