A great way to share your pictures is to post them on the Web. Here's an easy way for photographers to leverage the greatest publishing tool of all: the Internet.
Creating a web site is a cumbersome task, even for people with quite a bit of web design experience. So, what if you just want to get some images up for friends, family, or a client to review and comment on? This idea will get you on your way quickly, using a built-in feature of Adobe Photoshop. That's right, by using a powerful tool called Web Photo Gallery; you will have a professional-looking site up in no time.
All you need for this idea is a copy of Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Before I go further, let me clarify the difference between the two applications. The professional offering from Adobe is called Photoshop CS (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop). It costs about US$650, runs on both Windows and Mac, and has many high-level tools, such as advanced batch processing that working designer’s need. Adobe also offers Photoshop Elements (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopel), which is available for about US$85 and has most of the tools that CS offers. Elements also run on both Windows and Mac. For this idea, you can use either Photoshop CS or Elements. I refer to them both simply as Photoshop. The screenshots are from Photoshop CS.
When you have all your software together, you'll need access to web space for hosting your photo album. Check with your Internet service provider (ISP) to see if you have free web space (you almost always do!) and find out how to upload your files.
Most likely, your ISP will tell you to use an FTP application to move your files from your computer to their web servers. There are a number of good freeware or shareware FTP applications out there, and Mac OS X users have FTP built right into the operating system.
Okay, enough networks stuff; let's start building a great-looking photo web site! Open Photoshop and figure out which digital images you want to publish. They can be in any format Photoshop can open, and they can be as large as you want; Photoshop will take care of resizing them for the Web. You do need to make sure they are large enough to display in the larger size on your web page. A 200 KB JPEG is a good guide for a minimum size.
Go to the File menu and select Automate Web Photo Gallery. This will open a Web Photo Gallery dialog box, as shown in Figure.
The first thing you'll need to do is select the style of web page you want from the drop-down Styles menu. There are many styles available, and each will load a preview thumbnail in the dialog box, choose the one you like & get going.
Web Photo Gallery dialog box Additional Tips:
1. Photoshop creates an index.htm file and individual folders for images, pages, and thumbnails and places them in the destination directory.
2. The destination folder can be uploaded to your Web server as-is, or opened in an HTML editor for further editing. The UserSelections.txt file is not required and can be deleted.
3. You can replace the home.gif, next.gif, and previous.gif icons with your own images. If you use custom icons of a different size, however, you'll need to change the height and width attributes in your HTML files.
4. You may want to rename all your photos with a informative file name before creating your photo gallery. See the links below for more information.
5. Photoshop creates an individual page for each picture rather than linking directly to the image. This provides easier navigation and allows you to customize the page.
Source: O Reilley | Portfolio Website | Online Portfolio
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