Adding Scanned Images to Your Web Pages and Email Chapter 17 Copyright 2001 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click Here for Terms of Use. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. How To… ■ Email scanned photos ■ Post scanned photos on the Web with PhotoSuite and PhotoDeluxe ■ Create your own web page ■ Find free web hosting services to make your site accessible on the Web ■ Get started with Microsoft FrontPage ■ Send image files and upload web pages to a server using a file transfer program What fun is a photo you can’t pass around and share? Photos are meant to be viewed, not hidden away, and the reality of modern life is that a lot of our viewing now takes place over the Internet, via email and by surfing websites. This chapter is devoted to the subject of helping you share your photos with friends and family using today’s efficient and instantaneous electronic communication media. Choose the Best Way to Share Your Scanned Photos The Internet and the World Wide Web are dynamic tools for sharing and transmitting photos. You have a number of options for using them, depending on your intended audience, your comfort level with technology, and the amount of time you want to invest. This chapter gives you a whirlwind overview of your Internet-based photo-sharing options. At the simplest end of the spectrum, you can simply attach a photo to an email message. Taking things a step further, you can post photos for friends and family to view on an actual website. You can use a service such as PhotoSuite’s GatherRound.com or Adobe’s PhotoShare.com. These communal websites allow registered users to post photos and provide friends and family with a password to access them. If you’re ambitious, creative, and have the time to invest, you can easily design your own website. You can choose from among a number of programs to help you do this, including PhotoDeluxe, PhotoSuite, Yahoo! GeoCities, and FrontPage. 320 How To Do Everything with Your Scanner Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. A Word about the Internet If someone stopped you on the street and asked you to define the term Internet, with a capital I, what would you say? Chances are you visualize the Internet based on the part you interact with: your own computer screen. The Internet that brings a wealth of information to your screen is vast. It’s made of hundreds of thousands of interconnected networks in more than 100 countries using large computers, called servers, to interconnect them. A network is a grouping of interrelated computers, such as those for commercial, academic, and business entities. Originally developed as a tool for the U.S. military, the Internet has become a tool for communication and research that businesses, governments, and individuals now depend on. A term closely related to Internet, but not synonymous, is the term World Wide Web. Figuratively speaking, it’s a web of documents. The World Wide Web connects documents by the use of web-page links called hypertext markup links. How Computers “Talk” on the Internet Just as people must share language consisting of a common vocabulary and grammatical rules to communicate, computers must share common rules for transmitting and receiving data. A protocol is a set of programming rules and conventions that allow computers to “talk” to each other while sharing data over the Internet. Most computers use a protocol called transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP). What You Need to Communicate on the Internet To allow your computer to communicate with other computers on the Internet, you need to have web browser software and an Internet service provider (ISP). Web Browser Software Web browser software enables you to view web pages from the World Wide Web on your computer. To view a particular site, you type its address, called a URL (short for uniform resource locater), into the location field on your web browser software. Figure 17-1 shows a URL typed into the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser software. CHAPTER 17: Adding Scanned Images to Your Web Pages and Email 321 17 Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. FIGURE 17-1 A URL typed into the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser An Internet Service Provider (ISP) An ISP is usually a paid service provider you contract with to provide you access to powerful computers called servers. A server is a computer shared by hundreds, thousands, even millions of users. It contains files, applications, and data posted to the World Wide Web, and allows you to connect to a backbone network of other powerful servers that comprise the Internet. An ISP might also be an employer, educational institution, or free business-community service. Attaching Scanned Photos to Email Messages Email is perhaps the most frequently used feature on the Internet. In fact, so much written communication is now sent electronically that a venerable U.S. institution— the U.S. Post Office—has found itself financially threatened. Stamps and paper are simply at a competitive disadvantage with this new electronic medium. This is particularly true now that scanned images, such as photographs, can be beautifully and efficiently transmitted as email attachments. How Scanned Photos Travel over the Internet Images travel over the Internet much the same way as other types of email. When an email message is sent, regardless of whether it contains text or images, it’s broken up into packets of data. These data packets can be transmitted over telephone, cable, and other lines, and ultimately to the destination computer. What happens next depends on whether you’re hooked up to a network of computers or a stand-alone PC. If your computer is part of a network, an internal routing device determines whether the email is addressed to someone on the same network as the 322 How To Do Everything with Your Scanner Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. sending computer. If the message is going to someone within a network, it’s delivered and the process is complete. If your email is not part of a network or is going to another computer outside its own network, a device called an Internet router performs the complex process of locating and directing your message to the network the destination computer resides at. Once the Internet router directs your email to the appropriate destination network, you email might pass through both a gateway and a firewall. The gateway uses the TCP/IP protocol to reconstruct the data packets into a complete message. A firewall is a type of security device that shields a network from the Internet so unwanted intruders can’t break in and cause damage. Occasionally, for security purposes, a firewall might be programmed so that no file attachments are allowed to pass through. For example, a network administrator might decide that image files have no legitimate business purpose, and take up too much space on the company’s server. When someone sends you an email message, the message is seldom delivered straight to your computer. Instead, the message usually passes through a computer called an email server. The email software on your computer periodically logs into the email server and communicates with it to see if you have any mail. An Internet server might be programmed to reject email over a certain size, such as 1 megabyte, so the email server isn’t overtaxed. A megabyte is a lot of text—about a thousand pages of text like this page—but a single high-quality image might be as much as 1 megabyte. Emailing an Image Using Your Scanner Software As you might recall from Chapter 2, your scanner comes with its own software that runs it. Your scanner software might have a feature that allows you to open your email program and send email. Check the documentation that came with your scanner or the scanner’s Help menu to see if it has this capability. You might even have a special external button on your scanner that allows you to scan or email an image simply by pressing the button. Let’s look at an example of how scanner software that has email capability works. The Hewlett-Packard ScanJet ScanPro 5370C is an example of a scanner that offers this functionality. There are three phases to the process: Configure the default email settings. The first time you press the external email button on the scanner, the Scanner Button Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 17-2, appears. This dialog box allows you to identify the email program on your system you want the scanner software to use, and the type of scanned document you’re sending. For example, the dialog box in Figure 17-2 is configured to send true-color CHAPTER 17: Adding Scanned Images to Your Web Pages and Email 323 17 Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. . design your own website. You can choose from among a number of programs to help you do this, including PhotoDeluxe, PhotoSuite, Yahoo! GeoCities, and FrontPage. 320 How To Do Everything with Your. this watermark. How To ■ Email scanned photos ■ Post scanned photos on the Web with PhotoSuite and PhotoDeluxe ■ Create your own web page ■ Find free web hosting services to make your site accessible. as the 322 How To Do Everything with Your Scanner Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on www.verypdf.com to remove this watermark. sending computer. If the message is going to someone within a network,