Sharing Your Pictures: It is only natural, now that you have taken all the effort required to come up with a great picture, that you want to share it with friends and family. Of course, the easiest way to do that is by email. When I first started out I had a camera that only produced a one-megapixel picture. The best cameras today can produce a picture that that can be up to 20-megapixels in size. As a result, one needs to be much more careful when sending pictures via email. An unsuspecting recipient may not appreciate receiving several 20MP pictures, especially if their ISP puts a limit on the size of email attachments they can receive. In these situations, large attachments may end up clogging a recipient's inbox, making it impossible for them to access their remaining mail.
There are two solutions to this problem: One, reducing the size of the digital photos before emailing them, and two, using a photo sharing site such as Picasa, a social network site like Facebook, or a personal web site. I, personally use all of these methods. One, I have created a Photo Gallery on my own blog site [http://kensphotogallery.blogspot.com/] for sharing my photos with others. Two, I use Picasa Web to share Slideshows that I place on my Photo Gallery blog. Though I still sometimes share individual photos via email, the majority of the time I just place a link to the specific page on my photo gallery site for the picture that I want someone to see. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods.
1. Sending Photos Via Email: The easiest is to simply scale copies your photos down to a reasonable size that will fit on most screens and take less time to download. (You can delete these smaller copies after emailing them.) Users of Windows have a way to do this built right into the operating system, and many photo cataloging and editing programs have a send email feature that will also resize copies of the pictures before sending them. I personally use the [Edit|Resize/Resample] function in FastStone Image Viewer 4.5 to perform this function. It gives you the options of changing the size by pixels, percent of the original, print size, or standard width and height sizes, and shows the new size vs the original size for each selection.
2. Sending Photos Via The Web: Posting photos to the Web is a better solution if you have many photos to send, or when you want to share the same group of photos with many different people. Most photo-sharing sites will automatically downsize very large images when uploading and sometimes offer a choice of upload sizes to the viewer. In addition, they can offer useful services to viewers of your photos such as printing, saving, and slide show viewing. If you already have personal Web space (check with your ISP), you will find lots of free or inexpensive software to build your own Web photo gallery. These are a little more work compared to using a photo-sharing site, but you have a lot more personalization options when using your own Web site.
3. Using Dropbox To Share Large Photos & Slideshows: You got photos or slideshows that are too large to send via email, problem solved - use Dropbox. What is Dropbox? Dropbox is a magic tool that helps you store files whatever they are and access them any time wherever you are. This free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, making sharing so easy that you'll be amazed at the things you can do. Dropbox mobile apps can automatically upload your photos and videos to Dropbox using Wi-Fi or your data plan. They’re all uploaded at original size and full quality, and saved to a private folder in your Dropbox called Camera Uploads where they’re ready to view or share. In fact the latest version of its Windows and Mac desktop apps can automatically upload from just about any camera, smartphone, tablet, or SD card you connect to your computer. This means that if you’ve got great shots stranded on your Coolpix or piling up on your Canon 5D, all you’ve got to do is plug it in. It even has a gorgeous photo viewer that lets invited users use their entire screen to view your pictures or videos. Invite your friends and family to any folder in your Dropbox, and it'll be as if you saved that folder straight to their computers. You can send people links to specific files in your Dropbox too. Dropbox's ability to seamlessly share its cloud storage with minimal user fuss has been the key to its success.
Joining Dropbox is easy: installing the Dropbox software (free for Windows, Mac and Linux) creates a special folder on your computer. Dropbox creates a special folder on all your devices. Any time you need to save a file, drag it into the folder and at a blink of an eye it will appear in the same folders on all the other devices, be it laptops, PCs, mobile phones or iPads. The tool works perfectly well with all the existing platforms. At present, the Dropbox service offers its users both free and paid accounts that differ only in the amount of available storage. Once registered, free-account users get 2 GB, which can be increased up to 10 GB by referring others to the service. If needed, there are options between 50 GB and 100 GB of storage available for $10 or $20 per month respectively. This is a great program. Sign up for a free account today! Go to ... https://www.dropbox.com/register.
