Snap a photo of your tyke’s first steps with your phone and chances are that shot will be entombed in your little gizmo until your baby has gray hair.

Which is OK, as long as you plan on keeping your trusty Razr with you for the next half-century. (And really, how good could the shot have been on a camera phone?)

But this is not a good thing for the wireless carriers, who know that data usage — mobile gaming, messaging and such — is a gold mine.

So it is not so surprising that the phone companies are urging us to buy devices and services meant to seamlessly move those pictures onto the Web, where they can be blown up, touched up and blasted out to one’s MySpace or Facebook pages, Flickr accounts or to anyone with an e-mail address.

The operative word here is “seamlessly.” For years, cellphone users could get pictures from their phones to the Web, but for most people, learning how to use those services is the digital equivalent of a trip to the DMV.
Carriers and device manufacturers have only lately figured out that users need a single button that says, “Send my new photo now.”

While we wait for networks to line up one-click photo sharing services, handset makers are jumping in. Nokia, for example, recently announced its newest camera phone marvel, the N96, which will be available in the final three months of the year.

Photography snobs who sniff at camera phones need to look at this thing. The five-megapixel camera features a Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus capabilities — a huge departure from typical camera phones, which have static focal points and therefore render subjects in adequate, but rarely stellar, focus.

What this means, for those who can afford the roughly $900 price tag, is that N96 users will very much want to get their photos to the PC and the Web. For them and other users of newer N-series phones, Nokia has its own method for easy photo sharing.

Take a picture with the N96, and the camera’s screen offers four icons — one for trash, one for saving the shot to the camera’s internal gallery, one for e-mailing the photo and one for sending it to “Share on Ovi,” Nokia’s free online media sharing service at share.ovi.com. The phone photographer can edit the photo at that site, download it to his/her PC or send it to another online service.

The phone also “geo-tags” the photo, so others in your area can compare local snapshots online, assuming you have made your pictures public.

Some newer phones from Motorola, like the Z8 and Z10, and handsets from Samsung,  like the SGH F330 and the SGH i550, come with similar one-click upload software from ShoZu. ShoZu says millions of handsets will be distributed this year in the United States with its software preinstalled. If you don’t happen to have one of those phones, you can get the software on the phone yourself. An undisclosed number of people — probably in the millions — have downloaded ShoZu’s software, either from their mobile Web browser (at m.shozu.com) or from ShoZu.com.

Of course, you can also send the photo to a dedicated e-mail address and have it appear on free online photo sharing services like Flickr, or a mobile social networking service like Radar.net. For those new to texting, this requires learning to make the “@” sign appear on the screen.

It also means you will want to consider an unlimited data plan, unless you are especially stingy about the photos you want to keep. But with carriers conveniently introducing ever-better cameras and ever-easier methods to put those photos in circulation, they’ll get you upgrading your plan yet.

The New York Times