PhotoOnWeb for Windows

PhotoOnWeb is a simple, free program for creating photo albums and publishing them online. It creates your album, builds the Web site, and publishes it all for you, either via the built-in FTP Client using your own online space or via a subscription to sites such as the one the developer makes available. It creates easy-to-use albums with a full-screen Flash slideshow feature.

PhotoOnWeb's user interface opens with a Start tab displayed in the main view. The right-hand panel's three headings describe the program's basic operations, too: Project, Parameters, and Publish. We started by creating and naming a new project and adding images. PhotoOnWeb let us add images by browsing or dragging and dropping them one by one, in batches, or by entire folders. The default frame template is plain, but a drop-down list had a large selection of alternatives to choose from, many with names like Halloween and Tahiti. We could also browse to the program's Web site to get templates. Tabs labeled General, Frame, Navigation, and Security let us configure our album's online behavior, such as background colors and how programs open. The Security option let us specify log-on IDs and passwords to access our albums. We recommend using this option for your personal images, unless you want to share them freely, because that's what will happen if you don't protect them with passwords. A slider makes sizing images easy, though the tool resizes all the images at the same time. But we could rotate images individually and make other changes. We saved our project in the software's proprietary .pow format for editing, but the easiest thing to do is to simply press Publish to automatically connect with an FTP server, provided you've already specified one. PhotoOnWeb's Parameters offered a variety of preconfigured servers, and we could add more in the Options.

Our online album was basic but worked fine, though PhotoOnWeb's templates (and video tutorial) showed us that much more was possible, and with little effort. Most ISPs offer free Web space to their subscribers, and many other free online storage options are available for publishing your albums.