Continued from the Pervious Page
Showing your photos online
... what to do after the pictures are taken
Not everyone has an online server where they can upload their vacation photos. In the same respect, not everyone has time on the road to prepare and email photos to everyone on their email list. Many people already e-mail photos to friends, sending the images as message attachments that the recipients must open and view. But then there are people like me who don't particularly wish to be barraged with vacation photos, especially raw from the camera in their huge unretouched form. The online approach to image distribution may be the solution for you.
Finding a good online photo gallery site can have its advantages to your own server or to email. For those who have blogs an online photo host is a must if you intend to include photos with your blog -- an essential to successful blogging.
Storing Photos Online
- You no longer have to e-mail photos to different people and avoid force-feeding photos to those who don't necessarily want to see them -- put them at a single place and email the links.
- Upload more images than possible with email and send to more people. Makes the photos browser based
- Online storage services offer a degree of security and backup. If you lose your original memory card after uploading, you can retrieve the photos later.
Bloggers can easily upload the photos then link to them within the blog. (Unless of course the blog host allows picture upload as does TypePad.com
Careful what you store
Remember, by using an online service, you're photos are on the internet. So, be careful not to upload any images you don't want strangers to see -- because strangers do and will have access. If your pictures are good enough to be considered commercial quality you'll also have your pictures ripped off. In that case you might wish to use a digital watermark before uploading.
Online Photo Gallery Providers
There are many online gallery providers, some charge a fee and some are free. All will require a registration and will carry advertising.
PBase is a free service that seems to work well. It's created and maintained by Slug and Emily (pbase.com LLC) for people who find it difficult to share their work. It started in 1999 at photobase.org with basic features. Take a look around and see some of their popular galleries.
Photobucket.com is another such free service offering reliable image hosting and and online photo albums for direct linking and photo sharing. The good thing about Photobucket.com is that it is so simple to use. Simply sign up, get your gallery and begin uploading the images. Another real advantage is the privacy option -- you can make your album public or you can set a 'read-only' visitor password. So you can hide your photos from the general public. Additionally, Images larger than 250K will be automatically resized to 250K or smaller, so you have some protection from uploading overly large photos. (250K is too large anyway.) See a sample Photobucket gallery.
DotPhoto offers a free and pay services including printing in case you want prints of your digital photos.
We tested about a dozen of the services but those above were the best. Others included too much advertising, or too much programming per page and just weren't the
If you have a web site or you administrate someone else's web site, then you're probably already familiar with the FTP process of uploading files to the server. It's a simple matter to set up an unpublished directory to contain your photos whether for blog linking or sending links in email. This way you have complete control over what happens to the photos. Be sure to take along a good FTP program and your access notes for the site.
Which ever route you take, remember you should first process your photos to make them "web friendly" and always keep in mind it's the internet. If it can be stolen, it will.
Thanks for reading... and happy picture taking!
Editor / Publisher, DT&G Magazine
Previously: Digital Camera On The Go, Exposure & Tripods and Digital Vacations
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