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Flickr and Yahoo Photos and now even Google Web Albums are great ways of creating photo albums and sharing them online but they have their own restrictions as a free tool. Some limit you by bandwidth others by disk space. If you have a web site of your own, you might want to create your own photo albums and share them on your site.

There are many ways to do it but I will introduce you to two simple ways of creating photo albums for the web:

• Using Windows XP Power Toy: HTML Slide Show Wizard
• Using Picasa Albums 

Windows XP Power Toy: HTML Slide Show Wizard

It is a free utility which can be installed on Windows XP. It can be downloaded from here.

Here is the story with snapshots on how to create your photo album (with slide show feature): (click on images to enlarge)

Start the Slide Show Wizard (Start>Program -> Power Toys for Windows XP-> Sideshow Wizard) and hit Next

Add Images or Add a Folder (which can have multiple images) and hit Next

You can preview the pictures added in the tool itself. Hit Next

Give the Slide Show a name (the tool will create a folder with all images and supporting web pages with the same name so please try and avoid using spaces in the name), put an optional author name, choose the folder where you would want to create the album, select the size of pictures to be used in the album, choose between simple or advanced slide show (I go with advanced, which allows you to view your album in three different modes: slide show, film strip, preview). Hit Next and then Hit the “View Slide Show” button.

Main page of the slide show photo album. Click on “Click Here” to launch the album.

Sideshow mode

Filmstrip mode

Uploading:

Now that you are done with creating the photo album, you just need to upload that album folder the tool created to your web site somewhere and provide a link to it from your photos page or wherever else (Suppose you upload the folder to the root of your web site and name of the folder was TechnacularSlideShow, then your link will be something like this: http://www.yoursite.com/TechnacularSlideShow, replace yoursite.com with whatever your web site URL is).

Picasa Albums

 Picasa is a free tool from Google which allows you to find, organize and share your photos. It is available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista. A Linux version can be obtained from here.

Once you install Picasa, it automatically indexes all your photos and keep monitoring for news ones. New photos are automatically indexed in Picasa.

Let us create a photo album using Picasa.

Launch Picasa and open a new album (File-> New Album)

(click on images to enlarge)

Give the Album a name. I chose “TechnacularPicasaAlbum” (please avoid spaces in name). you can change “date” and enter optional ”Place Taken” and “Description” information. Hit “Ok”.

Album shows up in the list of albums on the left.

Select all the pictures you want (in Picasa itself), hold down the CTRL key which clicking to select multiple pictures. Right click anywhere in Picasa and say “Add To Album” -> “<your album name>”. In my case I will add to “TechnacularPicasaAlbum”. All the chosen photos get added to the album.

Right click on the album name (in my case TechnacularPicasaAlbum) on the left and say “Export as HTML Page…”. Make suitable choices on this form and click Next.

Choose from one of the six templates available for the page. I chose template 5 but you can choose any (do not choose XML option). Hit Next

Your album is ready and Picasa displays is in a browser window.  

Upload instructions for the photo album are the same as for HTML Slide Show Wizard here. 

Create Movie Out of Picture Album

If you want to create a video out of the pictures you have selected you can do so in Picasa.

Select your photo album in Picasa. Hit Create-> Movie.

Select appropriate options on this window.

Leave the default option and click “Ok”.

A movie(.avi) file is created which has the same name as the album name. You can play this movie in windows media player. You can share this file with anyone.

Conclusions:

Both tools provide powerful capabilities to create nice looking  photo albums. While HTML Slide Show Wizard has better presentation and supports slide shows, Picasa has robust browser support. HTML Slide Show Wizard only shows limited features in Firefox. Picasa is very rich in functionality and allows you to create movie, collage and lot of other things with your photo albums.

 

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