NeoPatrick

Please promise you won't laugh at me.
I finally purchased a digital camera before my 2 and a half month Asia trip -- I had never had one before and I am sooooooo non tech oriented.

I have several thousand pictures. I uploaded (or is that downloaded?) them from my camera onto my computer. They arranged themselves automatically in a file for each day of taking them. So in each file there may be 4 or 5 or anywhere up to a couple hundred photos. I can bring up any date and there are thumbnails (too tiny for me to see what they are, though) of all the pictures I took on that date. These are accessed by going to "my computer --documents - pictures"

Now, I feel I should start some website --snapfish, Kodak Gallery, or whatever -- so that I can add captions to them, arrange them by countries or cities, and make them easily accessible if I want to email a particular photo or send someone a link so they can see them all.

I've read lots of posts and the more I read, the more confused I get. So tell, me what site should I go to that makes it all easy? One where I can store them, hopefully free, and make access easy for both me and others? And while we're at it, is there one that works easily that I can put a USB cable into my TV and do a slideshow of them?

J62

I used to use snapfish.com for ordering prints so I just used that site for sharing photos, but maybe that's so 2000's.

Now that I rarely print out photos I don't upload my photos en masse to a website anymore.

Do you use facebook NP? I can't vouch for how easy it is for organizing, but that certainly seems to be the 2010 way for sharing photos, at least among the in crowd. Friends and family all seem to use that for posting photos.

If you want something more professional looking I know that one of our frequent fodors posters uses zenphoto & he shares links here from time to time.

NeoPatrick

Facebook? Oh please no! I'm avoiding it like the plague despite all my friends telling me to get on it. All I need is another internet addiction. LOL

Nelson

Zenphoto is excellent, but also more sophisticated as noted. A lot of people use Google's Picasa which I have seen and it looks great. I use pbase which is good but it is also geared toward photo enthusiasts.

If I might make a suggestion, the first order of business might be to cull your thousands of photos down to a manageable number. You will probably have lots of similar ones, or those that are better exposed, focused, etc. Nuke the less good ones.

I just got done doing that from my shots on a recent backpack trip by Mount Rainer. I deleted about half of them.

Hope you enjoyed your new toy! There is definitely a lot to learn.

longhorn55

When I got my digital camera a few years ago, I read some camera magazines that recommended Picasa. You can download the free software to your computer and then download your photos directly from your camera to Picasa.
I like Picasa because I can label the photos, put them in folders organized by location or date or whatever, and "improve" my shots by cropping, eliminating red eye, adjusting the light, etc. Then you can email the photos directly from Picasa to friends or to many different photo developing sites. I download them to a local drugstore and can pick up the prints in an hour or so when I'm running errands!

Orlando_Vic

Good advice from all. One of the advantages of a digital camera is that you can take many more pictures that you will ever save. Some of my best pictures are 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 shots and the rest are not worth keeping. I use Picassa to share my pictures with friends and family. Occasionally, when I do want prints, I email them to Walgreens and pay about 19 cents each. At Walgreens, I can have them ready in one hour at no extra charge.

Regarding Facebook, I avoid it like the plague too. I see it as a huge waste of time.

_____________________________________________
Vic's travels: http://my.flightmemory.com/vogilvie

hpeabody

Hi Patrick, My on-line photos are on http://www.myphotoalbum.com/ There is a free version or a pay version (Club) for unlimited use and other enhancements. I like the organization of it and have tons of photos stored there.

HappyTrvlr

I use Picasa too after giving up on Kodak's site. Kodak was easy and I liked it until my photos began to deteriorate, i.e., they had cracks across them.Kodak said I could "fix" them with an elaborate process.
All of my photos in Picasa are still perfect after many years.
I make different albums, such as with last year's trip, one each for Norway, Sweden and Denmark.After I complete editing the photos, I always burn a disk of each album.
You upload any photos you want to share with others to their online album site and can send "invitations" to friends.
Good luck and thanks for you wonderful series of trip reports from Asia!

NeoPatrick

I do have Picaso, and maybe I just don't understand it, but it drives me crazy. Everynow and then I download a photo and try to file it in an existing file in Picaso, but it tells me that file doesn't exist -- even though I can see it titled that way. Then I'll download a photo from someone's email and next thing I know it is one of those files -- that I didn't even specify.

