Feature #4 - Uploading Pictures to the Internet

Digital Photography is getting more and more popular every day. The cameras are getting better and less expensive. You can get a pretty decent 2 or 3 mega pixel camera for about $200 these days. 5 mega pixel cameras are about $500 - $800 or so. For the serious photographer, 11 mega pixel digital/SLR hybrids are available for around $8,000.

One fun thing to do with a Digital Camera is to post pictures of a party, graduation, family reunion, vacation, etc. on the Web so other people who attended can see them. Galaxy gives all of its customers free web space for a web page, to save files in or even post digital pictures.

This Newsletter feature has a tutorial on how to upload a digital picture to your Galaxy web space. There many different types of Digital Cameras, Photo Editing software and programs to upload files to the Internet. For this Tutorial, we will use a Fuji Finepix 3.0 mega pixel camera with a 128 meg xD storage card, Paint Shop Pro 7 and WS_FTP.

Note:  This Newsletter tutorial is only a general overview on how to upload a digital photo to the Internet and requires a certain level of Computer/Internet experience to follow.

Step 1

After taking the picture we need to get it into our computer. This camera has a USB cable connector, but we are just going to take the 128 meg xD card out of the camera and insert it into our xD chip reader.

Step 2

Next we open up Paint Shop Pro 7 so we can size the picture better for the Internet. We click on File > Open > go to the E: drive, which the CompactFlash reader is on, select the picture and then open it. We took this picture at the highest resolution, so it is 500K in size. This is too big for most people to view easily so we are going to get it down to about 60K. First we go to Resize and select 50%. Then we select the crop tool and cut out some of picture around the edges that we are not interested in. The picture seems to fit nicely in the middle of our monitor now. Next we go File > Save As and save the picture in a folder we have created called Digital Photos. We have named the picture file digitalphoto1.jpg.

Step 3

We are now ready to upload the picture. We open up WS_FTP which is our program to upload files to our web space. (Note: For an alternative method to upload the file see: Feature #6 - FAQ #5). Using our Galaxy username and password (same one for Dialup and Email) we connect to our web space. The Host Address is ftp.gis.net and we are using Automatic Detect for Host Type. Once we connect to our web space we open up the Public_html folder. We are going to put the picture in here so it can be viewed on the Internet. On the left side of WS_FTP we find the file on our hard drive and then double-click on it. This uploads it to our web space. The file should now be visible on the right side of WS_FTP which shows all the files in the web space.

Step 4

The picture is now ready to be viewed on the Internet. The URL (Web Address) of the picture is http://www.gis.net/~yourusername/digitalphoto1.jpg (Click on link to view our sample picture). Of course you would change your "yourusername" to your actual username and "digitalphoto1.jpg" to the actual file name of your photo. You can email this link to your friends or family members and when they click on it in their email program it will open a browser window showing the picture.