Use Technology To Share Your Layouts
By Angie Felix

One of the greatest joys of scrapbooking is the social aspect—sharing ideas, tips, tricks, stories and of course, your favorite layouts with fellow scrappers. Formed through networking in classes at local scrapbook stores or convention classes and crops, it can be hard to maintain the connections and continue to share layouts with these newfound friends, especially those who live in other parts of the country—or the world! However, today's technology offers an easy solution to avoiding huge email attachments or weeding through message boards with thousands of posts.

In recent years, the internet has come to provide all sorts of useful tools and many sites have now perfected one integral to scrapbookers' needs: online photo albums and picture trails. These tools allow you to easily upload pictures and keep them online where you can share them. It doesn't have to be restricted to photos, though. Scans or digital pictures of your layouts (or any images, for that matter) can also be posted for sharing.

Many of the sites provide this services for free, hoping the other services they offer will appeal to you. Most of them offer printing and developing services as well as gift services such as photo t-shirts, mugs, calendars and the like. The sites also offer the opportunity for viewers to order prints of photos in their friends' albums, which is how they can provide free space, yet remain profitable.

This technology can advance your scrapping groups, too! Since many groups form online and meet up at conventions and shows, this is the perfect opportunity for a group to share even more. Group members can join the same site and give each other access to their albums. Better yet, the group can create one account on an unlimited site and share the log-on name and password with all group members. Each member can keep an album of their latest pages and members will only have to go to one site to see their fellow scrappers' newest layouts.

Not only do these websites allow you to store your images, many permit the organization of photos (layouts in your case) into albums by theme, just like your albums at home. Some even allow you to create cover pages, captions and slideshows for each of your albums. You could easily use the caption space to include information about your inspiration, journaling, or techniques used in a layout. Fellow scrappers can glide through your pages with ease.

Many sites provide the choice of making your albums public or private. By selecting the private option, most sites allow you to send emails to your friends or scrapping buddies with links directly to your albums so that only they (and you, of course) can view them. This is a particularly nice feature if you're concerned about posting pages with pictures of your children.

What You Should Know

These sites are great for sharing your best layouts and most make it easy to upload images—sometimes even in large batches instead of one by one. You do want to be careful, though, because some sites have space requirements or only offer trial memberships for free. Others will boot you off if you don't purchase any of their products within a certain time period.

You'll also want to be sure you check the image guidelines for the site before you upload—otherwise you could spend a lot of energy and frustration trying to upload because of simple problems like incorrect file types. Some sites will only accept JPEGs, and some no image over 72 dpi (which is actually perfect for web viewing). Other sites, like PhotoWorks, require larger-sized images (640x480 pixels) to ensure quality. Another key to remember is to save your images in an RGB color format rather than CMYK, which is not web acceptable—knowing this could save giant headaches.

If you're interested in checking what your photo sharing experience could be like, you can click here to view the sample album we've created in PictureTrail. Once your browser takes you to the site, click on “HOTP Samples.” Then select a picture to view from the menu bar on the left. You can scroll through the images individually using the “next” and “previous” buttons, or click “slideshow” to view an automated show of the entire album. When you scroll through each image individually, you'll see the title and caption (designer's byline) that were added when we created the album. We were also able to select the border and background shown with the images from a variety of styles. Be sure to click on the guestbook where you can send messages to the creator of the album or read others' posts. Another benefit to this site is that when you sign up, it automatically emails you with a link to pass on to your friends, making it easy to share your layouts.

Check out the listing below for some key features offered by some of the other popular photo sharing sites.

Some Sites to Check Out

PictureTrail

This site offers the nice feature of uploading pictures in batches rather than one by one, as well as a slideshow viewing option for albums. You can even vary the speed of images and make them rotate. You also have the option of seeing how many times each image in your album has been viewed, that way you know just how popular your layouts are. Other great features include the ability to create album title pages, add music to your albums and password protect albums to keep them private. You can upload up to 500 pictures and put your first 20 into a slideshow.

The downside: The intro account is free for a month, after which you can either upgrade to a Premium Account for $19.95 a year, or your account will be converted a Free Basic account. Eventually (no time period is given) your account will be closed if you do not upgrade to the Premium status. You will however, be given email notice before the account is deleted.

ShutterFly

This online album site provides users with downloadable software called SmartUpload?to upload your images to the site, then lets you organize them into albums. You can send out email invitations to friends and family to share your layouts. You also have the option to use this with Adobe's ActiveShare software to do online image editing.

Snapfish

There is no limit to the number of images you can upload to this site. It allows you to share an album or an individual image, and permits viewers to easily scroll through the photos in an album. This site also has a guest book, allowing friends to praise you for your stellar layouts and techniques.

The downside: Others have to sign up to be members in order to view your albums, which some people may not be interested in doing.

DotPhoto

This is another site that allows unlimited storage and free membership. One nice feature is that DotPhoto allows you to add titles, sound and descriptions to your albums as well as send direct links to the albums you wish to share. The site even has scrapbooking listed under hobbies and interests for album types. You can upload by FTP, email or with your browser.

A site that permits you to add captions, write album descriptions and email invitations to friends and family. Also offers downloadable image uploading software and a slideshow viewer.

The downside: You must purchase products from PhotoWorks within a 12 month period to keep you account active. This site also requires you to keep your images at 640 x 480 pixels or greater to ensure quality, but making the upload process a bit slower. Uploader software does not support Macs or Windows NT.

Yahoo members (it's free to join) can also use the site to upload their images and share photos or layouts with friends. You get 30 MB of free space for up to 90 images. You can select themed albums and pick who can view your pictures, making them private or public. The site also has a slideshow viewer as well as the option to upload multiple images at a time.

This is another site that includes a guest book where fellow scrappers/friends can offer you praise. It allows you to drag and drop images into your albums and send email links to friends. Also unlimited storage.

The downfall: The website does require your friends to become members in order to see your albums.

Test Drive a Few Sites

These are just a few of the hundreds of online album sites that are out there. Remember, there is no law that says you have to pick one site and stick with it—feel free to try several different ones until you find the easiest, most sensible one with features you need and want. After all, many of these are free, so log on to the web and start sharing!