Okay, now you have a digital camera, a scanner, or both. You'd like to use your computer to organize and share your photos for your friends and family, or for your business. Perhaps you want to publish your photos on the Internet. Maybe you want to "burn" a CD of your whole library, or just a wedding or graduation. This system allows fast browsing, as well as the ability to optionally publish high-quality photos.

This system uses a web-browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape to do the browsing. This is convenient since just about everybody has a browser and is familiar with it. Using a browser to view a photo library is a natural if the library is published on the Internet. But even if you want to burn your library on a CD, a browser can "browse" a CD very nicely. In fact, if you browse from a CD or a hard disk, the browsing will be lightning fast.

The way this system works is that you build and maintain your library as a directory tree. You add, delete, and edit the directory however you want. Each directory in the tree can have photos, subdirectories, or both. By using meaningful names for the photos and directories, standard file-finding/searching software can be handy. For reasons you will see later, the total of photos and subdirectories in any one directory should be kept small, no more than 20 to 25.

This program will build "mirrors" of your photo library directory, all set up for easy browser access. The files are kept very small, so that they will display quickly, even if accessed over dial-up lines. Although this comes at the expense of image quality, you can make available the original, high-resolution photos if you choose. If you include them (on the web, or a CD), the people with whom you are sharing them will be able to make high-quality prints by themselves. If you choose not to publish the high-resolution versions, you can sell high-quality prints or files to customers.