Digital Photography - Photo Sharing

Michael Stewart: I am Michael Stewart, professional photographer showing you simple digital photography. Now I am going to show you how to share your photos. Once you have some nice images, you are going to want to share them. There are some Dos and Don'ts to sharing images. Let's say the biggest Don't is don't e-mail large size files to people who aren't expecting them. It really clogs up their e-mail and can be quite annoying. If you want to send somebody a small JPG file attached to an e-mail, I think that's okay, but if they are not expecting it, don't send them one of those big files. A better solution would be to send them a link. There are many ways to link to images, which I will show a little later. If you have a collection of images you need to send to someone, I recommend first zipping them into an archive. That way instead of sending multiple files, you are sending just one file. I do that here with this folder of JPGs.

Now I have a zip file of these images for Papa. I could e-mail this to him or better yet, I could use a service that delivers files online like YouSendIt, it's www.

yousendit.

com. There are several services that you can find like this, but it will send a link to the recipient's e-mail and then they can go and download the file from there.

Most of today's image management software has the ability to create an HTML or a Flash gallery which can then be uploaded to a server or delivered directly on a CD or DVD. There are usually different templates that you can choose from, that have different background colors, different size of thumbnails, and many adjustments that you can make to make the gallery look the way you want. You can then preview the image inside of a Internet Browser and see what your gallery is going to look like. Then you simply save that in a directory and upload it to the server or put it on to a CD. Let me show you a few of my favorite ways to share photographs on the Internet.

First is blogs. Now blogs are easy to set up. They are free services, PhotoLogs, Blogger, WordPress, are all places that you set up an account and start a blog and upload your photographs. I have one called Fototech and in Fototech I do a lot of writing about technology and photography, but I also show some of my favorite photographs.

Now you can click on one of these images and see a larger version of that because I uploaded a fairly large image. I just periodically update this and found it very easy to do and a very useful way to share. One of my favorite things about PhotoBlogs is that they have RSS feed and users can subscribe to an RSS feed and get notifications and automatic downloads of your updates to your blog. Flickr is a community where there is lots of people uploading their images. Now you can use it for all kinds of things. Joining a photo community like Flickr or SmugMug is a great way to share your images, not only with people that you know but also people who might be looking for images similar to what you do.

A next one example of an online sharing service would be SmugMug. SmugMug is easily customizable to the look and feel that you want for your galleries. I will show here my portfolio gallery where a user can come and look through my images. If they find one they like, they can order print from it or other merchandise, they have coffee mugs, all kinds of things. They can also download one of the images, or share it by sending an e-mail, or getting a link to the image. As I said earlier, it's much better to send somebody a link in an e-mail than to attach a large file to that e-mail.

So this makes a service like SmugMug very useful. The galleries can easily be password protected. I find SmugMug's interface to be very user friendly and intuitive. Things seem to be where they should be and it's easy to figure out what you can do. So there are few of the ways that you can share photographs with friends, family and the world at large.

Hope all these tips today have been helpful and that you now can have simple fast fun with digital photography. Thanks for watching.