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September 8, 2008 |
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Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
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Articles |
 
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Have you ever wanted to put your photos on the web, but never knew where to start? There are a lot of websites out there that will host your images for free like Flickr, 23HQ, Fotki, and Photobucket (links to these site at the end of the article), but with a limited amount of images you can share and slow loading time from huge amounts of traffic, I’d much rather just make my own site. With Adobe Photoshop you can create a Web Photo Gallery in minutes, and with GoDaddy.com you can put it on the internet with your own .com website.  A dialogue box pops up with some great options that allow you to customize how the page will appear. You can choose the different styles Photoshop has to offer and it will show you an example of the outcome in the picture box on the right. 
 There’s also a box to put in your email address if you want it posted on the website. In the ‘Source Images’ section you need to define which folder your images are stored in, and which folder they will be put in when the actual website is created. So click the ‘Choose…’ button and select the folder where you placed all your images. Then click ‘Destination…’ and create a new folder on the desktop named “web_photo_gallery”. The ‘Options’ section down at the bottom of the dialogue box is where you can really tweak the settings to make the site more unique to your tastes. Click on the box that says ‘General’ and choose ‘Banner’.  The banner is the text that will appear at the top of the index pages.  The ‘Large Images’ are the images that will pop up when you click on the thumbnails. For a portfolio site, the ‘Large’ setting is actually pretty small, so I would make that the minimum size you want to show your images at. You can make them larger by typing in how many pixels square you want your images to be.  ‘Constrain’ will apply the pixel dimension you specified to either the horizontal, vertical or both lengths. If you choose vertical, Photoshop will resize all your images by making them all the same height, leaving the horizontal dimension free. This way, horizontal images will appear larger than vertical images. The ‘JPEG Quality’ attribute should be set to 5 or higher, any less than that will result in pixilated images, but the higher you set it, the larger the files are going to be, and the longer the images will take to load. The last option you’ll really want to change is the ‘Thumbnails’ attributes.  Here you set the size of the thumbnails and how many columns and rows of them you want to display on the index pages. Once you have the settings to your liking, click OK and watch the magic. Photoshop will open each of your photos individually, automatically saving resized copies and thumbnails to the folder you created on the desktop, as well as all the HTML files needed to create the web page. If you have a lot of images, this process may take some time. Go take a break and come back in a few minutes so I can show you how to upload your webpage to your own site on the internet. When Adobe Photoshop is finished creating all the files for your webpage, it will automatically open a new browser window so you can immediately see what it looks like. The webpage is not on the internet yet, however. It is reading the files directly from your computer hard drive, not from a URL on the internet. If you want to purchase your own domain name I’m going to suggest www.GoDaddy.com because they are cheap, reliable, and have excellent 24-hour customer service. There are also free web-hosting sites like www.freewebsitehosting.com or www.geocities.com. There are many free web hosts out there and most of them fully explain how to upload your prepared website. I used GoDaddy.com to host my websites, www.chrislimone.com. Here’s an example of what the Web Photo Gallery function in Adobe Photoshop can produce. Example here.
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