Picasa Album

Picasa, a free program from Google, that you can use to view/edit/manage all of your photos and can create web page photo albums. This has tremendous potential for any busines that would want to create and display product lines.

My Garden Albums

Google Albums

In same quick, clean manner in which Picasa makes a web page of photos, you can also publish the photos to a google album on line. As the author, you have many options to the display of the photos. Below are two example albums.

Updating is a breeze, I can go back and add/edit/delete the photos and captions. You can set the viewer settings to public, private or just have a link that you can email to those you want to view it.

gymnast

Photo-editing Techniques

Using GIMP 2.6, I have selected a few of my favorite garden blooms and used a mask to cut out a Cone Flower (and Bee), a 'Cappuchino' Rudbeckia, and a Bachelar Button. I have given each photo, a transparent background and scaled them down. Now I can use them as art decco on any color or image background. In the last example, a Zebrina, a specific darker background was added to show off the light delicate edges.

cone flower and bee cappuchino rudbeckia bachelar button zebrina

A more complex technique, is to make composite pictures. In the first large examples below, I have cut out a redwood arbor with two-doves and substituted a new background of a Cascading Peach and blue sky. The second large photo is Wisteria, where I have manipulated the light, the contrast, and added a few degrees of Sharpness (using Picnic) to give more depth to the photo.

arbor and doves with cascading peach tree background wisteria

Photo Gallery

Another option to display photograghs is to install a Gallery into your website. With several to choose from, I selected the Coppermine Photo Gallery. Installed with a script, all options can be set by the administrator after logging on to the site. In my example gallery there are three levels of users.

I have removed my Coppermine Photo gallery because I have become too busy to manage it and the roving hackers and auto-bot internet preditors are trying to join as members and inject spam and worthless data into my gallery. REMOVED... problem solved.