Jack Schofield
Science has finally solved the problem of the old shoebox in the cupboard under the stairs stuffed with half-forgotten photographs. Now you can put your prize snaps on the Web where friends and family will be able to look at them immediately, no matter where in the world they are.
There are already more than a dozen websites designed to make it easy to put your photographs on the Internet, and they come in two types. The first is aimed at people with digital cameras, and the second at traditional film camera users. Sites aimed at digital camera users typically offer to convert image files into high-quality prints; sites aimed at film camera users convert prints and negatives into image files.
There’s nothing new about putting digital images on the Net. People have been using the free Web space at home-builder sites like GeoCities for years. However, “family album” sites such as PhotoPoint, PhotoLoft, GatherRound (owned and operated by Intel), Hewlett-Packard’s Cartogra and Zing make it easy to put pictures online without the effort of creating Web pages or, usually, uploading things the hard way using the file transfer protocol (FTP).
PhotoPoint accepts pictures sent by e-mail, for example, while Shutterfly offers “drag- and-drop image uploading”. Photo Access has automated the process with its PhotoStreamer technology. “Just plug your camera into your PC. It’s automatically detected, the upload window pops up, and your pictures are extracted,” it claims.
Once the pictures are online, the sites have the chance to make money. They can offer to make high-quality prints using large professional printers. And most don’t stop at paper. For example, PhotoPoint will put your pictures on to greeting cards, photo cubes, puzzles, mouse mats, mugs, coasters, baseball caps and wall clocks, for a fee.
But what about the hundreds of millions of people who don’t have a digital camera or a scanner that can convert prints into image files? Film and photographic processing companies have been targeting this market for more than a decade with offers to deliver prints both on paper and on floppy disk or CD-ROM. Now they’re offering to post them on the Web as well.
Kodak’s PhotoNet service does this in the United States. Kodak has also been working with America Online and more than 40000 retailers to roll out a system called You’ve Got Pictures.
Putting pictures online does involve making one decision that wasn’t a problem during photography’s first hundred years. Do you want to keep your pictures private, or will you let anyone anywhere in the world look at them?
Some things must be public. Photo sites are often used to post pictures of things for sale, for example, and could be used for missing persons. Others are just as obviously private. But, according to Photopoint, about 10% of people do make their pictures public.
Most sites also allow visitors to add comments to a “guest book” attached to the photos, and these are often more interesting than the pictures themselves. Sad to say, the photographic quality of most online albums is dire.
While online photo sites attract a few sad exhibitionists, they do not seem to have a problem with pornography. They look at anything that attracts an unusual amount of traffic, and remove it if it’s unsuitable.
Photo sites: www.clubphoto.com; www.ezprints.com; www.fototime. com; www.fotowire.com; www. gatherround.com; www.cartogra.com; www.photonet. com; www.photoloft. com; www. filmworks.com; www.shutterfly.com; www.zing.com