How to Put Your Photos on the Web

Introduction

Having a digital camera can be a daunting task. Sure, you can take a ton of pictures, but what do you do with all of them? You certainly don't have space in your residence to store thousands of pictures, but you probably do have the digital space too. Unfortunately, not every one has access to your computer, or your pictures and so sharing them requires another method. This article explores some of the methods available to you, the photographer, for putting your photos on the web, for the purposes of sharing them.

Before we talk about some options, you must know that putting information on the internet exposes it to the entire world unless you protect it in someway. That said, you need to be cautious about personal pictures which might incriminate you or someone else, or any pictures you wish to remain private. Copyrights can also be problematic if you are not cautious. This article will not address these problems in detail, but you will be able to find more information on these topics should you consult a search engine such as Google.

What are my options?

Fortunately for internet users, various companies provide free services to users in exchange for word of mouth, looking at advertisements and even in the hopes that you'll like the service enough to purchase an upgrade.

Other types of sites, more or less, require you to have your own webspace and possibly a domain-name (such as www.photub.com). It may cost a bit more up front, but your viewers need not be bothered by ads. With this method, your photos can be secondary to a blog, or another personal site. Of course, setting this up takes more time, money and even a bit of knowledge, some of which we'll talk about later.

Option 1: Photo Sharing Sites

An option for some are sites like Flickr, which store your images and provide some sort of interface to organize, rename and perhaps even some basic editing.

The following (small) list is fairly incomplete. There are tons of photo sharing sites out there. These just happen to be the ones I'm most familiar with. Wikipedia's article on photo sharing can help you find other popular services.

• Flickr: Flickr uses a free forever, but you get the ability to upload more per month if you buy a "Pro" account. "Pro" accounts also get to do a bit more organization. For instance, the free account (at the current time) allows you to create only 3 sets of images. A set might be an organizational group of your trip to Cambodia.
  
  There are many good things about Flickr and one of them happens to be their API (application programming interface). What this basically means is that programmers can create software that uses nearly all of the information stored on Flickr about photos and their organization. It also means that external tools can be created to upload images (something Flickr provides, but other people have integrated a Flickr uploader into photo organization software). The extensibility of Flickr is one of the reasons it's on this list. The other is the fact that I myself am a very satisfied customer.
  
  Flickr also has various options available for printing pictures, something most of the other sites we're exploring have as well.
  
  
• Shutterfly: Shutterfly has been around since 1999 and is one of the leaders in photo sharing online. It has free accounts with unlimited storage, basic color management tools (e.g. black and white, sepia, saturation) and album organization. Shutterfly allows you to create gifts, like mugs, t-shirts, etc. with your pictures on it.
  
  Shutterfly doesn't seem to have the type of discovery that users of Flickr enjoy. Part of the Flickr experience is related to social sharing of photos, and seeing what others see at a given location or of a particular topic. I could be wrong, but Shutterfly's model seems to be centered around private sharing of photos, which obviously appeals to many.
  
  
• Tabblo: Perhaps the most unique of all of the photograph sharing sites is Tabblo. With Tabblo, rather than creating a gallery, you create a narrative out of your photos. For instance, if you'd like to document the changing leaves in the autumn months, and share them with the world, you could arrange all of your photos in order and perhaps write captions for each image talking about the temperature or the gusts of wind that occured resulting in the leave tornado later on.
  
  Similar things can be created using galleries and slideshows, but Tabblo's idea is truely a unique photo sharing experience. Best of all, Tabblo is free and seemlessly integrates with Flickr, or optionally stores your photos for you. Tabblo's other offerings are books, post cards, and even posters of your tabblos (tabblos are your stories).
  
  

Option 2: Gallery Based Sites

If you're a do-it-yourselfer, you'll probably want a bit more say in how your pages look. Tabblo's unique layout system allows you to customize the look of your tabblo's quite a bit, but nothing beats the near limitless possibilities of your own site. But displaying photos on your site creates a few questions you must answer:

• How will you organize your photos? Software like Gallery, provides an album view of your photos, while tools like, SlideShowPro offer a more interactive slideshow view.
  
  If you're a Photoshop user, you may not know that you can create a galleries right from Photoshop, using the "Web Photo Gallery" option in the Automate submenu. These are simple galleries that are simple enough for many tasks, and might be just enough for you.
  
  What these methods have in common is that they are multiple images per page, or at least multiple thumbnails per page. This is the most common model and the model I'd recommend in most cases. Later in the article we'll talk about another model which uses 1 photo at a time.
  
  
• How will people view the photos? If you choose Gallery (or something like it), you're photos will be displayed in HTML. This means that anyone with a web browser can view your photos. Choosing an option like SlideShowPro, or SimpleViewer, you're introducing your viewers to the requirement of having Adobe's Flash Player. Since it's a common thing to have, you'll probably be OK, but just remember, most people have Flash in an idealized world. Not everyone will be able to experience your trip to Peru.
  
  
• How will you get your photos to the website? Most importantly, you need to somehow get your photos on the web. Some solutions will provide an administration tool which will allow you to upload images as you would at Flickr or Shutterfly. Other options require you to do some extra work in using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client to ftp your photos to your webspace.
  
  How you get photos to the web is entirely dependent on your photo "delivery" system.
  
  

The most important part of this process is customizing the pages to make it look and feel like your own. If you have no experience with web design you may wish to look at sites like OSWD which exist to provide it's users with free web templates. Most of these templates aren't designed with galleries in mind, but it's something I hope they will address in the future (OSWD, if you're reading this, how about a gallery template sub-category for photo galleries [not necessarily for the Gallery software]?).

Unfortunately, it'll probably take some know how to merge a template into a Photoshop generated gallery, or a gallery created by Gallery like software. The template method is definitely better suited for a flash based solution, or a custom solution. If you're a web expert though, by all means integrate away!

Option 3: Photoblogs

Photograph blogs (aka photoblogs) are another way to post photos to the web. Normally, a photographer puts up 1 photo at a time, perhaps once a day. This has the added bonus in that you can be lazy in organizing photos, but of course continued laziness means that no photos are ever shared.

The good news about photoblogs is that there is a bunch of software available to create them. Various plugins exist for popular blogging engines, and there are a few pieces of software which specifically provide a photoblog engine. The most notable is Pixelpost. For more information about photoblogs, check out Photoblogs.org, the definitive resource for photoblogs.

In Closing...

I've shown a few ways to add your photos to the web, and eliminate those boxes of prints you have from film. There are tons of other resources related to photo sharing if you just search around and plenty of people willing to help you. You might find that it's best to start off with using a site like Flickr, or Tabblo for now and eventually expanding out to creating your own site. Creating a site is a fun time and definitely a sense of acomplishment when it's complete.