I've been doing the digital photo album thing for years. Since I've learned a bit from experience, let me share some tips with you. These can be very time consuming but it will immensely improve your albums and may make the difference between skimming and looking for your viewers.
One of the reasons people like digital cameras is the ability to take as many pictures as you want and being able to see them immediately. If you are like me you travel with multiple memory cards and a laptop. I take the laptop everywhere but one reason is so that I can empty the pictures off the cards to make room for more. It does no good to have a digital camera if it is always full. If you cannot take a computer with you on the trip invest in a few extra memory cards (depending on the duration of your trip and the amount of pictures you plan on taking). As your card gets full you can also lower the resolution on the pictures to conserve space.
Personally, I don't print any of my pictures so I leave the
resolution on 1024x768. That is more than adequate for most
computer users to view on screen. This allows me to take hundreds
of pictures on one 256M card. When I want to take a picture for
printing I increase the resolution for that picture. If you plan
on printing pictures in large sizes, invest in very large memory cards
for your camera. Again keep in mind how many pictures you
generally take and how often you can offload them. You don't need
a 5 Gig card if you only take an occasional snapshot.
Take more than one picture of an item or scene--especially if there
is not much light. Some of the shots may turn out blurry or too
dark. If you have multiple shots to choose from later you have
increased your chances of having a successful picture.
Digital photography can quickly overwhelm you because it is so easy
and inexpensive to take many photos. If you let the pictures pile
up you will be less likely to get through all of them. If you
have trouble managing the number of pictures your viewers are going to
be even less inclined to look at them all. Start processing your
pictures as soon as you can. If you use some of the other
organization methods mentioned in this article you may be able to break
the processing into batches.
During processing you should be modifying, renaming, and deleting to clean up your photos. If you accidentally do something wrong it is good to have a backup of the originals. Since you deleted them from the camera or card (right?) they only exist on your hard drive. I make it a practice to burn a CD or DVD of the original images before I start working with them.
Some cameras can tell when we take pictures with the camera turned 90 degrees. Those cameras will set a flag in the picture but many cameras do not have this feature. Viewing those pictures is cumbersome because they are turned on the side. Go through and rotate those sideways images so that the viewer is not straining her neck to look at them.
In many systems and photo programs you can right click on the
thumbnail of the picture and fix
the rotation. Be careful though, sometimes this is not
actually
rotating the image but setting the same flag that the cameras set in
the image header. If your
viewer (or your friends viewer) is still showing the picture sideways
then you will need to rotate the image manually. You may have to
use a
different program than the thumbnail viewer to edit the picture and
rotate it.
Face it, people don't want to look through our photos if we have 5
shots of the
same thing from different angles. Whereas taking multiple shots
of a scene gives us a better chance at good pictures, looking at
duplicates gets boring very quickly.
16 pages of pictures can be reduced to 8 or 4 if we take out the
duplicates. Having less pictures to go through makes it more
likely that people will actually go through the entire
collection. Also, delete pictures which make no sense or are
blurry--especially if you have multiple shots of the same thing, start
by deleting the blurry ones first.
After cleaning up the photos you may still have very many. If
so, break them into groups by topic, day, or something that makes
sense. I usually treat each trip as a separate set of pictures
(ex. Hawaii, Virginia, July4). The Hawaii set was still
over 1500 pictures after cleanup so I broke it down further and used
the activities, locations, and days as categories (ex. Kayak,
Luau,
Waimea
Canyon).
Pictures can be exciting while taking them. Especially if
you're in an exotic place, surrounded by interesting sights and
sounds. When you look at them later you probably remember those
events and feelings but for most people your pictures are only mildly
interesting. It helps a person to understand the picture better
if you use a caption describing what the picture is. If you are
in a set of pictures for a particular geographical region then you
don't need to repeat that fact but you should tell them why you took a
picture of this particular plant, scene, or location.
In closing, I hope you find these tips useful. In addition,
here are some programs you might find useful in managing and creating
photos and albums.
jalbum - generate cross
platform (html) photo albums
flickr - online photo sharing,
Picasa - Google Photo software
GIMP - photo/image editing