SURFING THE WEB

Photo Albums For Your Friends

By: Dick Travis

So you have a digital camera.  And you can take picture after picture, without worrying about the “F” setting or the technical details of photography.  But how can you show your friends the best pictures and explain what they are?

Sure, you can email them and attach the pictures, but your friends keep complaining that either they can’t download them…or they can’t see the whole picture…or their email system doesn’t allow your pictures cause there “too big” or whatever.

Yahoo Photos to the rescue.

That’s right, YOU can use the Web to sign up with Yahoo (free) and go to photos.yahoo.com and start keeping photo albums which can be seen by your friends, printed or even have prints made. 

Try it?  You will be surprised how easy it is, especially if you don’t want to massage all your digital pictures with special software.  Yahoo is basically FREE and they will give you 30 megabytes of storage for your albums.  And you can add appropriate text to each picture and rearrange the photos to make almost professional looking slideshows.

One of the nice features of Yahoo Photos is that you can upload up to 30 megabytes of your photos and Yahoo will take care of re-sizing them (usually to 400 pixels by 300 pixels), automatically.  This means that you can simply take the pictures, put them on your computer system and upload to Yahoo without spending lots of time figuring out how to operate sophisticated graphics software such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.  Just shoot, upload and add text…

Why does Yahoo do this for free?  Because they want you to use their “Premium” service which does not limit the “size” of the pictures or they want to sell your friends “prints” of the pictures.  That’s fine, if you need it, and great if all you want is to show off your photos for FREE. 

I would highly recommend doing a little more preparation, however, if you want to make best use of Yahoo Photos.  Why?  Because, if you take the easy way, you can only get about 15 photos on the web and you will be out of space, but if you prepare your pictures ahead of time with Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or your favorite graphics software, you will be able to get 10 times as many photos on the web for your friends.

 And, improving the lighting, sharpness or just cropping your pictures will make you look more like a professional.  In addition, it saves valuable “computer space”, ie: you can reduce the “computer size” of your pictures to a few hundred kilobytes rather than a few megabytes.  Don’t forget to change the type of picture file to JPG to really save space, before uploading to Yahoo.

Yahoo provides all kinds of security for those of you who are concerned about placing photographs on the web.  You can limit the viewers to friends or even limit the printing of the photos if you wish, but remember when you send an email to your friend with the “link to yahoo”, your friends are the only ones who are really aware of the exact address of the albums.

After your album is the way you want it, I recommend running the slideshow and then capturing the “address” or URL of the slideshow and pasting the “address” or URL into your email to your friends.  They will be able to merely click on the link in your email and see all your photos in a slideshow format. Remember to highlight the “address” in your browser, then go to “edit”  and  “copy” …and then use the “edit” and “paste” in your email program to put the LINK into your email.

Surfing the Web keeps on getting easier for the average person and certainly exchanging photos through the web is more fun and productive than the old-fashioned way of getting your snapshots to your friends.  Surfing the Web with Yahoo is  definitely an interactive experience you and your friends will enjoy. 

Email me at dtravis2@cox.net or call at (760) 724-4091