Chapter 18: Working with Graphics

Sharing Your Pictures over the Internet

The Internet is a great way to share photos. Making print copies of photos for all your friends and relatives can be terribly expensive, but it costs nothing to e-mail an image file to 20 people or to upload a picture to the Web where anyone who is interested can see it.

E-mail and the Web each have their advantages as a way of sharing pictures. In general, if you have a picture that you know a few people will want to see, e-mail it to them. On the other hand, if you have many pictures that many people may or may not want to see, put the pictures on a Web site and e-mail the Web address to people who you think are interested.

Be careful about sharing sensitive or confidential pictures over the Internet. When you give someone else a digital copy of a picture, for all practical purposes, you lose control of it. Your picture can spread like a rumor, and you have no way of knowing who ultimately will see it.

Publishing Your Pictures on the Web

You can store pictures or other files on Web servers and use a Web browser to retrieve them from any computer that is online. You can also give the Web address (and possibly a password, if the files are password protected) to other people so that they can see the files also.

You can get a small amount of Web storage space free from MSN. X-Drive offers storage, but it's not free. Kodak's Ofoto service (at http://www.ofoto.com) also provides free password-protected photo sharing along with its photo-printing services.

To upload files to the Web, do the following:

1. Collect the files and move or copy to a single folder.
2. Open that folder and click Publish This Folder To The Web in the File And Folder Tasks section of the task pane. The Web Publishing Wizard starts.
3. Answer the Wizard's questions.

The Wizard leads you through the process of choosing a Web hosting service for your files, and setting up how others will access them. Each service does this differently, and it goes beyond the scope of this book to describe how to use each service.

E-mailing Pictures to Your Friends

You don't need Windows XP to e-mail pictures to friends. You can use your e-mail program to create a message and then attach the picture to the message. But Windows XP has a neat feature that can compress one or more pictures into a single file and e-mail it. Follow these steps:

1. In an Explorer window, select a picture or a folder of pictures. Or, select some pictures from a folder (click the first picture and CTRL-click the other pictures to add them to the selection).
2. In the File And Folder Tasks section of the Task pane, click E-mail This File, E-mail This Folder, or E-mail The Selected Items. Or, right-click the file(s) or folder and choose Send To | Mail Recipient from the shortcut menu that appears.
3. You see the Send Pictures Via E-Mail dialog box, asking whether you want to compress the files so that they transfer more quickly over the Internet:

4. Click Make All My Pictures Smaller if you are sending the files over a dial-up line, if the recipient uses a dial-up line, or if you are sending a lot of pictures. Otherwise, click Keep The Original Size.
5. If you want to choose the exact size of the pictures, click Show More Options and click a size.
6. Click OK. If you chose to resize or compress the files, Windows does so. If you are sending a folder, Windows compresses the files into a compressed folder.
7. Windows passes the files to your default e-mail program (Outlook Express or another e-mail program) and you see a new, blank message with the file(s) attached.
8. Address the message, type a subject line and text, and send the message as usual.