Using Photoblogs and Galleries: Creative Ways to Share Your Photos with Windows XP
Published: November 1, 2004
By Sharon Crawford, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
The remarkable thing about digital photography is the ease with which you can share your photos with far-flung friends and family. With traditional film cameras, making multiple copies of prints and sending them to various destinations takes both time and money. It’s especially expensive if some of the recipients are bored by snapshots of your family trip to Tulsa (as hard as that is to believe). After all, enforced viewing of someone else’s vacation pictures has been grist for the humour mill since the 19th century when hardy travelers began bringing home endless daguerreotypes of the Egyptian pyramids.
As recently as a year ago, I often sent photos as attachments to e-mail messages, but the proliferation of viruses and worms by way of attachments has made people cautious and rightly so. Also, the large size of digital photographs can make receiving them a hardship for people with slower Internet connections. Fortunately, there are other techniques for sharing pictures of your adorable baby or puppy, including photoblogs and galleries.
The photoblog is the newer phenomenon. A photoblog is a type of Web log (blog) that is regularly updated with photos. Galleries are arrangements of photos that may be organized by category or date or any system you choose. Galleries have been around for a while.
In this column, I’ll point you to some good photoblog and gallery sites, explain how to use them, and provide some tips on how create great photos to share.
Join the Photoblog Community
Some photoblogs focus only on photography, while others have photos in addition to other content. All photoblogs, however, consider photos to be an essential part of their structure. Photoblogs, like blogs, are updated regularly, invite comment, and often develop a coterie of regular viewers.
Photoblogs have a “guest book” where visitors to your site can post a message commenting on your photo. They have an area where you can link to other photoblogs that you follow and want to share with your viewers. Featuring your own snapshots, linking to other photos, highlighting pictures taken by friends, and posting comments are ways in which your photoblog joins the photo-sharing community.
The Terms and Conditions or Code of Conduct that you must agree to on all blogging or gallery sites specify what can’t be published: obscene, libelous, or illegal material. You also agree not to post material protected by intellectual property laws—you can’t post anyone else’s pictures or anyone else’s writing without their permission.
Fotolog and Fotopages host photoblogs from all over the world and offer a continuous stream of new photos. Both sites offer free or inexpensive ways to start your own photoblog. Expressions offers a selection of templates and an efficient uploading tool. The cost is $3.00 a month for which you get 100 MB of space and the ability to have up to three separate blogs going at the same time. Most of the larger photoblog sites offer tools that automate the process of setting up a photoblog and uploading pictures. Just go to the Web site and look for a sign-up link, then follow the instructions.
Create a Photoblog for Your Web Site
If you already have a Web site with FTP file administrating functionality, an easy tool for publishing your photoblog is Snaplog. This site provides free software that works with Windows XP, but note that it is beta software. To get started with Snaplog, download the latest version from their site and install it using the easy-to-follow prompts:
1. | Click Settings, and then click FTP Settings, as shown in Figure 1, to enter your FTP server domain name, the account user name given to you by your Web hosting company, your password, and the absolute server directory where you want SnapLog to publish your files to. This directory doesn’t need to exist prior to publishing.  Figure 1. Using SnapLog |
2. | If you want to use a theme other than the SnapLog default look, enter its location on the HTML Rendering tab. For more on themes and other customizing effects see the Customize Your Photoblog section in this column. |
Use Blogger for an Easy, Free Photoblog
You can have a truly free blog/photoblog at Blogger. Follow the easy instructions that start on the Home page to create a blog. To add photos, you’ll need to download the free software, Hello Bloggerbot. The easiest way to do this is by following these steps:
1. | Click the Upload Image/File link when you make your first post, as shown in Figure 2. This opens a window with a link to Hello Bloggerbot.  Figure 2. Using Blogger |
2. | Click the link to sign up and install the software automatically. If you’ve installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) , security features in Internet Explorer might require you to temporarily allow pop-ups to see the Hello Bloggerbot window. Windows XP will also open a Security Alert dialog box before allowing software download and installation. It’s a good idea to install SP2 because it includes Windows Firewall, which supplies a protective boundary that monitors and restricts information that travels between your computer and the Internet. |
3. | To add to your photoblog, open the Hello Bloggerbot and click Send Pictures. Select a picture from your hard drive and add a caption, as shown in Figure 3.  Figure 3. Using Hello Bloggerbot |
4. | Click Publish, and the photo is transferred to your blog. You can make both photo and text entries from Bloggerbot. |
5. | Click the Page icon on the same bar where your pictures are miniaturized to see the simple instructions (shown in Figure 4) for posting pictures and editing or deleting entries.  Figure 4. Blogger instructions |
6. | Click the Weblink icon to view your photoblog. |
If you want to change the look of your photoblog, follow these steps:
1. | Sign in at Blogger and click the name of your photoblog. |
2. | On the Template tab, click Pick New. |
3. | Select the template you want to use, and then click Republish to make the change to your entire blog. |
The best part about using Blogger with the Hello Bloggerbot is that it costs nothing and the software is quite easy to use—though you might have to poke around a bit to find every feature.
