Enhancing enjoyment of the film-free approach

By PETER GRIFFIN

These days a lot of amateur photographers are content to store their images electronically, sending them out to friends by email, storing them with album-building software on their hard drives or just burning them to CD.

For the latter you will need a rewriteable CD drive (CD-RW) and some blank disks. You simply select the picture files you want to move to CD in your computer's file system and copy them across to the CD you have placed in the drive.

If you are taking the film-free, do-it-yourself approach, Windows XP, Microsoft's digitally minded new operating system, is as good a place as any to start.

As long as your camera driver is loaded properly, XP will detect it and the media device holding the images as soon as you plug the camera in.

A dialogue box instantly pops up offering to copy the pics to your hard drive or to a CD, print them or publish them to the web. You can also view a slideshow of the images and arrange them in the order you want.

XP does not offer much in the way of picture-editing - its functionality is limited to capturing and copying.

If the software that comes with your digital camera is not up to much there is plenty of good picture-editing software on the market - Photoshop, Corel Photo, PhotoELF and Photo Factory among them.

Freeware versions also abound. Xatshow creates a picture slideshow and B/works converts colour pictures to black and white or sepia.

You can bypass Microsoft's channel to publishing your pictures online through a number of free hosters such as Yahoo.

Another option is to claim a spot in cyberspace using free web-hosting services such as Freeservers or Host4free and maintain your own album site.

Going a step further, you can order prints of your digital pics over the web from operators such as Ofoto a Kodak subsidiary, or www.photo.co.nz, which is based in Christchurch.

Xatshow

Yahoo Photos

Freeservers

Host4free

Ofoto

photo.co.nz