Photo Album Web Page Hosting
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
Hosting for Your Photo Album Web Page
There are a lot of ways to host a photo album web page on the Internet for free. Other services are also available that charge some type of subscription fee whether a charge for purchases or a small monthly fee. The intent of these specialty hosts is to let individuals upload their pictures, invite friends to view the photos, send photo greeting cards. They usually sell additional merchandise such as coffee cups, posters, t-shirts, etc, and other photo printing services.
They provide such enhancements as photo editing, thumbnail creation, borders, and special effects. You can also place an image title and descriptions on some of these sites.
Your Rights for Web Page Hosting of Images
Sites which specialize in photo album web page hosting vary in the rights that you grant them by uploading your images. They also differ in what protection from unauthorized use of your photos they provide. Always read their Terms of Agreement and any fine print you find on their site. Remember that any image you post on the Internet can be seen and used by anyone in the world. Even if you copyright the images, copyright infringement does exist.
A Word of Warning
If you upload your digital images and do not keep a copy of them somewhere on your hard drive or other media, you risk loosing your precious photos. These sites, whether paid or free, will not preserve your photos forever. They are meant as a means to share your images with your friends or family and are not meant as long term storage.
Alternatives to Photo Album Speciality Web Page Hosting
There are lots of places that provide free or very cheap web hosting. These hosts are not photo sites, but any web host will work as a photo album if you know HTML. If you want a more permanent storage for your images, prepare your albums like an ordinary web page. This way you have complete control over the design and presentation of your images. Anyone you choose can then view the album using any web browser either from the disk you provide, from a CD, or a real web page host.
Armed with a graphic editing software program and an HTML editor it is easy to create your album. There are several freeware programs that will automate the process of creating your web page albums.
Web Album Generator. is freeware. Jalbum is a java-based freeware program (which presumably means it is available to Mac and Linux users). I gave Web Picture Creator (freeware) a quick run through. It was easy to use and let me generate new HTML separately from new thumbnails, which is handy. In the also-ran category, is PhotoAlbumStudio, which works but needs lots of improvement. In the "untested. but looks plausible" category are Dalbum (open source, GPL), Pixmatrix.. Even more extreme is software that builds an entire photo sharing site, for example Gallery.
It's also worth mentioning other programs that specialize in making fancy presentations of your photos for offline presentaitons from disk or CD. One I've used is FlipAlbum.
