Putting pictures on the web is the quickest and easiest way to share them. You don't even need a computer to do it. And although you may never have thought about starting an online photo album, there is a very good chance you already have one.
The simplest and cheapest way to get your pictures online is to have it done as part of the D&P (developing and printing) process. Such services have become common in the US over the past couple of years, and Fotango, a start-up based in London, now offers one in Europe.
Post a 35mm or APS film to Fotango and it will put your pictures online free. You can also order a set of prints or a Photo CD when you send off the film: see www.fotango.com for prices. The service is also available via WH Smith, which means you can take your film into any branch for processing, and have the pictures put online for an extra 99p.
D&P services usually produce good results because they scan the original nega tives, not machine-made prints that may be of variable quality. And since manual scanning is hard work, they save a lot of effort.
Of course, it is not happy snappers who are driving the online album market. It is, rather, the growing number of people who are buying digital cameras, as the image quality goes up and prices come down.
Digital camera owners tend not to say: "I'll stick a print in the post". They probably don't have any prints. They can and do offer to send pictures by email, but this can create problems.
Image files can be large, and take time to upload and download. Recipients often do not like receiving large attachments by email, and may have problems decoding them. Worse, a handful of images can fill up a mailbox, which may mean more important mail is "bounced" (rejected).
The obvious solution is to put the pictures on a web page, so people can look at them when they like. And when the first free web space became available on GeoCities and similar "homesteading" sites, that is what many keen photographers did. However, this still required too much time and effort for people who just wanted to put a couple of snaps online - especially if they were just snaps of things they were auctioning on eBay.
About three years ago, PhotoPoint came up with the solution. PhotoPoint lets you put pictures on the web by emailing them to photos@photopoint.com. You then log on to the service using your email address, and search for other people's pictures by using their email addresses.
Also, once you have put a picture in a PhotoPoint album, it has a unique address. This means you can email a friend a link to a picture and they can go straight to it. For example, my photo of New York, a theme hotel in Las Vegas, is here.
What could be easier - if you just have just have to click on a web link? PhotoPoint now offers other ways to upload photos. You can upload up to 10 images at once, by browsing for each one on your hard drive and selecting it in a search box. It works exactly like adding an attachment to an email message in Hotmail or Yahoo. Almost every online album site has the same facility.
PhotoPoint has also introduced Image Express software for Microsoft Windows. Download this helper application and you can upload up to 100 pictures at a time. Finally, the site has a tie in with Kodak's PhotoNet Online service in the US, so users can have films processed and then transfer the image files to PhotoPoint.
If you only want to upload one or two dozen pictures, you should have no problems with a service that lets you upload six to 10 at a time. But if you want to upload a couple of hundred, or a couple of thousand, then make sure you choose a service with bulk upload software such as Image Express.
Another useful PhotoPoint feature, not found on all services, is the ability to rotate an image. This solves one common problem, which is accidentally uploading pictures as horizontals when they should be vertical. PhotoPoint also allows simple cropping, while other sites offer "image enhancement" software.
Dozens of rivals have entered the online album business over the past couple of years. It has attracted some big players including Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Sony, as well as start-ups such as Ophoto, Shutterfly and - in the UK - PhotoBox.
Most are free, but derive some income from making prints. This includes printing images on mugs, plates, T-shirts, mousemats and other memorabilia. If you allow it, they are also happy to make prints for your friends, or even for people you don't know who just like the picture.
Many other web sites have also added photo album facilities, including the leading portals: Yahoo, AOL and the Microsoft network, MSN. If you already have a Yahoo or Hotmail address, then you already have an online photo album. Visto includes one too.
The idea of making prints raises one of the problems that is usually hidden by photo album services: image size. If you use a digital camera, selecting the best possible image quality will result in a multi-megabyte file. Even compressed JPEG (.jpg) images will often range from 200K to 900K. If you just want to share a snapshot, this is far too large: about 35-135K would download quicker. However, if an image is going to be used for printing, you want the best resolution you can get.
Typically online albums will let you upload any image you like, but will only display a reduced version. For example, my New York picture was uploaded as a 182K image with a resolution of 1280 by 960 pixels, and on Yahoo, that is what you get.
However, the one you can see on PhotoPoint has been reduced to a 43K JPEG with VGA resolution (640 by 480 pixels), while the one on Fotango has become ludicrously small.
Another problem I had with Fontango was that I could not see how to link to a whole album. This is easy with PhotoPoint, and Yahoo. For comparison purposes, all contain the same four photos.
Another point to consider is the total amount of space allowed. For example, my four Las Vegas photos already take up a megabyte, so Yahoo's generous 25 megabytes of free space may only hold 100 pictures.
Some sites allow an infinite amount of storage - dangerous, if there is no limit on uploading multimedia files and movies! - while others are more circumspect.
The obvious way around such limits is to open multiple accounts. You could give them different names (scholialasvegas, scholia friends, scholiapets etc) or simply numbers (scholia001, scholia002 and so on). There are already people with more than 200 Yahoo accounts.
All the online photo albums let you keep your pictures private. However, you can "publish" them to the global populace, if you like, and list them in Yahoo-style category guides. Many albums also have "guest books" where visitors can leave comments.
But if you really want to be the next Sam Haskins or Ansel Adams, do the job properly and design a website to suit your pictures.
Online albums are just a simple way to share snaps with friends.