I've pretty much culled the photos already. I tend to do that each day, reviewing the pics I took and removing all the ones that are duplicates or not very good. A couple thousand sounds like a lot, but divide it over 76 days of exotic traveling!

hawksbill

I"m going to follow this thread, because I'm interested in learning about how people have approached this issue. Here's my two cents' worth:

I used to use kodakgallery.com. I think it's particularly good for ordering prints of your photos. There are many, many options for ordering prints, photo books, and even stuff like souvenir mugs with your picture on them. The prints are good quality (to my untrained eye). I'm now moving away from kodakgallery, for a few reasons. I hated uploading photos through their web site, although to be fair I haven't tried their uploading applications. Most importantly, I'm not wild about how their online slideshow works. My plan is to keep my photos elsewhere, and upload one or two to kodakgallery when I want to order a print.

For any of these sites, you'll want to note how much they charge you for image storage. If you store less than 2 GB, kodakgallery makes you buy $5 worth of prints and stuff every few years. For 2 GB or more, you need to spend $20 every few years. I don't know what the limit is.

I've started using Google's Picasa. You can store a certain amount of photos (I think it was probably about 2 GB) for free. I'm now paying $5 per year for 20 GB of storage. The slide show is very intuitive, and works well. They have a Picasa application that you can use to manage all your photos on your hard disk and keep them coordinated with your online albums. I hated it. As soon as I started it, it immediately started scanning my hard disk, finding all the image files, and trying to organize them. I like to organize my files myself (for example, I don't use iPhoto). I stopped the application, and deleted it. Then I tried their "uploader only" application, and that's great.

I didn't previously know about pbase and zenphoto. Both look much more sophisticated, geared to more advanced photographers. Pbase charges $23/year for 700 MB, and $60/year for 2100 MB, which is far more than Picasa charges. I've been looking through some galleries, and I find the slideshow less intuitive and easy to use than Picasa's (maybe I'd change my mind if I spent more than ten minutes on it). There are some phenomenal photos on pbase! One could easily spend a whole day just browsing through everyone's photos. Wow.

I can't figure out how much zenphoto charges, because their site is currently so slow that it's basically unusable.

TDudette

I enjoy looking at TR photos on the Kodak site. Flickr was easy to load several years ago and free.

Can't wait to see your pix.

bigbomoho

my fav is shutterfly--lots of features for editting etc,good prices.What i like best is that they can produce a hard cover book,with captions etc for like $20--- shutterfly.com

mlgb

Picasa is also my choice. The easiest way to find your file folders is to open the Picasa program.

For public sharing you would use the Web Albums feature.

To save copies of changed pictures to your hard drive or other backup you should "Export" them from Picasa.

sf7307

One of the confusing things about Picasa used to be (and maybe still is) that there were two different programs - Picasa, which is for organizing your pictures on your computer /hard drive, and picasaweb, which is for uploading your pictures to "cyberspace" and creating albums, captions, annotations, sharing, etc. It seems like you're looking for the latter, which is what I use, too.

BTW, Shutterflt's photo books are terrific, but for $20, you get about 20 pictures!

NeoPatrick

Well, I realized that all my photos are already on my computer ON Picasa. And they are all with thumbnails that I can actually see.

But here's what I don't get. I have a number of pictures of things that I want to combine into an album. When I click one and name an album and send it there, fine. But when I click another one, it won't give me the option for the album I just created. If I type in the same name of that album, it starts another album with that name and each album just has one picture. Then if I want to remove the picture from the other folder -- the only option seems to be to "delete from disc" and poof it is gone from the album I put it in as well.
I just can't seem to figure out the whole Picasa thing.

emalloy

I'm pretty non tech, but I managed to use flickr after a bit. You can upload a bout 30 or 40 pictures a month for free. Once you sign up scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the actions you can make with your pictures. I drag them to my desktop and then it asks me which ones I want to upload. They then can be organized into sets and descriptions added etc. If you want to look at what it looks like you can go to my page at www.flickr.com/photos/emalloy2009/sets

FYI I have a macbook with iphoto which is very easy to use.

mlgb

Neo, the easiest way to move photos to an existing Picasa album is to "drag and drop". (For the technically challenged that means to left-click over the photo you want to move, then holding that button down, drag the photo thumbnail over until the album name is highlighted in the column on the left).

When I want to upload to a Web album I use the star button (under the album name) to select all the starred photos. Then I click "upload" to send them all to a Web album with the same name.

mlgb

And here's a web album from a quick trip to NYC.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kiwifann/NewYorkMay2010#

spirobulldog

I use photoworks. I like their 12X12 albums. Does anyone have any other sights that they make albums? The kind that you can actually hold in your hand.

ElendilPickle

I'll third the recommendation of Picasa online. I have a couple of albums there if you look for picasaweb.google.com/ElendilPickle

Lee Ann