Andrews Family

Now that you’ve got your free blog set up (see my previous post), you might be thinking that you’d like to share some photos. Who doesn’t want to share their photos with friends and family? Everybody likes looking at photos, but you can only attach so many pictures to an email. What is bad is if you don’t make them smaller before you attach them and you send out a 3 MB email and max out someone’s account; that’s bad form and I’ll cover that in my FAQ soon here. Never fear though, there are sites that provide you with free space to make your own on-line photo gallery. Most people have seen photo sites like the ones from Kodak and Snapfish, but those sites focus on selling you prints and not simply sharing your photos. There have been free photo sharing sites around for a while, like Flickr, but Google recently started testing their Picasa Web Albums.

It’s pretty cool, and best of all it’s FREE. (Yes, free is a recurring theme.) You have to have a Gmail account to sign up and they say it is a limited test, but I don’t think they are turning people away yet. You get 250 MB of space to create albums and upload your pictures. Uploading your pictures is easy. The upload page provides an ActiveX control that you can install that makes uploading pictures easy. You can drag and drop them right into the web page and it even gives you the option of resizing them so that you save space. You can also upload them one at a time through the website without installing the ActiveX control which is nice if you want to upload from someone else’s computer.

You can also upload pictures easily using Picasa, which is a free application from Google for organizing and editing the pictures on your computer. It is seperate from the new web albums but it does let you upload directly to your web album. If you aren’t using anything to organize and backup your photos, I’d recommend giving Picasa a try. Picasa will also let you edit your photos and has an excellent "I’m Feeling Lucky" button which will automatically adjust the image with a single click. I prefer Adobe Photoshop Elements, but that isn’t free. A few clicks to edit your photos will make them look 100 times better, and make you look like that much better of a photographer. It also makes it easy to backup your pictures to CD or DVD, which you really want to do so that if something does happen to your computer, you don’t lose all the pictures you’ve taken of baby’s first year. 

If you want to check out what a Picasa Web Album looks like; you can check out my ’favorite’ sister’s site:  http://picasaweb.google.com/galenlisalyons

Oh, and if you are wondering how you are going to keep up with everyone’s new web album sites, don’t worry. They provide RSS feeds that you can subscribe to. Actually they currently have some issues with their RSS feeds but I submitted a bug report to them and I’m sure they’ll get it straightened out in no time.