If you received a digital camera for the holidays, you are probably already deluged with digital images.

It’s one of the few downsides of using a digital camera. Free from the financial worry of developing bad photographs, the photographer with a digital camera can snap as many photos as its memory card will allow. As a result, instead of waiting for the perfect moment, a digital shutterbug snaps away.

Before long, however, your computer is bulging with photos. Like a digital shoe box, your hard drive is packed with umpteen photos of your dog, your children or that one particular sunset you really thought was pretty at the time. There are so many photos, you can’t find the one good photo you took, but you won’t delete the rest because they have the potential to be good if you could only figure out how to remove your relative’s red eye, or trim out your obnoxious cousin.

How to wade through the digital deluge? One answer is photo management and editing software. Although your digital camera likely came with such a program, it is probably rudimentary at best. And at the other end, you don’t have or aren’t willing to plop down the $600 for a copy of the professional-grade Adobe Photoshop.

The good news is several powerful photo management and editing programs can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Two popular programs are Picasa from Google (www.picasa.com), and EasyShare from Kodak (visit www.kodak.com, then search for ”easyshare software”).

Both programs share many of the same photo management and editing tools, and are easy to use, said Vince Jones, the store manager at KITS Cameras in the Bend River Promenade mall.

”Ninety percent of the public isn’t going to go into Photoshop and try to edit their photos,” Jones said. ”They are going to look for a software that’s convenient for them because their computer knowledge isn’t that high.”

Picasa can be downloaded and installed for free, but registration is required to download EasyShare. The registration is free, and also creates an account for you at Kodak’s proprietary online photo development site, Kodak Gallery (www.kodak gallery.com – formerly www.ofo to.com).

After installation, both programs organize the user’s photo collection into date-based albums. Within the albums, each photo is displayed as a thumbnail, or a tiny version of your photo, so you can visually search your photos. In Picasa, each photo can be given a caption, which can be a handy way to label a photo and find it fast.

In fact, finding photos in both programs is markedly easier than trolling through your computer’s file directory. The photo’s file name and its caption are searchable. Picasa also allows a user to assign key words to a photo, which are in turn searchable.

The most helpful, though, are the photo editing tools. With one mouse click, you can remove red eye, rotate an image, and trim, or in photography parlance, crop, an image. The programs also allow you to adjust the light and color of your photos. You can change the contrast of an image, the amount of background light, or render your photos in black and white or sepia tones.

Once your photo is perfect, Picasa offers several options with regard to what you want to do with it. One cool feature is to designate photos to be used as your computer’s screen-saver, thereby creating an automated, personal slide show to replace the boring old screen-savers that came with your computer.

Both programs also enable you to print your photo on your home printer. You can print in a variety of sizes, from wallet-size up to 8 inches by 10 inches. Thanks to the printer and photo-quality paper, a computer user can produce professional-grade photos at home.

(Some printers are better suited for printing color images than others. Check your printer’s manual for details, or consult an electronics review site on the Web, such as www.pcworld.com.)

If you don’t have a photo-capable printer at home, photo software can make it easy to select an online photo developer in order to buy prints of your photos and have them delivered to your home. Picasa provides links to several such developers, including Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) or Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com). To develop a 4-by-6-inch photo, Snapfish charges $.12, and Shutterfly charges $.19, according to their Web sites.

Kodak’s EasyShare program directs you to its online photo development site, www.kodak gallery.com.

Ritz Cameras, the parent company of KITS Cameras, also has its own photo development Web site, www.ritzpix.com. Users can upload photos to the site, edit them with the site’s own photo editing tools, order prints and then pick them up an hour later at the local Ritz Camera or KITS Cameras store. Jones’ store doesn’t currently have that capability, but will when its remodel is finished in May, he said.

Most online developers will also be able to turn your photos into a variety of other items. For instance, you can make a calendar, a DVD, a hardcover photo book, or even have your favorite photo printed on a coffee mug or a mouse pad.

Online developers all have photo sharing possibilities. This allows you to create digital photo albums and e-mail them to family and friends. And several services, such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) allow you to upload your photos to create photo albums you can show off online, enabling Web surfers to view your photos and leave comments.

Bend resident Maria Limberg uses an online photo sharing service, Sony’s ImageStation (www .imagestation.com), to assemble photo albums of her family and e-mail them to friends and family, including her mother in Peru.

”We have family all over the place, so it’s easy for them to watch the kids grow up,” said Limberg, 29.

She has been using the free service for three years, and likes it because it doesn’t require people that receive her online albums to register with the service to view them, unlike some other services. Limberg estimates that she uploads photos from her digital camera to ImageStation and sends out a new online photo album three times a month.

A broadband Internet connection is recommended if you plan to use online photo developers or photo sharing services, as the large file size of digital photos can considerably slow the process if you use a dial-up connection.

If you don’t have a digital camera, and instead have shoe boxes of old photographs, you can still get in on the action with a scanner. The scanner will scan a photograph and digitize it, enabling you to edit the photograph on your computer. Prices range from $50 and up. Visit a product review site, such as www.pcworld.com, for more information on scanners.

Special effects get the red out

Photo management and editing software such as Picasa, available free online, can help you get the most out of your digital photos, including adding different effects, such as a sepia tone.

Picasa can also automatically remove the red spots from subjects’ eyes that occur when the flash bounces off the retinas, located in the back of the eye.