Quick and Easy – Sharing Photos on Yahoo
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to share your photos on the Web, Yahoo Photos offers one of the better solutions for free album hosting. Yahoo doesn’t provide the customization options or the gee-whiz features of a custom website, but it is free and offers some nice extras such as online photo editing and various levels of sharing.
Let me start by pointing out that many features of Yahoo’s photo sharing service are not unique to Yahoo. For example, Yahoo and oFoto use the same drag-and-drop upload application, and it would appear that the photo editing tools use the same software engine. We will compare these services, along with several of the other free online photo sharing services, in a future article. Today, though, our focus is on Yahoo Photos.
Starting Out – Create an Account and Upload Photos
Create a Yahoo account if you don’t already have one. Pick a username that is easy to remember and use because it will become part of the Web address that you’ll use for sharing the album with friends. Our demonstration photo album, for example, is at photos.yahoo.com/aDigitalPhotoAlbum.
After creating your account, go to photos.yahoo.com and login if requested. Click on the appropriate link to create a new album. The default album name will be the current date, but you’ll probably want something more descriptive like “Bill’s 30th Birthday” or – as our example uses – “Tropical Fun”.
At this point, I recommend that you download the Easy Upload Tool. It’s fast, easy, and free, and it makes it much easier to upload your photos to the Yahoo website. After this tool is installed, you can open Windows Explorer to find the photos you want to upload, then simply drag them from Explorer into the appropriate box in your browser. Keep in mind that Yahoo supports only the JPEG format. Other common formats, such as TIFF or WMF cannot be used.
Yahoo will give you a preview of your photos and even estimate how long it will take to upload them. Once you’ve dropped all of your photos into Yahoo, click the continue button to start the upload. It’s easy to add and delete photos later, so don’t worry too much about your selections yet.
Cleaning Up – Online Photo Editing
Now that the upload is complete, click the View Album button… there they are! Click on the photo and you’ll see the full-size version. Yahoo’s full size is not necessarily the full size of the original. You’ll find that Yahoo resizes your images, which is one of the drawbacks of the free online services.
Clicking the Edit button above the photo gives you the opportunity to edit the image name and add a description. Keep the existing name only if you want to be able to refer back to the original file on your own computer or storage medium. Otherwise, give the image an appropriate title and add some details in the description field as we’ve done on our example photo album.
The Edit button also gives you an “Enhance Image” option. Clicking this link will open a photo editor that lets you rotate the image between landscape and portrait orientations, crop the photo to get rid of distracting background elements, and remove red-eye from portraits. Save your photo after successfully completing each action; this will make it easier for you to back out of later mistakes and return to the version you were happy with.
After taking care of these basic cleanups, you will probably need to adjust the brightness and contrast. Then, you can move on to the more interesting enhancements. The Effects button gives you several options for artistic effects, tinting, and warping. The Borders button lets you add borders and edge effects to your images. We took one of our beach portraits and created three new photos as shown in the bottom row of our example photo album. We turned the photo into a black-and-white shot, we applied the neon effect, and we added an interested edge to the photo.
Unfortunately, you have little control over the degree to which these enhancements affect your photos. When you select an effect, you are at the mercy of the software as to how great of an effect the enhancement will have. For example, we were unable to control the intensity of the neon enhancement as we could have done with a standalone photo editor such as PhotoImpact, Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro.
All things considered, though, the photo options are a nice addition to this free online service, especially if you are traveling without a laptop and would like to upload your photos to an album from an Internet café where you don’t have access to a full-fledged editing application.
Personalizing – Editing and Enhancing Your Album
Almost done! If your photos aren’t in the order you would like, click the Edit button and use the Rearrange option. Then click the Edit Album Info link and put in a short description of what this album is about. If you didn’t use a descriptive album name when you created the album, you can change it now. You can also select which photo you want to be shown on the main page to represent the album.
Select an album theme if you’re so inclined, but we recommend against this. The themes add background noise that distracts from the photos themselves. A nice addition would be a customized theme where you could pick your own colors, but that’s not available at this time.
Sharing – Show Off to Your Friends and Family!
Before leaving the Edit Album Info page, click the Edit Settings link under the Advanced Sharing Settings heading. This is where Yahoo gets higher marks than similar free online photo sharing services. Yahoo allows you to select a Public setting so that your visitors aren’t required to create a Yahoo account before viewing your photos. The Friends Only option is useful if you have a close group of friends and you don’t want the naked volleyball photos from Club Med to be seen by the rest of the world. The Private setting provides a similar advantage; visitors don’t have to be registered with Yahoo, but the e-mailed invitation can be shared by those who receive it, so you have less control over who sees your photos.
Now you’re done and ready to share the photos with the world (or only the other naked volleyball players on your team). If you go back to the first page of your new album, there is a link for sharing the album. This link will let you send an e-mail or Yahoo Instant Message to your friends telling them about the album, but it’s easier to just send them an e-mail directing them to your album at http://photos.yahoo.com/youralbumname.
While you are at it, send an e-mail to us at albums@aDigitalPhotoAlbum.com. We would love to see what you create, and we’ll publish a link on our website. (Tell us if you do not want your album link published.)