Technical
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Background

If you are investigating the WWW you will find a growing use of the web is to communicate information amongst family & friends.  Aside from using voice or video phone, the function with the most impact is putting up a gallery of photos.

Now you would think such a thing would be pretty simple.  It is, and it isn't.   You can spend a lot of time preparing a lot of photos.  Or you can use a variety of  services, software and techniques.  And if your are prepared to accept the "gotchas", then you can have a pretty good gallery.

Services

The most common emerging service is for photo development businesses to offer space on their own web site, with varying levels of security.  The shortcoming of this, in the early period, seems to be either a limit of the number of photos, a limit to the time they will remain, and / or the cost of the service.  Some require special software for "publishing" or handling the photo images.  Others do not require any special software.  Some of the services we are aware of include

bulletSeattle FilmWorks,
bulletthe Australian version, National Photos, (website not operational as at 2000 JN 12)
bulletof course Kodak has one,
bulletand the newest one, and the one that seems to have the best offer (money for value - "free" and reasonable storage space - basic service allows for up to 100 images, or 20 mb worth of size space. Storage space increases to 50mb if you pay), is PhotoLoft.

Software

In the mean time, a couple of software packages come into play.  PhotoWorks (which is a product of Seattle FilmWorks / National Photos (website not operational as at 2000 JN 12).  Or MicroSoft Picture It!, now in V2.0 and supposedly V3.0 is soon to be released.

Techniques

OK, so here is what we have achieved so far.  We get our film developed by National Photos (website not operational as at 2000 JN 12) (they are in Southport, Queensland, so be prepared for the inherent delays).  One good thing is they post the electronic images of the roll on the web (with security) so that only you can down load almost as soon as they are finished processing.  Only you can download them (or someone with your User ID, and password can).  Only problem is they are in a format that can only be read by PhotoWorks.  And PhotoWorks does not have the HTML slide show capabilities that MicroSoft Picture It! does.  While Picture It!'s HTML slide show leaves a lot to be desired (you can't specify background, picture descriptions, change sequence on the fly, or zoom the photos) it is just so very nice to be able to input a folder of compatible images (JPEG or .JPG is what we used) and get a HTML slide show out.

Gotchas

bulletYou of course have to have your own web site to post the photos on !
bulletYou can't easily use CompuServe's personal user's web space.  The expectation is that each slide show (we are using 1 roll = 1 slide show) is in it's own folder.  CompuServe doesn't seem to easily deal with multiple folders in the user web space.
bulletYou have to convert ("Save As") each photo from the roll using PhotoWorks to a JPEG format useable by Picture It!  PhotoWorks latest version now has a batch mode that makes that a little easier.
bulletNational Photos is apt to get your photos in the wrong sequence between negative sequence and their downloadable file shot sequence, so a bit of renaming and juggling is required to ensure the photos are in the sequence shot.
bulletSome of the services and some of the software provide the ability for you to include captions or comments for each photo.  Unfortunately the combination we use, at this point, doesn't allow for that, without lots of additional effort.  So we compromised and put some comments against each roll (see our Gallery Home Page).   However, if you want to ask any questions, feel free to send us mail (czarnik@compuserve.com), let us know which roll and slide you want more information on and we will get back to you as soon as practical.   We also hope to have out "Comments On Gallery" discussion forum working shortly.

Aside from that it does give results.  Just have a look - Tovegin - Private Gallery

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Created - 8 September, 1998.  Updated - 02 October, 2002 18:11:00 +1000  - Hit Counter

Last updated - Saturday, 27 February 1999 09:14:34 +1000
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COPYRIGHT © 1998, 1999 - Larry & Colleen Czarnik