Most digital cameras capture your pictures at a size large enough for quality printing. But when sending pictures by email, it’s important to reduce the size of your pictures so they transfer faster and are more viewable on the recipients screen. Windows Vista has an automated function that will resize, optimize, and email a group of pictures without altering your originals.

1. Open My Computer and navigate to the folder containing the pictures you wish to email.
2. Select the group of files that you wish to email. Use Shift or Ctrl to select additional files.
3. If the picture files are inside your Pictures folder, you should see an Email button at the top of the Window. Click this. If you do not have the Email button, right click and choose Send To > Mail Recipient. The Attach Files dialog box will appear.
4. Choose a size for your pictures. The small option is suitable for most purposes and will give you the best reduction in file size. If you know your recipient has a fast Internet connection you may want to choose Medium or Large.
5. Click Attach.
6. A status bar appears as Windows resizes the files, then a new message is opened in your default mail program with your pictures attached.
7. Windows inserts the file names into the subject field of the message. You will probably want to change this.
8. Fill in the recipients email address, add a personal message, and you’re ready to send.

1. Most images will be converted to the JPEG format for best compatibility.
2. Some files types (such as PSD) cannot be converted by Windows. You should convert these yourself before emailing them as they can be quite large.
3. Most Email providers have a maximum file size limit per message, usually around 10 MB. Try to limit the total size of all attachment to less than this when sending to recipients with a high speed connection.
4. If your recipient is on a dial-up internet connection, limit your total attachment size to 1-2 MB or less.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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Here are ten great tips to get you started in Lightroom

T Is for Toolbar
Pressing the letter T on your keyboard hides the toolbar that appears at the bottom of the Preview area, and pressing T again makes it visible. However, if you’d like to hide it temporarily (which is handy for taking a quick, uncluttered look at your photo), then press-and-hold T and the toolbar only hides as long as you have the letter T held down.

Rate Photos Quickly
When applying star ratings to photos in the Library module, if you hold down the Shift key while applying your rating, it will automatically move you to the next photo. So, if you press Shift-4, rather than just 4, it assigns a 4-star rating to the current photo and then immediately brings up the next photo.

Control Your Panels
Pressing the Tab key hides all the side panels in Lightroom, so your photo(s) are displayed larger onscreen. If you move your cursor over a side triangle where a Panels area used to be, it temporarily pops back out. When you move away from a panel, it automatically hides. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can configure each Panels area individually, as well as the filmstrip along the bottom and the module picker up top. If you want to turn this “auto-popping” off, you can switch to Manual mode, so when you want a Panels area open or closed, you click the triangle next to it. You can also choose Auto Hide, where you manually open that Panels area, but when you move away from it, the panels automatically hide. To access these options, Control-click (PC: Right-click) on one of those triangles and choose from the pop-up list.

Bigger Text
If the text displayed in the panels seems a little too small for your tastes (and you’re getting tired of squinting), you can change the font size by going to Lightroom (PC: Edit)>Preferences and clicking the Interface tab. Go to Panel Font Size, choose Large, then restart Lightroom, and your panel font size will be significantly larger.

Slide to the Default
To reset any slider back to its default setting, you can double-click directly on the slider knob, but I think it’s easier to double-click directly on the slider’s name instead—it’s a bigger target and easier to hit than that little slider knob.

Going Solo
If you want to see only the panel you’re working on and hide the rest, then Control-click (PC: Right-click) on the panel’s titlebar, and choose Solo Mode from the pop-up menu that appears. Now when you open a panel, all the other panels in that Panels area will automatically hide. (You can tell when your panels are in Solo Mode because the disclosure triangles change from a solid fill to tiny gray dots.) You can also turn Solo Mode on and off by Option-clicking (PC: Alt-clicking) on a panel’s name. Note: You can turn this feature on/off for each Panels area.

Remove Clutter
If you don’t use a particular panel, then there’s no reason to have it cluttering up your Panels area, right? So, just Control-click (PC: Right-click) on any panel’s titlebar, and from the pop-up list that appears, choose any panel you want to hide.

Full-Screen Photos
Want to see the photo you’re working on as large as possible? Then press Shift-Command-F (PC: Shift-Ctrl-F). To return to the regular view, press that same shortcut again.

More Than a Badge
You know those tiny icons that appear in the bottom-right corner of your photo in the Library Grid view (Adobe calls those “Badges”)? They let you quickly see what has been applied to the photo (e.g., the Pencil badge tells you that a keyword has been applied to the photo, and the +/– badge tells you that the photo has been edited in Lightroom, etc.). Double-click on any one of those badges, and it will take you directly to the panel where that adjustment was added. For example, if you double-click on the Pencil badge, it opens the Keyword panel and highlights the keyword field. Pretty slick.

Selective Histogram
The Histogram panel gives you the histogram for the entire photo. But, if you want a histogram reading on, say, the face of your subject to make sure the flesh tones have detail, go to the Develop module, click the Crop Overlay button, and drag in the corners to where it’s around just the face. Now the histogram shows you the reading from just what appears inside the crop border. When you’re done, press the Clear button in the toolbar to remove the crop border.

