One of the best ways to share photos with friends is to post them to a web site. It’s more efficient and practical than sending lots of emails with attachments.
One of the best ways to share photos with friends is to post them to a web site. It’s more efficient and practical than sending lots of emails with attachments. For family occasions (births, birthdays, anniversaries etc) you can share your images with the extended family. These sites are usually private (the URL isn’t given out to the public) and temporary.
A photo web site is also good for people on a tour group to pool their photos – one of the Woody’s Watch team has just done that with a massive site of over 3,000 photos!
But what’s the best way to do it?
There are some subscription services that let you share photos, though these are simple and often quite limited. We’ll not talk about them here because we figure WOW-MM readers would prefer to make their own site using the resources they already have.
Most Internet providers include some web space as part of their offering. As long as you don’t exceed the disk space limit this is a cheap way to post your photos.
If you have no web space there are plenty of companies that offer low cost services. We have used Dundee Internet for many years and have good reports of Future Quest.
Another option is to host the web site on your own computer via an ADSL connection with a static IP address or dynamic mapping service, but this is for advanced users and has various risks.
THUMBNAILS
Most digital or scanned images are large, at least 1MB or more, and displaying many of them on a web page can take a lot of time to for the user to see them. The solution is to provide ‘thumbnails’, small versions of the full size picture. These thumbnails are linked to the main picture so when you click on the thumbnail, the full picture appears.
PAGE VIEWS
A simple photo web page has a lot of thumbnails and when you click on one the full image appears in the browser window.
There’s more complicated options available with a series of thumbnails on the side or bottom and a full size image on the side. This is like the filmstrip view in Windows XP.
These options can have all sorts of frills and designs to make the photo gallery look either really cool or incredibly messy.
The more complicated page views are generally OK for small groups of images (say less than 50-100) but choke when the gallery gets too large. It’s also worth remembering that the more ‘elegant’ web designs require particular browsers or versions of those browsers. For maximum compatibility (and less complaints from frustrated relatives) you might want to go for a simple web design.
Thankfully making a snazzy web design is quite easy, there’s plenty of tools to make the thumbnails and web pages.
The first place to look is with the software you already have. Any digital camera or scanner comes with software that can probably make web pages from groups of photos. Adobe’s Photo Essentials seems to be bundled with every second box we open these days.
The recent versions of FrontPage have a Photo Gallery option under Insert | Picture that will take a group of images and make them into a fancy web site. Similarly almost any photo editing or organizing program on the market will do a similar job – we found ACD Systems, Adobe Photo Essentials and CompuPic (still going strong after many years) among many.
While these programs do a good job we generally feel they are too smart for their own good. As mentioned before, fancy pages don’t suit large numbers of pictures and can have browser compatibility options. In our experience it’s safer to go with a basic web page then customize it a little.
There’s some small and effective programs that will take a group of images and make pages and thumbnails in a straight-forward way. We’ve been using a simple freeware program from Matthew Monroe called HTML Photo Gallery Cataloger. This will make thumbnails and a simple web page with links to the main images. The result is basic but you can open the pages and make any changes you like. For heavy use you can configure the template web pages but I’m happy enough to run with the defaults and edit afterwards.
MAKING IT YOUR OWN
Once you’ve created the picture gallery you’ll probably want to customize it to some extent. Regardless of how you’ve created the gallery you can open it in FrontPage (or any other web site editor) and make changes.
Be careful with any changes you make to ensure that you don’t break the pages, and this especially applies to the more complicated designs that have a lot of code behind the scenes.
Whatever you do and how you do it, make sure you test the web site before publishing. In Frontpage, save all web pages then choose File | Preview in Browser. Look at the site in 640×480 resolution if you think some older computers will be used.
I usually put some comments on the opening web page to help viewers. Most important I tell them how to copy images to their own computers. Here’s some suggested comments:
“These photos have small ‘thumbnail’ images for you to choose from. Click on any small image to see the full size version.”
“To copy any photo to your computer from Internet Explorer: Right-mouse click on the full size image and choose: Save Picture As … then choose a place to save on your computer.”
“Some of these pictures are big, over 1MB so it may take some time to copy each one.”
“These web pages have a lot of small pictures and can take a little while to full display, patience please.”
PUBLISHING
Once you’ve made and checked your photo gallery you can publish it with FrontPage using File | Publish Site or an external FTP program like the venerable WS-FTP.
Depending on the size of the gallery and images the transfer of your files and images to your website might take some time, especially if you have a dial-up connection. With a broadband connection make sure you don’t exceed download/upload limits.
MAKING A CD
One side-benefit of making a web site is that it can also be published to a CD or DVD. Simply copy the entire web site to a CD/DVD. The receiver can click on the index.htm file in the root folder to launch their browser and view the contents just like a normal web site (except faster).
