If you want visitors to be able to e-mail you easily, enter your address where shown; doing this will include the address on every page of the gallery. Next, select the folder that contains your images. You’ll also want to select the destination folder where all the web pages, images, and thumbnails that are created will be placed. This is the folder that will be copied to your website, ready for viewing. The Options section of the dialog box contains all of the areas that you can customize to make your website look unique. Here you can select the background colors for your web pages, a banner or title, and any text that you want to display along with your name, contact info and date. Other choices under the Options menu control the size and quality of your images, and thumbnail size. Under Security you can specify whether or not to use a watermark on each image to help protect against people downloading them for other uses. Although the examples here are from Photoshop and Elements, all of the major image editors include a web gallery feature. Some, such as Microsoft’s Digital Image Pro, will even connect and upload your gallery to a specified website. FIGURE 3: ACDSee offers several simple designs and will include navigation buttons to the rest of your site if you desire. Other Options If you use an image manager or browser, such as ACDSee, you have a very full-featured web gallery tool. The steps to create a gallery are similar regardless of which application you use—select a style, choose your images, customize the colors or image sizes if you wish, and click the create button. When it’s finished you’ll have a folder of web pages and images to upload to your site. FIGURE 4: JAlbum is a free program that offers a ton of features. If you’re not happy with the templates you have now, check this program out. For real control over how your web gallery appears, you might want to explore one of the specialized tools, such as JAlbum (www.jalbum.net). This free (donations accepted) program offers a huge number of very well designed templates, referred to as “skins” and an active community that is constantly adding more skins. Of all the options available, I prefer JAlbum because of the number of choices available and the ease of customization. Other options include the tools in Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and other website programs, and the application Coppermine (http://sourceforge.net/projects/coppermine/). Finally, if you just don’t want to mess with creating your own gallery, but still want more options than the online services provide, take a look at PBase (www.pbase.com). This wins my vote as best online image sharing site. Next month, I’ll discuss some of the different ink and paper options available for your inkjet printers. Ask Jon Do you have questions on output issues? Drop me a line at jon@joncanfield.com. I’ll try to answer all mail on output questions and will feature some of your questions in future columns.