Sharing pictures via the internet
One of the great thing about digital is that you can share your pictures without having to print them out or be in the same room as your friends and family. With a digital image, you can email it, upload it to a photo sharing site, or put it on your family web site.
Sending via email
If you just want to share a few pictures, email might be the best way. It's easy to email pictures as attachments to your messages. Most email programs have a button to "Add Attachments" (usually accompanied by a paper clip icon). Simply create your email as you always do, click on the paper clip and use the "Browse" dialog that appears to find your pictures and attach them.
Making your images smaller
When sending pictures by email, there are a few "gotchas" to watch out for. First, you want to keep the total size of your email to under 1 - 2 megabytes. Since the images on your CD are high-resolution, each one is already between 2 and 4 megabytes. That means before you send them via email, you need to make them smaller. The "Preparing Images for the Screen" tutorials tells you how.
Setting your options so everyone can read your attachments
Images are what we call "binary" files. Binary files must be "encoded" when they are attached to emails. There are several different encoding options and if you pick the wrong one, not everyone will be able to open your attachment.
Mail for Macintosh
Select "Always send Windows friendly attachments" from the "Edit⇒Attachments" menu.
Entourage for Mac (part of Office for Mac)
In the Preferences dialog, select "Windows (MIME/Base64)" under "Attachments⇒Encode for"
You might think you should select "Any Computer (AppleDouble)" but these options are misnamed. MIME is actually an internet standard, not a Windows standard and "AppleDouble" is not understood by every computer.
Outlook Express (Windows and Mac)
All attachments are encoded using MIME format. There are no encoding options for you to set.
Photo sharing sites
There are two types of photo sharing sites. One type is set up just to display photo albums. Sometimes these are free and sometimes there is a small yearly fee. The other type of sharing site is actually an online photo lab. They offer you space to upload your pictures in the hope that you will use them when you need photo products.
It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain how to use every photo sharing site out there. The following is a list of sites that are popular to help you get started. Once on their site, use their online help if you have problems.
Flickr (beta)
Flickr.com is a new site that is very popular. Right now it is free and only lets you share files; there is no photo lab attached. The interface is clean and easy to use. They promise there will always be a free version even if they add features later and start charging.
Go to http://www.flickr.com/ to get started.
pBase
pBase is one of the first photo sharing sites. It used to be free but so many people use it that they started charging $23/yr for 300 MB of storage. But you can open a free trial account with 10 MB of storage. The trial lasts for 30 days.
Go to http://www.pbase.com/ to get started.
Smugmug
Smugmug is an online photo lab that has lots of photo sharing features including being able to leave comments on photos. It is very easy to use and optimized for sharing photos rather than selling them. The prices on prints and photo products are very reasonable. It costs $29.95/year for unlimited storage and there is a 7 day free trial.
Go to http://www.smugmug.com/ to get started.
Shutterfly
Shutterfly is another photo lab that makes sharing albums easy. Also they have some of the best prices around and a generous "tell a friend" program. Their print quality is excellent and they are one of the few places you can buy a photo book.
Go to http://www.shutterfly.com/ to get started.
Yahoo! Photos
Yahoo! Photos is another free sharing service available to anyone who has a Yahoo! ID. They don't charge for the service because they are hoping you'll buy prints from them. Their prices are reasonable and your photos will remain there as long as you use the account.
Go to http://photos.yahoo.com/ to get started.
All the others
There are so many online photo labs out there that it's impossible to keep up. The ones listed here are easy to use, free or cheap, have lots of storage and are optimized for sharing rather than selling. That does not mean there aren't good photo lab and sharing sites out there that not listed here. When looking at photo lab sites, here are things to watch out for:
- Do you have to order prints from them to maintain your account?
- Can you share albums with anyone or do people have to sign in (i.e., get an account with that web site) to view them?
- How much storage is provided? If it's a small amount, you'll constantly have to delete old photos to upload new ones.
Avoid sites that make sharing difficult, force you to order prints from them to keep your account open and don't offer a lot of storage.
Creating a web site
There are so many ways to create web sites, that we could never cover them all here. If you would like to start a small web site to share news and photos with your family, there are a number of web sites you can use that are cheap and don't require you to know anything about HTML or Javascript. Most have free trials. Many include a free email address. Here are some of the better known and some information to help you decide which one to try:
Yahoo! GeoCities
This service has been around for a long time and there is a strong user community to help you with your web site. There is a free version that has ads. People who come to your web site will see the ads. If you don't want ads, you need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.
GeoCities PLUS - this is their basic plan. You get a very small amount of space, enough for a few pages, with no ads for $4.95 / mo.
GeoCities PRO - for only $8.95 / mo. you get a basic web site with your own domain (they'll register the name for you for free) and 10 GB of storage. This is comparable to most bare-bones web hosting services, but you also get to use their page wizards to create your site. It's a very good deal.
No matter which version you go for, there is a Photo Page wizard that creates online albums for you. Other features include visitor counters and a free guest book.
Go to http://geocities.yahoo.com/ to check it out.
Homestead
This is another service that has been around forever. They have changed their price structure quite a bit over time though and it's no longer as good a deal as it once was. The basic service comes with a 3 month free trial but after that it costs $9.99 / mo. for a very basic site with only 10 pages. The next package up is $19.99 a month for 100 mb of storage. Also, it only works with Windows.
Go to http://www.homestead.com/ to check it out.
.Mac
.Mac is a Macintosh-only service. It is much more than a web site creator. You also get Mail, a Backup service, extra disk storage you can use for anything, not just your web site and a Sync service that lets you share information such as bookmarks, addresses and calendar between multiple computers. It is very easy to create a photo album with this site, much easier than with GeoCities or Homestead.
This service costs $99.95 / year ($8.33 / mo.) and there is a 60 day free trial.
Go to http://www.mac.com/ to check it out.
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