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This is part 5 of 6 in my series on Digital Photography Workflow for the Beginner.  In this lesson, I’m going to share my approach.

Earlier in this series I touched on an excellent piece of software from Breeze Sys called Downloader Pro.  I would now like to make reference to another essential piece of software in my workflow from Breeze Sys, Breezebrowser Pro (BP).

I use BP from everything to proofing my photos, to preparing them for email, to preparing images for ordering prints.  I also use the software to easily create web pages to share with friends and family, which is what I’ll focus on in this segment.

Before launching into this, it bears mention that there are a great number of online photo sites that allow users to upload photos to their site and share them.  In many cases, there’s no arguing the convenience of this option.  However, given the continued proliferation of the internet and the ease with which one can obtain a private domain (e.g., clawblog.com, cdcphotos.com), it’s becoming more common to share photos via one’s own personal presence on the web.  The latter option has the following benefits:

1. you have greater control over the use of your photos since they are stored on a server to which only you would have access = greater security
2. you control the design and layout, which is made easy with the use of templates (see below)
3. photo/site management is more easily controlled

I find BP simplifies this process, while providing a multitude of options for the novice user.

First, BP does much more than create photos for sharing on the web - it’s a complete photo management tool.  (I’ll offer a more complete, standalone, review of this software and how I use it in my workflow in a future article.)  When you initially launch the program and access your image folder you will see a screen that will look like the following:

Note the file management capability of the tool on the left side of the screen.  Based on what folder you have selected you can view the thumbnails of the photos in the folder.  You can view the photo in detail by selecting it.

In order to create a web page, select the photos you wish to include on the page and select the “Tools” drop down menu from the toolbar…

…then select “HTML…”.  You should now have a dialog box that looks like this:

At this point, simply enter a title for your page, e.g., Dad’s Birthday, and select “Generate HTML”.  As I alluded to above, there are a number of templates from which you can choose.  The software includes documentation explaining the layout of each template.  The default template is “black”.  Following is the page created from the photos I selected in this lesson.  (The example shown would be the entry page and displays the photos as thumbnails, clicking on the photos enlarges them for better viewing.)

The next step is uploading the folder created to the root folder on your website.  Your hosting company will be able to provide guidance here depending on the setup of your site.  Note that you will likely need to change the name of the folder prior to uploading, as the default folder created will be named “HTML”.

Please feel free to ping me with additional questions, or chime in with other thoughts on this process.

chris@clawblog.com

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