Photos from your digital camera may not fade, crumble, or turn yellow like your grandfather’s old prints, but they’re vulnerable in a different kind of way. Digital photo files are nothing more than a series of 0s and 1s stored in a particular order. They only last as long as whatever media they’re stored on, and CDs, DVDs, and hard drives are just chunks of plastic and metal that are vulnerable to water, fire, accidental erasure, and breakage. Scared yet? Good.
Here’s rule number one for digital photo backups: More is better. For safety’s sake, back up all of your photos in more than one place. That way, when a CD breaks, a hard drive crashes, or your laptop is stolen, you’ve got another copy of your photo library stashed somewhere safe. Read more »
Sending photos
There are a number of ways the net can help you share your photos. One of the easiest is to send pictures to other people as email attachments. This can be done using Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook, Netscape Mail, AOL or whatever other email service you’re using.
Watch out for the file size of your digital photo. Bear in mind that unless you and the person you’re sending the photo to are using broadband, file transfer speeds via ordinary modems are in the region of 5k per second. That means a typical 1Mb digital photo will take a little over three minutes to send and a similar amount of time to download when received at the other end.
Also remember that some email servers put limits on the maximum file size you can send to other people, so you may need to reduce the image first. If the photo’s just designed to be seen on-screen and not printed, you don’t need to send a full-sized version. Many beginner-orientated digital photo programs will resize a photo for emailing in a couple of easy steps. You can also resize photos manually. Emailing photos to other people is easy. You just attach your photo as a file, or resize it to fit the screen dimensions and embed it in the message itself
Online photo albums
A number of companies offer online albums completely free. You set up your user account, then choose the pictures you want to upload. They’re then transferred to the album site where you can organise them, rename them, add captions and more. You can then invite other people to come and look at your photos. One of the best examples is the service provided by MSN (Microsoft Network) at photos.msn.co.uk. Here you can upload full-resolution files, organise them into albums and slideshows, plus print and send them to other people. You pay for any printing you have done but the rest is free.
Your own website
You have even more control over the look and presentation of your pictures if you create your own website. Nearly all Net accounts come with free web space just for this purpose, so you might as well use it. You will need a web page creation program, and some information from your ISP about where you upload the finished pages, too, but it doesn’t take long to pick it all up. Some image-editing programs, like Adobe Photoshop, Elements and others, can automatically create web page albums from selected folders of images. If you don’t mind spending a few hours learning web design tricks, though, you can do it yourself. Serif’s WebPlus 7 (£30) is just one example of a program that makes website design easy, and you can even create web pages in Microsoft Word.
You’ve uploaded your photos to Flickr and now its time to get organized. On your Flickr home page (www.flickr.com), you see a few of your photos and others under the heading: “Everyone’s photos.” In the upper-left corner are some links to other pages:
- Home. Flickr’s home page is a no-nonsense, bare bones screen with big, clear links to the pages where the real business takes place: uploading photos, and viewing photos (yours or everyone else’s). When Flickr has any news or announcements to tell you about, you’ll read it here first.
- Tags. In Flickr, these keywords or phrases are your primary tool for both organizing and searching for photos. But they’re much more than that. In Flickr’s lively online community, tags are a basic unit of currency. Most members add several tags to each photo they upload, hoping to see and be seen by folks all over the world with similar interests. On the Tags page, Flickr displays current lists of the most popular tags for the past 24 hours, past week, and all-time favorite tags.
- Groups, People, Invite. These pages connect you to Flickr groups, your friends, and your family for sharing your photos. The invite page makes it easy to lure your pals to Flickr; fill out a simple form and Flickr sends them an email.
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Flickr is fairly different from the other consumer-oriented online photo sites such as Shutterfly and Snapfish. Part of Yahoo, Flickr caters to a much wider online community than just photography buffs. It’s less interested in selling you prints and other items and more focused on providing a forum where visitors can share photos and other interests. For example, when you log on to the site, you see not only your own photos, you also see a sampling of photos that other Flickr members have recently uploaded. Whatever your passionwhether it’s hiking, baseball, or manhole coversyou’ll find plenty of folks to share photos with on Flickr.
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As far as your computer is concerned, the photos from your digital camera are nothing more than files that happen to contain images. You can treat them exactly like any other kind of document file: Drag them into folders, copy or delete them, and so on. But pictures are different than other kinds of files, so along with a quick review of basic Windows file management techniques, this post shows you how to use Windows XP’s juicy new picture viewing features. Even if you use, say, Photoshop Elements or Picasa as your primary tool for organizing photos, someday you’ll inevitably find yourself shuffling photos between folders in Windows, so this post is worth a read.
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Tip:
Should you want to send your photo via fax, then you really choose the most reliable way to transmit your precious photos and image documents. There are many fax solution out there, but to make it easy for you, you might want to try fax solution from www.axacore.com. But wait, why would you need fax? Well, supposely you need to send a business document with some photo attached for quick review, and also with a signature request and at last, you need to have it returned to your desk in minutes. With this challenge, a proper fax solution could give you a great favor.
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To organize your photo albums in Snapfish, click the Photos tab at the top of the page. In the Things You Can Do box at right, click the triangle next to the words Edit & Organize. A list of options expands below the heading, including commands for moving, copying, and deleting photos.
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Snapfish, a production of the folks at Hewlett-Packard, provides services for both digital and film photographers. You can upload digital photos or mail rolls of film for them to develop and upload to your online account. Either way, your photos end up in Snapfish albums, which you can share with friends and family by sending out email invitations. HP also gives you ample opportunity to part with a few bucks by slapping your photos on prints, posters, books, calendars, and so on.
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In Shutterfly, the procedures for moving and copying photos between albums start out the same as moving them within albums as described in the previous section. First, you select photos by adding a checkmark, and then choose from the list of commands at the right of the screen.
Moving, Copying, and Deleting Photos
To move or copy photos, click the “View & enhance” tab to see all your Shutterfly albums. Then follow these steps:
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Shutterfly is an online photo service that lets you store, share, and print your digital snapshots. Shutterfly gives you three ways to upload pictures. You can transfer photos one-by-one using your Web browser. With the help of a browser plug-in, known as the Picture Upload Assistant, you can upload several photos at once. Shutterfly also provides a standalone utility program called Shutterfly Express, which you can use to perform minor edits and then upload photos with a few clicks.
Note: At this writing, Shutterfly was testing out a new programcurrently saddled with the ungainly name “Shutterfly
Photo Organization Client”that will eventually replace Shutterfly Express. The new program will be a full-fledged, PC-based image editor and photo organizer.
To get started, go to
www.shutterfly.com and sign up for a free account.
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Sooner or later, you’ll want to rearrange the photos in your online albums. Perhaps you’re creating a slideshow for friends to see, or maybe you’re collecting otter photos for a gift calendar (it happens). You simply drag an album’s photos to put them in the order you want and EasyShare uses this new arrangement for things like slideshows and photobooks.
Tip: To create a new album, you can do it when you first upload the photos, as described in the previous section. Or, to create a new album from photos already in EasyShare, make copies of the photos and then create a new album to hold them .
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