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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Making sense of all the online photo services can be just as difficult as picking out a camera and lenses. With all the options out there, it’s important to choose the right site for backing up and printing out your precious masterpieces. Whether you’re looking for a photo community, a place to develop your shots, or just a site to share your photos with friends, there are plenty of options to pick from. But choosing the right site to upload your all your photos to is a big decision since you will spend a lot of time and potentially money once you go down a path. So choose your path wisely.

Here’s a comprehensive look at the best of the best for sharing and printing photos on the web:

flickr is made for snap happy photographers. From the simple uploading interface to the Organizr tool, the folks at flickr designed the site for photo sharing. You can easily exhibit all of your photos to the public or control who sees them with convenient privacy settings. You can also track how many people have viewed your pictures. But one of the best aspects of flickr is the community. Like other social networks, flickr allows you to connect to your friends and see their photostreams and see their new pictures whenever they upload them. It also allows friends and visitors to leave comments (and even highlight portions of the picture to leave mouse-over callouts on any photo!). Spend hours looking through tags of photos to find anything and everything a person could take a picture of. Flickr makes it easy for bloggers to add their pictures to their blog (except for Xanga users). It unlike all the photo printing sites, flickr even allows people to download your files which makes it a great tool for archiving files. On top of that, it allows your friends and anyone else to download different sizes of your picture files, including the high-resolution originals! Sharing photos has never been easier since flickr came along. Now you can get prints of your pictures! If you are connected to friends you can also print out their photos as well. There are also a few printing services like Zazzle that you can use.

Shutterfly was one of the original online photo services along with Snapfish and Ofoto. It has continued to stay independent unlike its competitors (Snapfish was owned by District Photo and now is owned by HP; Ofoto was bought by Kodak). Shutterfly has the most user friendly interface of all the online photo printing services and makes organizing and editing photos simple and easy. The desktop uploading tool is a bit buggy, but usually can get the job done. Shutterfly prints come out with relatively accurate colors and pretty good quality. Although the consensus is that Ofoto has better quality prints, comparing them side by side, Shutterfly is comparable. The slideshow feature loads quickly but at lower resolution than the Kodak EasyShare Gallery (Ofoto) does. Shutterfly is a great service for sharing photos online. For new members you get 15 free 4×6 prints.

Ofoto was bought by Kodak which has changed the name to the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Ofoto quickly became the leading online photo service with high-quality prints and competitive pricing. The Ofoto interface is less intuitive than the Shutterfly interface. Editing and organizing photos is much more complicated on Ofoto. You also have to register and log in to see other peoples photos which can sometimes be a pain. But once you login, the updated slideshow presentation loads quickly (photos are now pre-loaded in the background) and they are at higher resolution than they used to be. But Ofoto’s strength is in the processing. Backed by Kodak, Ofoto has continued to perfect the process of printing digital photos. This is a very compelling reason for DSLR owners who want to print large photos with accurate colors and sharpness to use the Ofoto service. 4×6 prints run for about $0.25 each.

Snapfish started off as an online film processing solution. It was bought by District Photo and recently sold to Hewlett Packard. It has built a similar offering to Shutterfly and Ofoto, but the prints are not quite as good as the big two online printing services. They have tried to differentiate themselves with mobile camera phone photo printing, a service that the others have not quite fully adopted yet. For new Snapfish members you receive 20 free prints. For existing memberships Snapfish pricing is extremely competitive and now offers 4×6 prints for only $0.12 each.

Other Services

Photo Sharing/Hosting:

• PBase
• Zoto
• Smugmug
• Photobucket
• Fotki
• Webshots
• ImageEvent.com

Photo Printing/Publishing:

• PhotoWorks
• Picaboo
• Winkflash.com

Desktop Photo Slideshows:

• Slide
• FilmLoop
• Tubeshow

Photo Licensing and Selling:

• Fotolia
• Digital Railroad

Online Storage:

• 25 Free Gigs at MediaMax

Any suggestions, ideas? Feel free to comment on this article!

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TagGalaxy offers up a novel concept concerning Flickr and tags. The set up, as you can probably guess, is influenced by space. Essentially, Flickr tags are visualized as an arrangement of planets. The greater number of pictures within a tag category, the larger the planet will be.

To start off, you simply have to enter a search term or tag into the search bar; you could enter a color, objects, a city name, etc. After you click go, you’re taken off to space, following large glowing orbs and planets. The initial effect is quite visually arresting; and it gets better. From there, click on any planet to zoom in and your planet will fill up with Flickr photos. Click on any of these to get a larger view. To view even more photos, hit the arrows at the top and your planet will be tiled with more photos. There’s also a full screen mode, so you can enjoy the spectacle even more. To start a new search, hit ‘new tag’. You’ll be able to enter in a new term and zoom in on more galaxies.

Sure you could surf Flickr the normal way, but TagGalaxy is simply brilliant. From the beginning formation of each tag planet, to the actual Flickr pictures, TagGalaxy offers a spectacular visual show. It’s absolute fun to make the planets rotate and to add more photos to your universe. You could very easily spend a good chunk of your free time on this.