In the last chapter, you learned how to email photos. But what if you’ve got legions of friends—do you have to email your pictures to everyone individually? Not with Elements, which makes it incredibly simple to post images online, thanks to Photoshop.com, a one-stop shop where you can share your photos and back them up. You can create fancy online albums complete with professional-looking effects, courtesy of Flash, the ubiquitous Adobe program that’s responsible for zillions of nifty online animations.
If you have Windows, Elements can also help you put together elaborate slideshows, complete with slick between-photo transitions like wipes and dissolves, clip art, and even audio. And for the perfect combination of high-tech wizardry and old-school charm, you can make digital flipbooks, simple slideshows that are easy to share with friends. Like the paper flipbooks of yore, these little shows can make a series of still photos appear to move, like a cartoon. In this chapter, you’ll learn the ins and outs of all these ways of sharing photos.
Note
Alas, the fancy slideshows and flipbooks didn’t make it into the Mac Organizer, but Apple fans can still make online albums and PDF slideshows. And if you have the App Store version of Elements, you can’t create any of the projects described in this chapter, since you don’t have the Organizer.
Adobe calls these “albums,” but the online albums you create from Elements aren’t just boring, grid-like rows of photos like you see on most photo websites. Instead they’re elaborate, Flash-based displays in which your photos do things like appear in an animation of old-fashioned slides dropped onto a table, and your friends can sift through the pile and click the slides they want for a close-up view. And you get to choose whether to share your album with the whole world or to limit viewing to just your family and friends.
If you use Photoshop.com (Photoshop.com), Adobe makes it super easy to share your albums there, right as you create them. Follow the steps on Albums and Smart Albums for creating and naming an album, and then, before you click Done:
In the Organize bin’s Album Details panel, click the Sharing tab.
On the left side of the window is a preview of your slideshow, and on the right side is a list of options for sharing to Photoshop.com. (If you decide you want to change the order of the photos or add or delete images, you can click back to the Content tab to rearrange them at any time.)
Note
This section describes using the Organizer’s Album Details panel, but you can also start a new online album from the Share tab in either the Organizer or the Editor, as explained later in this chapter (Other Ways to Share). The process is very similar; the only difference is that you choose a sharing method when you start, and then click Next to go to the Album Details panel.
If you wish, change the template.
Elements starts you off by displaying your photos in a slideshow on the left side of the window. If you want something different, go to the “Select a Template” menu above the preview area and choose a template category, and then double-click the various template thumbnails that appear below the menu. Use the slider below the thumbnails to move back and forth through the category’s available slideshows. The left side of the window displays a large preview of what your photos will look like in the selected template, and there’s also a description of the template below the thumbnails.
Note
In the template list, you see the same little blue and gold banners on some thumbnails that appear in the Content panel (Photo Stamps). They mean the same thing here: If a template has a blue banner, you can download it for free (if you have a Photoshop.com account). If the banner is gold, you need a Plus account (the paid version) to download it. Once you download a template, you won’t see the banner on it anymore.
Some templates play as a slideshow automatically, and others are interactive, as explained in Figure 18-1. (When you create the album, Elements applies the last template style you clicked.)
Figure 18-1. Some of the album styles automatically start playing their slideshows, while others, like the Scrapbook template shown here, are interactive. Your friends “turn” the pages of the book to move backward and forward through your album.
Note
If you’re looking for the Yahoo maps in the Elements 10 Organizer, Adobe has removed this feature (no great loss, since it was pretty quirky and often didn’t work well). However, you can still share photos on a map by using the World Travel album template, which works for both Macs and Windows computers.
Change any settings for the album.
Some albums have “ghosted” settings panels that come into focus when you move your cursor over them. Others have tabs you can click within the preview to make changes. The settings you can change depend on the template: You may only be able to tweak the title that appears, or to do things like change the number of burning candles on a cake.
Choose the album options you want in the Sharing pane.
Your choices are explained in detail below, but this is where you choose who gets to see your album and, if you want to, personalize the notification message they receive when the album appears on Photoshop.com.
Click Done.
If you aren’t signed into Photoshop.com, the login window appears. Once you log in, Elements uploads your album to the site, and the people you specified in Step 4 receive an email with a link to your album. (If you decide not to create an online album after all, click Cancel instead.)
The Sharing pane gives you several choices for who gets to see your albums and what they can do with the photos:
Share to Photoshop.com. Turn on this checkbox to make the options below it available.
Display in My Gallery. If you turn this on, your album becomes public. Anyone browsing Photoshop.com can see it (and comment on it, if you don’t change that setting on your Photoshop.com account page).
Message. If you want to include a personal message in the album notification email, type it here.
Send Email To. Click the Contacts button (the one with the head and shoulders on it) to choose your recipients. You can select all your contacts, none, or open the Contact Book (Photo Mail (Windows only)) to add people. The names appear in a list; just turn off the checkboxes next to the names of people who shouldn’t receive a notification.
