If you want to create an online photo album (of your prized plants and gardening endeavors) and aren't sure how to proceed, maybe the following information will be helpful to you? Prodigy provides an ideal location for its members to show-off their prized photos. For those new to creating web pages, the Prodigy Building Blocks FAQs can help to get your photos posted within your FREE 15 MBs of Prodigy storage space. However; it's not necessary to use the Prodigy Building Blocks, in order to post your web page(s) on Prodigy. For those not new to web page creation, you can utilize any FTP client to upload/manage your photo album. To do so, just follow the step-by-step instructions, which are located here! And for those who are looking for an excellent HTML-Editor, I believe that you will be very impressed with a FREE (as in totally free) copy of 1st Page 2000 with its built-in FTP client! Maybe you have scanned your hard-copy photo images (or maybe you used a digital camera), to obtain the computer files of your photos/images? But you may find your current graphics-editing software (needed to resize, crop, create thumbnails, and otherwise manipulate those computer files) is a bit lacking in features and functionality? If this is your situation, you might find that a FREE (as in totally free) copy of IrfanView will more than meet your needs! Okay, now that you have access to: your own copyright-FREE computer image files, and a FREE Graphics/Image-Editor to manipulate those files, and a FREE HTML-Editor / FTP client for creating web pages, and 15 MB of FREE online storage space (included with each Prodigy account) ... what's stopping you from creating your own online photo album? Here are some important factors to consider, as you begin bringing it all together: Typical web browser and video monitor settings, used by your potential web page visitors, usually will not be compatible with the video resolution of the photos to be presented. What I'll address here are some basic considerations and suggestions for formatting the layout of a typical photo album page. When sizing more than one image to be displayed on the same web page, it might be a good idea to not mix-n-match images which are of vastly different sizes. Just to illustrate this point I'll mix-n-match two images, and because of their vastly different sizes one can observe that a lot of white space surrounds the images. Using this approach yields a rather unbalanced appearance: click here to align these images on your screen:   Once again I'll mix-n-match two images of different sizes. but this time they are closer (in size) to each other. While not as exaggerated as the above illustration, one can observe that there is still significant white space surrounding the two images. Again you can see that using this approach yields an unbalanced appearance: click here to align these images on your screen:   In addition to the problems encountered when mixing-n-matching photographs of various sizes, another consideration is that of maximum size to be used for presentation. Several things should be taken into consideration here, among them are: visitors likely do not use the same video resolution as your full-sized images make allowance for the width of side-navigation-menus (avoid horizontal scrolling) allow for a reasonable browser display height (avoid vertical scrolling) provide alignment links so that images can be easily viewed (without scrolling) In other words consider such things as; your visitors might be using 800x600 (or even less) video resolution, and a 17" (or even lesser sized) monitor. These things are not as important when presenting text (which can easily be "wrapped" and/or "resized" to fit their screen), but images/photos are not so easily accommodated (by most web browsers). Based on these considerations, here's a suggested maximum size to be used for presenting your photos: click here to align this image on your screen: One method of presenting several same-sized images, on a single page of your photo album, would be to utilize thumbnails. Many of the better photo/image/graphics software packages (including IrfanView, discussed above) provide a method for easily creating thumbnails. If you have never used this method before, just click on HELP within your software package, and perform a search/find on the keyword thumbnail. Making all your thumbnail images of the same size provides for an orderly and balanced presentation. Making your thumbnails clickable links (which lead to the full-sized images) will allow your visitors to view your large (hi-resolution) photos within their own browser window. In the example below, I used several thumbnails (and made the last image in the set clickable). If you click on the last image, in this set of thumbnails, it will open a separate browser window to display the full-sized (digitally created) image which is associated with that thumbnail: click here to align these images on your screen:                       In summary; my suggestions for a photo album web page presentation, are as follows: avoid mixing-n-matching different sized images on the same page limit the maximum width to avoid the need for horizontal scrolling limit the maximum height to avoid the need for vertical scrolling provide alignment links to aide with image presentation employ same-sized thumbnail images for a well-balanced appearance use clickable thumbnail images (full-sized images open in a separate window) -- Karl

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