Anyone who owns a digital camera or a scanner will know the excitement of putting their own pictures on the Internet. It's a great way of sharing pictures with friends and family - and indeed with total strangers.
Before you spend hundreds of pounds on expensive photo editing software, it's well worth investigating some of the shareware and freeware applications available that will do just as good a job.
Most original image files will be too big to put on the Net. Big in terms of file size, not actual size.
The art of successfully putting photos on the Net is about getting compromise. You have to reduce the file size without adversely affecting the quality of the image. For Windows users, a company called Trivista (www.trivista.com) makes two very good programs, called A Smaller Image and A Square Image.
The latest version (2.0) of A Smaller Image costs around US$20 to register but is a worthwhile investment. It allows you to quickly and simply crop, rotate and remove red-eye, and also reduces file sizes so your pictures are ideal for Web publishing.
Or take a peek at the bottom of the Trivista.com downloads page - there you will see a link to A Square Image, which does many of the jobs A Smaller Image can do, but is free and a great way to try things out before spending money.
The results from both software packages are impressive and you'll soon want to put them on the Web for everyone to see.
Which brings us to the next reason for hunting down software. Building HTML pages to display more than a handful of pictures by hand is a long-winded and fairly dull process.
What you need is a facility that will take a folder of images and make the HTML pages for you. Thankfully there are many programs like this, so it's well worth tracking some of them down to find out how they work. Sunday Software (www.comune.modena.it/cittadini/apal/html/) makes two great freeware applications to do this job, called simply "v" and "im-h".
There are other programs as well - a search at Nonags (www.nonags.com) will help you find some.
There's also a lot of choice for Macintosh users. Photo Page by Jon Vink (waves.apple.com/ people/jav) is freeware, and provides a simple interface for annotating and making index pages for your pictures.
Page Thing by Matt Ridley (www.matt-ridley.com) is another freeware app for Macintosh. A bit more complex than Photo Page, it achieves good results.
There are dozens of other applications. The important thing is that the end result is a Web page that your friends, relatives - and a few total strangers - can browse quickly and easily to view your photos. Far better for them to be exposed to the world on the Web than to be languishing in a shoebox in the attic.