What's the best way to get a lot of photos you have taken with your digital camera to others who may want them? Now days with the high mega-pixel cameras, each photo maybe on the average of one to two megabytes. So sending 20-30 photos will most likely not make it through your e-mail systems. You could burn the photos to a CD but that takes time and then you would need mail it or deliver it to them. Who has time for that? So what other choices do you have?
Well, you can post your photos to an on-line photo album and send an e-mail with a link to the album. Once your friends or family are in the on-line album, they can view, download the photos or print them. But how do you do that you ask? Isn't it hard? There are many different on-line services (e.g. Snapfish, dotphoto, Shutterfly) but the one I use the most is provide by Google and it is called Picasa Web Albums.
Picasa is a free application and service. From the familiar Google page (www.google.com), click on the "Photos" link.
From the Picasa Web Album website, download the Picasa application to your PC (there is photo uploader for the Mac but it doesn't have all the same features).
The Picasa 3.0 application makes it easy to organize, edit, create movies and share your photos on-line at Picasa Web Albums. If you are using Picasa 2.7 or earlier some of the instructions may differ from what I describe below. Here are the steps to make your first on-line album:
- Download your new photos from your camera to your computer. Normally your photos are stored in folders in your "My Pictures" folder but you can put them anywhere you want.
- Launch Picasa and let it find your new photos.
- On the left side of the Picasa window, find the folder which has your new photos and click on it. In the window on the right, you will see thumbnails of all your photos in that folder. Double click on the first photo and it will be displayed in the window on the right. On the left side of the window, the "Basic Fixes" tab should be showing. At a minimum I usually "Crop" and use the "Auto Contrast" functions on each of my photos. When you crop a photo, you can remove areas of your photo that you don't want because they are distracting or extraneous. If you set the cropping to "manual", you can crop the photo to any size you want. You can also have it constrain your cropping to the dimensions that would work best for a certain size of paper (e.g. 4" X 6"). For more information, go to: http://www.google.com/support/photos/bin/answer.py?answer=93183
Once you finish your cropping the photo, click on the "Auto Contrast" or "I'm Feeling Lucky" to fix the photo's exposure. You can always back out of the changes if you don't like the result. You can play with all the effects to see what they do without fearing that you will permanently loose your photo.
Go through all photos in the folder cropping and fixing the exposure. Once you have done that, click on the "Back to Library" button on the top left of the window. Click on the "Save to Disk" button to make the edits you just did, the new photo in the folder. Picasa also keeps a copy of your original photo in a hidden folder just in case you want to go back to the original photo later.
Now you are ready to upload it to the Picasa Web Album. Select particular photos or all the photos in the folder that you want to share. Click the "Upload" button on the bottom center of the window. A login window will appear. If you have a G-Mail account, you can use that to login. If you don't, you can create one easily for free. Another window will pop up asking if you want upload the photos to an existing web album (if you have one) or to a new one. Once you choose the album, click on the "Upload" button and you will see a window pop up showing you the status of the upload process.
Once that is completed, you are ready to share the on-line album with your friends and family. Just click on the "Share" button which is just above the folder you uploaded. A window will open asking you the e-mail addresses of who you wish to share your photos with. You can write that person a note or just leave the default and click send. The recipients will receive an e-mail with a link to your album. When they go on-line they can view and download individual photos or all the photos in your album.
There are many options and features with the Picasa application and Picasa Web Album service. If you are interested, try them out. But you now know the basics to share your photos on-line via Google's Picasa.
