Using your digital camera to upload photos to the web is simple. Managing them is also easy, but for a beginner, it can be a little hard to understand. Most computers come with photo management software. If your computer doesn’t come with software, you can easily load the software that came with your camera.
Depending upon the photo management software your camera comes with, you could be looking at an easy task, or a complex application that is quite different from your other camera or from other photo management software you have used in the past.
If you have multiple cameras in your home, F-spot is a wonderful tool. F-spot is a full-featured, easy to use, straightforward, photo management software program. The photos you upload from your digital camera can be arranged by date or folders and can be tagged for quick retrieval. F-spot comes with standard photo editing procedures like red-eye reduction, color adjustments, cropping and angle adjustments. When a picture is opened for editing, the original will be saved and a new version of the picture receives the edits.
F-spot allows you directly export your photos to Flickr, Picasa and SmugMug. F-spot stores and looks for photos in the Photos directory. F-spot will also look for photos you have stored in other directories and you can import them by clicking the import button.
Uploading your photos to Flickr is also easy. If you start with a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB worth of photos each month. This is a bandwidth limit, not the actual amount of space you have with Flickr services. On the first of each calendar month, your bandwidth allowance will be reset by Flickr. You cannot reduce your bandwidth amount by deleting photos. If you start hitting your monthly bandwidth limit, you should upgrade to the Flickr Pro account. Another option you have is to shoot your photos are a smaller resolution or resize them to be “web friendly.”
Flickr has five ways in which you can upload your photos:
• The Flickr uploadr
• The iPhoto, Aperture, or Windows XP plugins
• Upload web page
• Email
• Third-party desktop programs
Fortunately, Flickr has a wide range of uploading tools available for both Mac and Windows. Emailing your photos to Flickr is an easy method to get your photos uploaded. You will have your unique email address that you use and you can send photos to your Flickr photostream or upload them to your Flickr photostream and automatically have the pictures posted to your blog. In order to do this, you can go to Flickr’s help page and configure your email settings.
The Windows Uploader is available in all languages that Flickr offers and the Mac version is only available in English. Flickr is working to expand the languages so new languages will be added soon.
After you have established your Flickr account, you need to organize your photos. Your Flickr account can be more professional and accessible if your photos are in collections and sets. Your Flickr page can be set to show both your photostream and your collections or sets. By setting it to both, people will be able to instantly find your art without having to browse through hundreds of other people’s images.
When you use online photo sharing software, you need to keep in mind that the primary goal of many photo sharing web sites is to sell you back your own photographs in the form of prints and gifts. The online album you create probably will not allow your friends and family to download the individual photo you have sent. The images can also be deleted if no purchases are made.