Customize Your Photoblog
From small Perl scripts to customizable applications, an assortment of photoblog tools is listed at Photoblogs.org. If you know your way around Web page creation or scripting in general, you can construct a unique theme for your blog and automate the uploading and editing process. This site also has a good list of general Web hosts (where you can use those scripts and programs) and a separate list of sites that specifically host blogs and photoblogs.
How and When to Use a Gallery
If you’re not up to the constant updating that make photoblogs what they are, consider an online photo community where you can set up a gallery, with or without additional commentary.
Webshots offers the usual free plan and a premium service for $3.99 a month ($2.49 a month if you pay for a full year). To transfer your photos to your personal albums, you first have to download the Webshots software. After the pictures are uploaded, you can reposition them and add captions. Figure 5 shows pictures of the late, great Dave with captions added.
Figure 5. Using Webshots
Pluses for Webshots include easy search tools and thousands of downloadable photos. On the other hand, rearranging photos within an album can be tedious and navigation tools don’t always work as expected.
MSN Photos combines lots of information and tips about photography with groups that range just about every subject. You can have multiple galleries but their contents all count against the 3-MB storage limit for free accounts. For $30 a year, the limit increases to 30 MB.
You can join a group or create one of your own. I maintain two groups (really galleries) on MSN—one showing our house and its ongoing changes since we moved in February 2004 and one chronicling our puppy’s growth, Bringing Up Puppy.
To create your own group:
1. | Go to the MSN Groups home page, and under Create your own Group, click Create one now. |
2. | Sign on using your .NET Passport, and then supply a name and description for your group. Each time you want to add photos or organize your pages, you sign in using your .NET Passport. |
3. | Set options for the group—whether it’s public or private, what overall category it should be listed in, and so forth. |
4. | Click a photo album, as shown in Figure 6, to see its contents and to change or add to it. |
Figure 6. Using MSN Groups
MSN groups are quite flexible—in addition to photo pages, you can also add a message board, a calendar, lists, and a custom Web page. Unfortunately, even buying the extra storage space does not buy you freedom from sponsored links on every page.
Tips on Posting Photos
Whether you’re a serious photographer or limit your photo taking to holidays and birthdays, it’s now relatively easy to put your pictures on the Web where they can be admired by millions or just your friends and family.
You’ll want to post your best effort each time you post a new picture on your photoblog or gallery. Taking the picture is half the battle.
Tweaking your photo in an image-editing program can make the difference between a filler photo and a great memory. See Digital Image Editing 101, PhotographyTips, and Kodak’s Taking Great Pictures for information and insight into working with digital photography. If you’re running into difficulties with your pictures, the best place to go for help is the Windows XP Photos Newsgroup.
Sharon Crawford is a former editor now engaged in writing books and magazine articles. Since 1993, she has written or co–written two dozen books on computer topics. Her books include Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual, Windows 98: No Experience Required, and Windows 2000 Professional for Dummies (with Andy Rathbone).
