Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Sharing Your Photos Online

Showing off your photos has always been a source of great joy and—in pre-digital days—major pain. Friends and relatives passed your prints around the room, craning their necks to see over each other’s shoulders. By the time you got them back, your photos were dog-eared, smudged, and out of order, making it even harder to order copies for folks who wanted them. Sending those copies required expensive mailing envelopes and a special trip to the post office.

With digital photography, you can avoid the expense of reprints and postage stamps by emailing your shots. The next chapter shows you how easy it is (using the programs covered in this book), to email shots that look great on a PC screen. But digital photos are big files—and email systems prefer small files. When you email photos with enough resolution to make good quality prints, you can send only a few at a time—and you risk crippling your loved ones’ inboxes. Email is still a limited solution.

Web sites like the ones covered in this chapter are the wave of the future. Sharing photos online is similar to organizing them online for your own use. In fact, this chapter assumes you’re already familiar with uploading photos to the Web, as described in Chapter 6. Once you’ve set up an online photo collection, you simply give viewing privileges to anyone you like. This chapter shows you how.

The benefits of sharing your photos online include:

• Instant gratification. Minutes after you upload photos, ...