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As I mentioned in an earlier column about Sharpcast -- the image-sharing tool that also automatically synchronizes your photos -- there are dozens of photo-sharing websites and services out there, from Flickr  to Zooomr  and Smugmug  to Photobucket . But like Sharpcast, a service called Tabblo, which went public several months ago, thinks that it has something different enough to make it stand out from the crowd.

Yes, Tabblo  lets you upload and share your photos. But founder and chief executive officer Antonio Rodriguez says that this is just the beginning of what Tabblo wants to help you do. While services like Photobucket just offer raw hosting, and websites such as Flickr and Smugmug offer relatively rudimentary layout options, Tabblo's focus is on giving users a wide range of control over the layout and display of their pictures and how they look -- and on the eventual printing of posters, postcards and prints.

Prior to founding Tabblo, Mr. Rodriguez was the chief technology officer at MyPublisher , the company that produces photo books and albums for users of Apple's iPhoto software. He recommended that the company start something like Tabblo, but he says MyPublisher wasn't interested. So he went out and raised financing from Matrix Partners and did it himself.

"By the end of 2004, I came to the view that personal publishing on the Web had crossed the chasm and become the purview of regular people, who didn't need to know HTML or any of that," he says. "We built Tabblo for them, and to make it easy to seamlessly transition between online and offline, with photo books, calendars, greeting cards and so on."

When you create an account at Tabblo (which is free) and upload photos, you can choose from a number of photo-album or scrapbook-style layouts, with a mix of wide and tall or large and small pictures arranged on the page. Some themes have space for blocks of text nearby a group of photos, and others do not. The photos flow into the layout, and then you can rearrange them and/or edit them using the service's built-in tools.

When your mouse moves over top of a picture in your tabblo (which comes from the word "tableau," meaning an artistic scene or layout), a menu appears on the left-hand side, which allows you to resize the photo, rotate it, apply a range of effects -- such as sepia tone or oil paint -- add a text block next to the photo or delete it. After you choose one of the menu items and apply it, the layout automatically adjusts itself, thanks to the use of interactive software called Ajax.

You can also keep photos you want to edit or move around in a "lightbox" on the right-hand side of the page until you decide where exactly to put them. And you can change the colours of the text, background and other elements, change fonts and so on with a click. You can also change the layout at any point, remove photos and then have the album automatically rearrange the remaining photos to fit. When someone clicks on a picture in your tabblo, they get a large version with the rest of the pictures as thumbnails just below it.

Once you create a tabblo that you like, you can share it with others or you can print it on a poster, from standard page size to 16 by 50 inches. You can choose whether the poster shrinks photos to fit them all in, or drops photos until they all fit. Posters are $9.95 (U.S.) without a frame -- frames cost from $29.95 for a black metal frame to $59.95 for Scandinavian pine -- and Tabblo says they ship in 3 business days. You can also choose to make postcards or prints.

Thanks to a relationship with Flickr, you can even import photos that you have hosted at one of Tabblo's competitors, and you can configure the service to post photos and layouts to your blog if you have one. Mr. Rodriguez says he wants to make the service as easy to use as possible, not build walls to try and keep people's photos inside Tabblo. Other services such as Kodak-owned Ofoto )  and Snapfish (owned by HP)  try to do that kind of thing, and as a result don't have a very big community of users, he says.

"The 'roach motel' or data lock-in model doesn't work any more," the Tabblo founder says. "When I started this, I said we need to be the mortar in the Web, not a brick." Mr. Rodriguez said that the service is also considering a way of allowing users to sell their photos individually, the way a Web-based stock photography site such as iStockphoto  does. And the company is also working on partnerships that would see Tabblo features incorporated into other services.

"Imagine a music fan site, where you could click and edit your own poster and then incorporate it into your site, or theirs, or both -- or print it out," says Mr. Rodriguez. "Anywhere there's a need for layout of words or pictures, or both, that's somewhere Tabblo could fit in." And for now, the service is an appealing and easy-to-use alternative to some of the other Web-based photo-sharing services out there.