Share Your Holiday Photos

Personal Computer Tutor

January 2009

Share Your Holiday Photos

Now that you have taken all those great holiday pictures with your new digital camera, how are you going to share them with friends and family? Of course you could take your memory card to the drug store and have prints made and then mail them to your loved ones. But did you know that you have a complete photo publishing workshop right on your computer? Yes, with a little guidance you can learn how to email your photos or even better, create a web album to share them. Now this is the fun part of computers!.

Email Individual Photos

The quickest and easiest way to send photos is by email. Once you have loaded your pictures onto your computer you would use a program like Picasa (for Windows and Intel Macs, now in version 3, download it for free at http://picasa.google.com) or iPhoto (pre-installed on every Mac) to email them. (I won't get into how to transfer pictures from your memory card to your computer in this newsletter. If you need help with this you may find my Picasa Step-By-Step instructions helpful. Click here.) You will find an "Email" button at the bottom of both programs that quickly reduces the size of the picture and attaches them to a new email message ready for you to address and send.

Picasa Bottom Buttons (Windows and Intel Macs)

iPhoto Bottom Buttons (Mac)

Note: Depending on the email program you use you will either see the pictures directly in the message body or as attachments to the message. Obviously it is preferable to see the photos in the body of the message but not all email programs and email systems can handle this. If the email button does not work at all on your computer your email program may need to be configured for your email account or you can export the pictures and then attach them to an email message manually.

Share an Online Photo Album

An even better way to share your photos is with an online photo album. Basically you transfer your best photos to an online service and then send a link to everyone letting them know that you have new pictures for viewing. This is a preferable way to share photos because you are only sending one set of photos to an online service instead of flooding the recipients email Inbox with your photos. Each person can then decide if they want to look at your photos instead of forcing them to download your email attachments.

Note: When you attach photos to an email message the person at the other end must receive your entire message with attachments before their next messages will reach their Inbox. If they are on high-speed they may never know the difference, but dial-up users definitely know when someone has sent them an email with a lot of attachments. They sit and wait for your email to be received into their Inbox before they can read any of their messages.

Picasa Web Albums

At the bottom of Picasa is a simple "Upload" button (see toolbar picture above) that will transfer your photos to the Picasa Web Albums website. To see an example of a Picasa Web Album, click here: Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola Vibraphone Battle.

Note: If you have not already signed up for a Google Account you will need to in order to be able to use these features. Just click on the "Create an Account" button and follow the onscreen instructions (and remember to write down your user name and password in a safe place).

Once you have your account setup then all you have to do is select the pictures you want to upload (see Getting Started with Picasa for help with this. Look for information about Picasa Albums to select out your best photos.) and click the Upload button. You will then see the Upload to Web Albums window. Make sure that Unlisted Album is checked and click Upload.

Web Album Upload Windows

Upload Manager

Once the photos are transferred click the View Online button to see your album online.

Upload Finished

Upload Finished (Click View Online)

To share the album with others click the Share button on the right. I like to send an email to myself with this share button and then I can forward the email sent to me from Picasa Web Albums to any number of people in my address book. (Doing it this way I don't have to remember email address, I'll get them later from my own email address book.)

Web Album Online

(click the Share button on right to send yourself an email then forward that email to others)

You now have another way to upload your holiday photos and share them with family and friends. There are many other ways to do basically the same thing but this is a pretty simple solution.

Create a Webpage with Photos on a Mac

One of the easiest and most impressive ways to share your digital photos is to display them on a webpage. This way, anyone with access to the Internet can view your photos anytime. iPhoto works with iWeb to make it easy to create your own webpages. See http://www.apple.com/support/ilife/tutorials/iphoto/ip4-3.html for how to do this. You'll need a MobileMe account to automatically post your photos to a webpage. If you don't have one already, go to http://www.apple.com/mobileme/ to try it out (60 day free trial, then $99 per year).

Picasa has also just released a version for Intel Macs. You can download it at http://picasa.google.com

and all the information above about Picasa Web Albums would be available for free. There is also a Picasa Web Album Plugin that works on any Mac so you can upload photos to your Picasa Web Album account (from within iPhoto or outside of iPhoto). You can get it at http://picasa.google.com/mac_tools.html.

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