Tip
If you don’t want to hassle with creating contacts every time you invite different people to view an album, just send the invitation to yourself, copy the link in the email you receive, and then paste that into a regular email and send it to your recipients. Or, once the album is posted on Photoshop.com, just copy the address from your web browser’s address bar.
Allow Viewers to. Here’s where you can choose to let your friends download your photos or order prints of them (or both), if you like.
View Online. Click this button to see your completed album at Photoshop.com.
You can go back to the Sharing pane at any time to add new recipients or to change your album’s content or template. To do that, click the Edit Album button at the top of the Albums panel in the main Organize bin, or just click the Share button to the right of the album’s name. To stop sharing an album and remove it from Photoshop.com, click the Stop Sharing button (the red circle with a slash).
But your sharing isn’t limited to Photoshop.com. If you don’t want to use Photoshop.com, you can start an album from the main Share tab by clicking the Online Album button, which lets you choose between exporting your album to your hard drive or sending to Photoshop.com. Alternatively, if you’re using the process described in the above list, just don’t turn on the Sharing pane’s “Share to Photoshop.com” checkbox when you create your album; click Done, and then skip to the next section of this chapter and follow the instructions there for sharing existing albums.
Note
If you aren’t in the United States, then when you create an online album, you do so at Adobe’s Photoshop Showcase website (Photoshop.com) rather than on Photoshop.com. The process is exactly the same, and so are the templates available. However, your options for downloading and sharing the photos in the completed album may be different.
There are a few drawbacks to posting an album to Photoshop.com. For one thing, as you probably know, a disadvantage of Flash is that you can’t view Flash animations on iPhones, iPads, and many other mobile devices. So your gadget-toting friends can use the link in the email you send them to view your photos in their devices’ web browsers, but only as a very basic kind of slideshow, not in the fancy templates available in Elements. And if you have friends with dial-up Internet connections, it’ll take them forever to load the online albums. Fortunately, Adobe gives you other ways to share albums, as the next section explains.
You don’t have to decide whether to share an album while you’re creating it. Even if you don’t sign up for a Photoshop.com account, you can still create the same kinds of albums and impress friends with them, since you can save them to your computer and then upload them to your own website via FTP (File Transfer Protocol, the way you’d send any other files to your site) or burn them to a CD or DVD.
Note
While you can upload your Elements albums via FTP, you’ll need a separate program to do this. FTP isn’t built into Elements anymore, so upload your albums the same way you upload other files to your site.
It’s also easy to share existing albums, either from the Share tab or from the Organize tab’s Albums panel:
Share tab. In either the Organizer or the Editor, click the Share tab and select Online Album. Elements sends you over to the Organizer, where you can create a new album or choose an existing album from the list, and then select how you want to share it. The rest of the process is the same as the one for sharing a new album (Online Albums).
Edit Album. In the Organizer’s Albums panel, select an album, and then click the Edit Album button (the pencil at the top of the panel). This method offers you only the same Photoshop.com options you get when creating a new album, though you can’t export to your hard drive or to CD/DVD this way.
Album name. In the Organizer’s Albums panel, right-click an album’s name or the little Share icon to the right of the name, and then choose whether to have Elements export to your hard disk or, in Windows, to a CD or DVD. (Photoshop.com isn’t an option here.)
The process for any of these options is similar to the one described in the previous section. You can change templates, rearrange the photos, add or remove photos, and so on, exactly the way you can when creating a new album. The main difference is your sharing options:
Export to CD/DVD (Windows Only). The Sharing tab gives you the same options for renaming and changing the template that it does for an FTP export, but instead of entering server information, you choose the drive to use to burn the disc, and enter a name for the CD or DVD. When you click Done, Elements asks you to insert a disc. Put one in, and then click OK. Elements burns the disc, and then asks if you want to verify it; you do. Finally, it reminds you to label the completed disc before it ejects it.
Discs made this way play on computers, not DVD players. If your friends use Windows, the disc should play automatically when they put it into their computers. If that doesn’t work (sometimes the loading animation loops endlessly and the slideshow never runs), or if they’re using Macs, tell them to open the disc, navigate to the Root folder, and then double-click the index.html file inside that. The slideshow will then play in their web browser.
Export to Hard Disk. Elements saves your album to a folder on your hard drive. In the Album Details panel’s Sharing tab, click the Browse button to choose a location for the album and then click Done. This way, you can create an “online” album that plays right on your computer, even when you aren’t connected to the Internet. To play the slideshow, open the folder and double-click the file named index.html. Your web browser opens and the slideshow runs in it. If you want to upload the album to your website, choose this option, then use an FTP program to upload the album, the same way you would send any other file to your site.
You can share albums by exporting them even if you’ve also uploaded them to Photoshop.com. It’s a really handy way to make a fancy slideshow.