I use a Mac, and I use iPhoto to manage my digital photos. iPhoto 6 now has a feature called Photocasting, which allows you to create a photo feed for other users to connect to.
If you're an iPhoto user, Photocast feed invitations work fine - you click on the link, iPhoto launches, and you can subscribe to the Photocast.
However, if you're a Windows user, the experience kinda sucks, as getting any kind of reader to subscribe to the feed is a royal pain in the arse (a Photocast is supposed to just be an RSS feed, but apparently it's not standards-compliant).
Anyway, after much messing about, I have a solution, and it's as follows:
1 - Tell your Windows friends to use Firefox as their browser.
2 - Get them to install the Sage RSS plugin for Firefox.
3 - From Sage, have them open the photocast feed, but have them substitute the word "photocast" with the word "web" in the URL (you may want to do this for them in the invitation you send).
So, for example, if my photocast feed URL was
http://photocast.mac.com/myusername/iPhoto/myphotocast/index.rss
I would send it to my Windows friends as
http://web.mac.com/myusername/iPhoto/myphotocast/index.rss
Once this is done, the photocast renders nicely in Sage under Firefox :)
Note:
a) I have only tested this with password-protected photocasts.
b) I have only tested this using the latest versions of Firefox (1.5.0.7) and Sage (1.3.8) on Mac OS X 10.4.8 and Windows XP Pro SP2.
c) The photos are not cached locally - the Windows user can only view the photos whilst they are online with this method.
d) I have also tried Photocast Viewer (poor viewing interface), dmAlbums (buggy) and Opera (poor viewing interface, not straightforward to configure).
Update: During an e-mail conversation with a good mate about this, there was a misunderstanding. Basically, he picks up the feed for this blog using Google Reader and had e-mailed me about this post. As a result of the misunderstanding, he opened one of my photocasts using Google Reader, and it works just fine!
That's a lot less hassle than Firefox/Sage!!