You'd probably have to lug albums all over town. And for those who are miles away, mailing them across would seem the only option. You don't want to send scanned photos via email attachments, as this eats up loads of space in people's inboxes.

Here's a better option: Create an online album, and send your friends a link.

You'd have to begin by scanning your photographs. Check out Scantips.com for the finer points of this process, including how much to scan, scaling, resolution, grayscale and file formats. Once your done scanning, you would need to edit, optimize and display the photographs.

Edit

After scanning, you'll probably need to edit your pictures to make them more presentable. Before you hunt for someone with Photoshop or download a 40MB Paintshop Pro file, hold on! There are easier ways to 'touch up' your pictures. Online image editors like Myimager.com let you do basic stuff like resizing, optimizing and adjusting contrast and brightness without installing any software on your machine.

You just upload the picture and make changes right in your browser. The processing of the image is done 'server side' which means the image is uploaded and processed on the server where the software is hosted rather than at your machine. You can see the results on screen.

The MyImager interface consists of drop down menus for 'File', 'Edit', 'Effects' and 'Optimisation', almost like in an image editing software. It gives you two options to upload your file - from your hard disk or from a URL. You can resize images; adjust the hue, contrast and saturation; and change it to a black and white image. You can add text and captions to your images with options to choose from over 25 different fonts, font size and colour. It also has 'undo' and 'redo' options.

After editing, optimise your image and save it to your hard disk or floppy. The best part: You don't need a lightening fast connection for this tool to work decently.

Gifworks is another online tool similar to MyImager.com but works with GIFs. You can edit and create special effects like despeckle, emboss, sharpness etc, and also resize, colorise, optimise and animate. Gifworks also lets you zoom in and out and rotate. You can then use 3D Text Maker for descriptions. The site also has a library of free backgrounds and images to jazz up your pix.

If you edit a lot of pictures regularly and need to install software, try Irfanview. It downloads in a jiffy, doesn't take up much space on your PC and lets you scan, resize, add effects, and optimise.

All about Gifs and JPEGS Although there are several file formats like psd, tiff, tga, png and several formats native to different graphics packages - for the Web, look no further than GIF and JPEG. Both these formats are self-compressing and work with multiple platforms. JPEGS work better for photographs, while GIFS are most appropriate to images where colour use is limited. They are good at compressing images with large horizontal expanses of color. For a flat image with just a few colours, it's better to use a GIF. JPEGs allow you to control the compression and quality of the file. Most programs will have settings for JPEG compression as high, medium or low. To optimise, increase the compression and experiment with different ratios. You'll find that as you compress further many images will suffer in display quality. That's your cue to back up a bit and retain the quality. The trick to optimise a GIF is to reduce the number of colours in the image. By default, GIFs assume that an image has 256 unique colors. But most images don't use so many. Hence there's a lot of 'wasted space'. When you force a GIF to render with a smaller number of colors, the overall size of the graphic is automatically reduced without making a major difference to the image quality. .

Optimise

If you've ever stared at a webpage, drumming your fingers while waiting for images to trickle onto the page pixel by pixel, you'll know why it's important to optimise images. Avoid putting anyone else through it.

Image 'crunching' keeps your pictures 'fat-free' and reduces the kilo(byte)s. Many software tools allow you to optimise GIF and JPEG graphics for the Web. While, professional image-editing packages like CorelDraw and Adobe Photoshop let you manipulate the size of an image file to get the quality you want, other tools help you crunch files at little or no cost.

MyImager, Gifworks, and Irfanview - all have image crunchers. If you need a quick cruncher, try Spinwave.com that has free JPEG and GIF crunchers and is simple to use - just upload and choose whether you want High, Medium or Low resolution.

There's no way to determine the ideal file size. Make a copy of the original image and experiment until you achieve an optimal balance of compression and image quality with the least possible download time. The ideal download time shouldn't be more than four seconds.

Display

Now that you've got your images optimised, put them together and display them in online albums. It doesn't take much work and it's much nicer to send people a link to your album rather than a dozen photographs by email.

Though most free online albums are now defunct, there are still a few left.

Picturetrail allows you to create several albums at one location - 'www.picturetrail.com/username.' First upload your photos and then decide which album they should go into. It has good options for photo presentation with backgrounds and fonts, and lets you add captions and descriptions to each image.

Imagestation.com and Yahoo! Photos are other such albums.

Also Read
 -- Flash Garden
 -- Going Digital