HERNDON, Va. — One thing about living near the nation’s capital is that relatives and friends from all over want to pay you a visit. Many times they stay with you and your family and kind of look to you to plan an exciting itinerary for them.
An added benefit is that most of your other relatives would like to know or see what your and your guests did during the visit, many times asking for copies of photos taken so they can, vicariously, enjoy the trip along with everyone else.
During pre-Web days this involved several trips to the drugstore to have film processed, determining how many picture copies to make and lots of stamp licking and address looking up in the little red address book all wives have.
Depending on how popular you are and the relative distance of family and friend members, this scenario can be repeated several times during a tourist season and can get into a few coins for picture copies that never seem to be enough.
That was THEN and this is NOW (grin). Because of the increasing popularity of such things as digital cameras and low priced scanners, it’s now possible to use one set of prints or digital images and with a little software and savvy, to share vacation photos with the entire family and friend database anywhere on the planet through Web pages.
Loyal readers will have already created or obtained Web page space through their ISP, cable modem provider or other sources. I recently moved my Web page to another provider that offered up to 150 megabytes of space, umpteen e-mail accounts, etc., all with my domain name. Paying by the year I am only out $100 and I can use part of the space to advertise my consulting business.
However, just by looking on the Web it is possible to Bogart some free Web space here and there for these family type projects. Just be sure and keep up with what pictures are put there (grin).
The first step is to either transfer the digital camera images to your computer and/or scan in copies of the regular photos you have taken. Remember my admonition from pervious columns to make your ORIGINAL copy in the highest quality possible in case you want to make printed copied later.
Decide on how you want to present your pictures to your friends and relatives. When I first started doing this I would take HOURS and design nice looking pages and agonize how “artistic” the pages were. After talking to friends and relatives I was told all that work was more for my benefit than theirs. All they wanted to see pictures, nothing fancy!
There are all kinds of software out there that will convert your huge digital photos or scanned image files into smaller sized pictures and thumbnails for the Web. I have personally fallen in love with Adobe Photoshop’s automatic batch program into Web pages on the fly.
The page “design” isn’t much, but very utilitarian. Just put the large picture files into a file by themselves. Once that’s done, I recommend that you rename the images into a brief description of what photo is about. Two examples of this technique are located at www.ncc1701.net/cave and www.ncc1701.net/battlefield. These web pages document recent trips to Lauray Caverns and Gettysburg with relatives.
Once that’s done, the Photoshop program goes in and reduces the size of photos, makes them 72 dpi, creates a thumbnail and page. Just click on the thumbnail and get a larger picture.
If you don’t have access to this kind of software, most digital cameras and scanners come with image manipulation programs allowing users to adjust image size to 72 dots per inch (dpi) and whatever image size (say 3 x 5 inches) they want to use. These files are then used to hand-create Web pages.
Why Web pages and not e-mailing photos to everyone? First, with the increasing use by many services of Web-based e-mail, it is sometimes impossible to attach files. Also, some ISPs will not allow users to have the large size mail boxes needed to send and receive large sized images.
Frankly, it is much more efficient to display MULTIPLE pictures via the Web. Programs such as Microsoft Internet Explorer allow users to just move their cursor on top of a Web photo and print it out on their printer if they wish to keep a copy.
Don’t know how to create a Web page? No problem; just go to www.google.com and search for “create as Web page” and lots of folks will give you advice how to do it.
Finally, how do you let friends and family know when and where new pictures appear? You could send e-mail to each person telling them when new images show up; or, create a specific Web page they can check from time-to-time for new stuff. I recommend the latter,
If you want the whole world to see your photos just put a link to your family photo index page. Doing this type of page will help share your family moments with millions of potential viewers.
Of course, there are still commercial sites out there to display your pictures in exchange for possibly selling copies to your relatives.
Please send me links to your vacation picture pages so I can look over your work and let me know if you want to share them with other readers or just me. Please send those links to [email protected].
