I think your fears are legitimate and justified. I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Using a small, free host company for your pictures is unwise! They are not accountable to you, because, you are not paying them for their service. They do not have the resources to keep their site clean.

Even if you have to use free hosting, definitely use a major site that can afford to keep things clean, like Flickr. If you can, pay for your hosting, to get accountablility and good service.

She has been talking about RAW format, but as far as I know has not started using that mode yet. She says it really wouldn't do her a lot of good unless she had photoshop to allow her to edit the pictures some, nothig very elaborate or deep, just shadows/ contrast/sharpening, the simple things to make the pics look better.

While good camera and lenses are nice, it is definitely possible to take excellent pictures with lesser gear. I wouldn't worry too much about the photo gear.

Pros tend to use high end gear mainly for durability and flexibility, and also a for maximum optical quality. However, if you can take a good photo, then you can do it whether with a phone camera or a high end camera.

I used low end camera gear for the first several years I was shooting, and took many pictures which are still among my best, to this day.

For our (MY)needs, don't think I will pay. You see, all that is on Photobucket is my avatar and pictures I want to post on the site here, along with emoticons. All the pictures she plans on getting printed off are on Walmart website (I know, but it works well for us). She just uploads them to the photos side of the site, and online orders them when she gets enough to have printed out (usually 100 minumum).

It's true that Adobe Camera RAW (which is built into Photoshop) or Adobe Lightroom (which is sold as a stand alone product) would benefit her greatly for processing RAW pictures.

Ultimately, I think RAW is absolutely the better way to go. The sooner she starts with RAW, the easier and better, in the long run.

In the mean time, if she must shoot JPEG, she might consider putting her camera into RAW + JPEG mode, so that she has the JPEGs for now, and the RAWs for later.

oK, I'll try and mention that to her as well. Thank You

And yup, that's where we are at. The desire to have better stuff, because, well it's better. BUT not needing it considering we only do this for our own enjoyment. She says she is satisfied, because she always wanted a slr and now has one. AND she has not ever complained about the quality of the camera or the lens, just HER ability to use it to it's potential so she can get better pictures.

Even if you use a free site, you might consider using one like flickr with the size to hire staff who practice good internet hygiene.

Ok again, thank you. And also, are you saying that all she really needs is Adobe Lightroom? We probably could swing that, the mega buck price for photoshop was way out of our league considering our amature/hobby use for it.

Right now she is using Google Picasa 3 and it MOSTLY works for her but sometimes she would like the ability/capability to do more than picasa will.

Using it to the full potential is 90 % not camera gear related, but other stuff like knowledge, careful technique, thought, and effort. It takes practice, but she'll get there.

You know, despite all the fancy features my camera has, almost all of my shots are all manual. I expose manually 100% of the time, and focus manually most of the time. I don't bother with most of my cameras's fancy features. I take full control of my pictures, because I know what I want to do better than the camera does.

I have a spiffy camera mainly for durability, not features.

If she learns and makes the effort, she'll use it to the full potential, eventually.

Adobe Lightroom is all she needs for highest quality RAW processing and digital asset management. If that's all she needs, then YES.

However, Lightroom is NOT a pixel editing program. If she wants to do fancy editing of that type, then lightroom will not suffice. Photoshop is best for that.