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Okay, so now you've got all your photos ready to go. They've been color corrected, they've been resized, and they've been properly named (if not, head on back to Part One: Photo Preparation for a refresher). The good news is that the hard part is out of the way. The bad news is that the sloooooooooooooowwwwww part is just ahead.

Apple's iTools is an wondrous thing. First, it's easy to use. Once you learn to navigate your way through the menu options, getting your photos, movies and documents online is as simple as...well, as simple as the Mac OS. Second, it's attractive. I've seen many image storage and display sites, and iTools is the only one that seems to have been designed to show off your images, not the advertisers. Third, it's free. Any Mac user with Mac OS 9.x or Mac OS X and up can create his/her own art gallery, perfect for showing off photos, illustrations, movies, and anything else you mistakenly believe the world wants to see.

Now, I realize this a "How To" article, but I'm not going to teach you all about iTools, for the most part. Apple has an online tutorial that does a decent job of walking you through the basics. To access it, simply click on the question mark icon that appears in the upper right of every editable iTools page. I will, however, walk you through the process of getting your photos online.

First, of course, you have to have an iTools account. You can sign up at http://itools.mac.com; the process is quick and painless. Apple will then guide you through the installation process, which basically involves getting the proper plug-ins in the proper spot. Once the software is in place, it's time to start the uploading.

The first thing you'll want to do is open your iDisk. Click on the iDisk icon, enter your new (or old...whatever) member name and password, then click the "Open Your iDisk" button on the next screen. This will add a new icon to your desktop as if you'd simply inserted a Zip Disk. Of course, unlike a Zip Disk, the iDisk is slow. Painfully slow, even on DSL. Remember, you're connecting to a server out there in the ether, so it's not like you're copying files across 1GHz ethernet connection.

My first piece of advice is to never ever try to open that "About your iDisk" text file from within your iDisk folder. It's a good read, but not if you have to wait for the Peter Schilling comeback tour for it to open. Copy it to your desktop and open it from there.

As you can see from the iDisk subfolders, there's plenty we can do here. However, we're going to stick to format and concern ourselves only with the photo folder. If you have a decent amount of photos (more than fifteen, I'd say), you'll probably want to create some new folders in here. This will assist you later when you're actually adding the items to your pages, and it'll greatly speed up the editing process. You'll see why in a bit.

Copy your photos from your hard drive to the iDisk photo folder (or new subfolders), and we're ready to go. In the purple menu bar of the iTools web page is a link for "Homepage." That's what we're building, so that's where we're heading. It should default to the "Photo Album" tab along the left hand side of the screen, so we may as well start there. When you choose the style template you want, it immediately takes you to your iDisk pictures folder. Highlight the folder with which you first want to work, then click choose. iTools will pull these pictures into the template, and now you get to create your page. If you want to rearrange the photos, simply select one and drag it to where you want it to sit. If you don't want a photo to appear at all, make sure its "Show" button is left unchecked.

Here, by the way, is the main reason we split our photos into groups when loading them up to iDisk. When editing this page, iTools makes you wait until each picture is loaded before you can start making changes. The more photos there are, the longer this takes. Splitting them into folders therefore makes it faster for you to complete your work and faster for those viewing your page.

Editing captions and page titles at this point should be obvious enough; Apple does a good job of telling you what text is editable and what is not. Remember, though, that your space is limited. Don't try to get too wordy.

When the page is finished, click "Publish" and you're all set. You can also change your theme for any page, but doing so tended to wipe out my page titles for some reason. Just be wary of that if you make alterations.

You can now go ahead and create any additional pages if you need to. As you'll see from honeymoon photos, I split the trip into three pages. Don't worry about the order just yet. That's one of the final steps.

Once your photo pages are ready to go, you should put them in an album right? Previously, the only way to do this was with the "Personal Homepage," template, and it was a waste. I won't even get into why I hated this because Apple has now provided a better option; the Site Menu. This has basically been drawn from iDVD, I'll wager, as it simply collects the pages you've created thus far and provides links to them. You can assign graphics from the Pictures folder to represent the links, and there's room for text descriptions as well. There are currently only four templates from which to choose, but all of them are much better than anything offered in the Personal Homepage. Again, place photos and text where Apple says, click Publish, and you're done.

So, now that you've got your photo pages and your site map complete, let's get it organized and announce it. Once again, Apple has made this incredibly easy to do. In the upper left corner of the main iTools set-up page is a window that should list all the page you've created. As the instructions to the right state, simply drag the page titles to the order in which you want them to appear. Finished. If you created a Site Map, you'll most likely want this to appear at the top of the window, making it your homepage. Now, all you have to do is notify everyone of your URL, which will be http://homepage.mac.com/USERNAME. And hey, what better way to do this than with an Apple iCard (don't worry, Apple made sure you'll see the link).

With a little help from Applelinks, a lot of help from Apple, and no shortage of hard work on your own, your friends and family can now see your vacation photos without any doubles being purchased and photo albums being passed around. Congratulations, you've turned Mac into a digital hub, just like Steve Jobs was really hoping you would.

And finally, if you'd like to see how all of this can come together, head on over to the page I created for my honeymoon photos. Be warned, though; with Druid sacrifices, detention centers, giant lizards and buckets of blood, this was hardly your typical honeymoon.

Next month, we're going to get a little more dangerous...and expensive. Using VR Worx from VR Toolbox, Inc., we're going to build ourselves a panorama. If that doesn't work, we'll try building ourselves a Bananarama. It was, after all, a fairly cruel summer.