Dealing With Digital Photos

David Mulder | February 2009

I regularly take photos of the many things happening in my junior high science classes. Sharing these pictures with parents gives them a window into the world of their young adolescent's school day. Parents have commented to me that viewing these pictures has opened up conversations with their child about topics they might not have otherwise had opportunity to discuss. At the same time, students love to see pictures of themselves and their classmates in action. My students often ask to include pictures we've snapped during science labs to help illustrate their procedures or results when writing lab reports.

If you take a lot of pictures in your classroom (like I do), organizing them can be a challenge. I use a photo management program to help keep track of them all. I happen to use a Macintosh computer at school, and I've been very happy with Apple's preloaded photo management software, iPhoto. iPhoto is an incredibly easy-to-use program; when I plug my digital camera into my computer, the program opens by itself and begins downloading new photos. It allows me to group photos into albums, perform simple edits (touching up, rotating, and cropping images), and easily search for particular photos. If you are using a Windows-based PC (or are somehow dissatisfied with iPhoto), I might recommend you explore Picasa 3, a downloadable program for photo management. You can get a copy from Google for free, and the installation is very straightforward. Picasa 3 allows you to keep track of your digital pictures on your computer, "tag" them (note who or what is in the photo), edit them (resize, crop, remove red-eye, etc.), and even create slideshows or movies from your collection of digital pictures. When I downloaded it, I was surprised and delighted that the first thing the software asked me was if it should locate all the pictures on my computer. When I clicked "OK" it proceeded to do so—finding pictures I had saved in random folders and long forgotten. It is an excellent program, and I've recently started using it on my home computer (a Windows-based PC) for photo management.

Now that you have your photos organized, how do you share them with your students and their parents? You could, of course, simply attach your photos to an email message sent to parents, but this can be very time-consuming and labor intensive. I've found that it's simpler to place the pictures on my website and then send an email to parents informing them that new photos are available online.

The good news is that there is a very easy-to-use tool (also from Google, not surprisingly) called Picasa Web Albums. As you might suspect, Web Albums is the online extension of Picasa 3. However, you do not need to use Picasa 3 to take advantage of Web Albums; for instance, I have continued to use iPhoto to manage digital photos on my school computer. Using Picasa Web Albums, you can upload (transfer pictures from your computer to the Internet) and store up to gigabyte's worth of your digital pictures—that's a whole lot (likely several thousand, depending on the photo size)—all for free. Picasa Web Albums is basically just what it sounds like: web-based "photo albums" that store your digital images. Once you've uploaded your photos to Picasa Web, simply email parents a link to your web album. There they can browse your newly uploaded pictures as they wish. If you'd like to get an idea of what this tool looks like, you can check out my junior high science classes' web albums.

If you use Google Sites for your class website, Picasa Web has another great feature that can help you direct traffic to your site. I use Picasa Web to create my "Photos" webpage, which is comprised of a series of "slide shows." The photos in these slide shows are piped right into the website from my Web Albums! (Learn more about using Google Sites to create a website here.) If you begin using Picasa Web Albums to share your digital photos, you can create your own photos page for your Google Site—create a new page as a "Dashboard," and then choose "Insert" and "Picasa Web slideshow." The slideshows come out looking beautiful! Whether you email parents a link to your Web Album or embed your photos as a slide show on your website, the point is, a tool like Picasa Web Albums makes it easier to distribute your digital pictures. (Editor's note: between the time this article was written and put in print, Picasa beta has become available for Mac users as well.)

So get your hands on a digital camera and start snapping those photos! Capture your students in action, get them your digital pictures organized, and then share them with people who should be seeing them: your students and their parents.

David Mulder is a 7th and 8th grade science teacher at Sioux Center Christian School in Sioux Center, Iowa.