Digital Photography Hacks

Create a Web Photo Gallery

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 hack 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.

Tip

All you need for this hack 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 designers 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 runs on both Windows and Mac. For this hack, 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 ...