Working with Digital Photographs in Zoner Photo Studio
Share Your Photos on the Social Web
The social web has really been booming lately, from videoblogging to easy web photo galleries to picture posts on Facebook. And when you want to take a part in this gradual revolution, Zoner Photo Studio is here to help you along your way.
Zoner Photo Studio offered some basic uploading in version 12, and as of version 13, it can upload a picture directly to Facebook, Flickr, or Picasa. In all three cases the job is very easy and all you need is an account already set up on that service. Actually, you don’t even need that; Zoner Photo Studio sends you to the account creation page if needed.
Flickr at Top Quality
All three of these uploaders are in the Publish menu of the program’s Manager module. They are the last items in the menu. Since you probably only want to share certain photographs—not your whole collection—you should prepare them first by creating a separate upload folder and putting them into it.
Before uploading, edit the photos in the folder to taste and resize them if needed to meet the target website’s requirements. Then start the uploader. For Flickr, you are immediately asked to authorize the connection. Without authorization, Zoner Photo Studio cannot cooperate with Flickr and upload the photos. This must be done each time you use the uploader.
After the Flickr part of authorization, go back to the Zoner Photo Studio window and click Authorize. This leads you to a window for selecting pictures to be uploaded to the gallery. You can either select an existing gallery or create a new one. Choose a gallery, click Next, and choose the size at which to upload the pictures.
Try to avoid having Flickr, or any other services, resize your pictures. Resize them before uploading instead. Web services’ resizing algorithms often offer poorer sharpness than Zoner Photo Studio does. With these services and their interest in saving space, “resizing” usually means “shrinking.” Shrinking tends to blur a picture. Resharpening afterwards helps greatly, but the services do not resharpen after shrinking. Note that Flickr does not have a “physical” (pixel count) size limit, but rather a data size limit: 10 MB. Click Next again to launch automated upload of all the pictures in the current folder.
Now Let’s Try Facebook and Picasa
Uploading of pictures to Facebook or to the Picasa Web Gallery service works similarly to uploading to Flickr. However, for these services, automatic login can be set up inside Zoner Photo Uploader itself. This speeds up your work since you do not have to go through authorization.
For both of these services, we again recommend that you shrink pictures in Zoner Photo Studio rather than letting the service do it for you. Facebook, for example, recently still had a size limit of 600 px per dimension, which with today’s digital photo sizes easily meant a 4x reduction in size during uploading—again with no resharpening afterwards. That meant a great loss of sharpness.
Don’t forget to take advantage of Zoner Photo Studio’s batch editing tools when preparing (e.g. shrinking) batches of pictures before uploading. Remember here that many people in your audience are likely using a tablet, laptop, or cell phone. Therefore, a medium or small resolution, e.g. 1024 px on the longer side, is best as these people won’t get any benefit out of a larger one. Even for services with no size limits, we recommend a maximum of about 1600 px. Any larger than that is a waste of space and bandwidth: what is your audience going to be viewing them on, a widescreen TV? But whatever your pictures will be viewed on, we hope they will be viewed enthusiastically and frequently—and that Zoner Photo Studio will have played a part in that.
