Sending your photos to your family tree website by email

In case you haven't heard, TribalPages now lets you upload your family photos to your TribalPages site via email! After setting a four digit PIN for your account, you can send photos to your site, just like you send them out to your family - with your favorite email program!

What's great about this feature isn't just how it makes it easy to upload lots of photos quickly: it's all the different tools and websites out there that you can now use directly with your family tree website!

In this series of tutorials, we're going to walk you through some of the most interesting and exciting ways we've found to use the new email upload feature. If you've found something even better, just drop us a note, and we'll add a column about it. If you have trouble, just let us know in the Technical Forums.

Getting Organized: Picasa brings sanity to family photo collections

Picasa is Google's tool for finding, organizing, and managing your photos. And it's simply wonderful. And with our new Email Upload tool, you can use it to manage your TribalPages photos as well!

Once it's installed, it will search your computer (with your permission) and find pictures you had no idea you still had. It will sort them by date, group them by directory, and show them to you in a really easy to use format that's great for "computer users with less experience".

Installing Picasa's simple as well: just use the Google Pack to automatically download it, install it and keep it up to date. We've put a button to the right to make that as simple as possible. Wile you're at it, take a look at some of the other tools in the pack: we love Firefox and Google Earth (which is the subject of Part Four of this series).

If you don't want the whole pack, or if you're not running Windows XP, you can also download the application manually -- there's even a Linux version! (Mac users should probably stick with iPhoto, which is the subject of Part Three of the series and is very similar.)

Finding your photos

When Picasa starts up, it will offer to search your computer for photos. Go ahead and let it run -- it can take a long time if you have thousands of photos, but it's worth it! If you've already got your photos stored and organized, you can tell it exactly where you want it to search. Picasa doesn't move your photos, or do anything rotten at all: it will, however, finds photos you've thought were gone forever.

The image to the right shows the settings for searching for folders. In this case, we let it search "My Documents, "My Pictures", and the Windows Desktop, but didn't allow it to search the rest of the hard drive (c:\), or a network drive (h:\).

Browsing and Managing your Photos

Even while Picasa's searching, it will show you what it's found and give you fast, organized access to your photos. In the image below, it's showing pictures from a recent trip to Mexico. They were automatically sorted by date, and you can see where we've added captions and other information. We also used Picasa to crop, straighten and remove red-eyes from all of these photos. It makes it very easy!

Cropping and Cleaning up your Genealogy Photos

Picasa is not a replacement for a professional photo retouching tool like Photoshop, but it's a fantastic tool for the amateur, and it is amazingly simple to use. In the image below, we're straightening a family history photo that was scanned crooked. Three clicks and we're done. And if we ever need to undo it, Picasa keeps a history of every change you make (forever!) and you can always undo it!

TribalPages gets into the act

So, it's pretty clear that Picasa is a pretty slick tool, and is a great help to Family Historians. But what about TribalPages new Email Upload tool? How does that fit into the mix?

Well, Picasa makes it easy to send photos by email. Just select the photos you want, click a button and it will resize them, ask for a destination and send them on their way.

With TribalPages new Email feature, we can make great use out of that. In fact, publishing your photos from Picasa is a breeze.

Find the photos you want to send

First, gather together the photos you want to sent to your TribalPages site. This may be simple (you just scanned them), or you might gather them together from all over your computer. For this example, I copied all of the photos I wanted into a folder called "TribalPages Demo" by right-clicking on each photo I wanted and choosing "Add To Album->TribalPages Demo" as shown in the image to the right.
Once they were all marked, I had an Album with just my genealogy photos as you can see in the shot below:

Email the Photos to TribalPages

The next step is to email the photos to your TribalPages site. After clicking on our new Album, we need to click on the Email button at the bottom of the Picasa screen. Picasa will ask you which email client you want to use, your default (most commonly Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird), GMail (Google's mail service), and Picasa Mail (which is an older mail service from "Hello"). We're going to choose Outlook, my default mail client.

Filling in the Email Form

Your mail program (Outlook in this case), will pop up a message with your photos already attached. All you have to do is fill in the fields like you would in any other email and hit send.

The Email Upload feature provides an email address of the form "userid-PIN@tribalpages.com" where you can email your photos, and that's what we need to put in the To: field. For this test case, I've set my PIN to 9128, so the upload address for my free website is "binkofree-9128@tribalpages.com".

For this example, I've set the Subject and Message text to things that will be obvious to spot on my site later. The Subject: field is used to set the Caption on all of the photos, and the message text is used as the description (again, on ALL the photos).

When all done, the form looks like the one to the right.

Waiting for a response

Even though this process is easy and quick for you, there's still a dozen high-res photos that need to be sent received and processed before your photos will show up on your family tree site. If you are using a slow dialup connection, this can take a considerable amount of time. If you're on a high-speed connection, we're probably talking just a few minutes (if that).

When we get your photos, our automatic system will check the PIN and make sure your photos are OK, then it will email you back a confirmation that your photos were received correctly. If the site has a different email on file than that of the sender, we'll also notify the owner of the site that new photos are available.

Checking the Results

Let's take a look at the results! Our site now has all of the photos in an Album named "Emailed Photos". Below, you can see one of the photos being displayed with the others at the top in icon form. Notice that the Caption and Description have been set as we wanted, and that the image looks great:

We hope you get as much out of Picasa and the new Email Upload feature as we have. If you have comments or questions, please send us Feedback or post on the Technical Forum.

Next up: Mac users get some much deserved attention

Next up in the series, we'll tackle the exact same problem for our Mac users using the built-in iPhoto software. Then, we're on to more exotic tools like sending aerials straight from Google Earth to your genealogy website.

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