Virtual photo albums let you share your memories around the world.
Sharing photographs with friends and family is a great way to use the Internet to keep up-to-date with the important people in your life. Some of the fun may be tempered by the chore of uploading photos, but there are techniques to make the process quicker. Images shared online don't require the same resolution as those intended for high-quality printing, and your upload times can be significantly reduced if you opt for lower-resolution files. Yahoo's photo sharing site, Flickr, accepts uploads through a variety of sources, all compatible with these techniques.
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Downsize your photos before uploading. Digital cameras can provide remarkable resolution, but this is not always necessary when sharing snapshots. Image processing and viewing software can save copies of your images while reducing file size. Irfanview, for example, is a freeware viewer that can re-size your photos to a variety of standard sizes while maintaining image proportions. Save your converted files under unique names if you want to preserve the original file.
When you have a lot of images to upload, resizing one at a time is time-consuming. Explore the options of your viewing and processing software, as many include batch processors for resizing files. Irfanview includes this capability, and freeware batch resizing processors like Fotosizer and PictureTray are dedicated to the resizing task. Set the batch processor to rename converted files so your original images retain full resolution.
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File format affects both image quality and storage size. When reducing file size is the main goal, JPG format is the most accepted compression format for images. Many cameras have the option of shooting in JPG format at its highest quality levels. These levels can be reduced using the resizing methods described. If your images are in another format, such as RAW or TIF, converting to JPG offers substantial file size reduction.
Don't upload photos with only minor variations. Eliminating duplicate images will reduce your upload time. As you acquire a catalog of images, learning to pick the best of a group of similar images will not only keep your catalog organized, it will improve the quality of your collection.
