Nikon myPicturetown is a photo sharing site that offers a convenient way of storing images and obtaining their URLs for sourcing to blogs and websites. What gives this service additional appeal is the ability to share a photo album without the viewer being provided access to your other albums on the site. Although aimed at users of Nikon cameras, anyone can register a free account with 2 GB of storage. Setting up an account is straight-forward: Just go to myPicturetown and click “New Registration (Free)”.
Sign-up has the usual onerous “Terms and Conditions” but does not ask for much besides name and email address. You do need Adobe Flash Player installed to use the site and Adobe AIR is required for the upload tool, a desktop app.
Uploading images to myPicturetown
The upload process is simple but a bit unusual. Double-clicking the desktop shortcut brings up the Japanese language version of the upload window then quickly launches your browser and goes to your MyPicturetown account. 
If you selected to stay signed in on your prior visit you will not need to sign in. The account home page shows a collage of some of your photos – nice – and a small Nikon ad which can be closed – a small price to pay for the service.
Click Upload (lower left of collage) and the desktop app opens – this time for me in English. This is a drag and drop procedure and works very smoothly. The album to upload to can be selected or a new one created. Click Upload and the process starts. For each file there is a progress bar showing the portion 
already uploaded. Even during this upload process additional images can be added to the window and will be uploaded.
Note of caution: Not all file types are accepted. You can upload JPG files but not PNG files.
Note of caution: You can upload photos in their original size, however, you cannot use or link to the full size images if they are larger than 1024 pixels horizontally, for vertical images the max size is even smaller. This is similar to the way Flickr works. However, the full size images are available to you for downloading.
Getting the image URL
Once your images are stored in an album on your myPicturetown site, getting URLs to the images is a very simple matter. If your uploaded images are larger than 1024 pixels (max horizontal dimension) only down-sized images will be available as links. Navigate to your MyPicturetown album and click the thumbnail of interest. Click the “i”, 
, in the tool bar to open an information pane on the left. Scroll down to see a section labeled Blog Links: – see Nikon provided for your needs. 
For most images three sizes are offered and the pixel dimensions are shown. For images larger than 1024 px scaled down images are offered. For very small images only one or two sizes might be shown. For example, for the “i” image here only the actual 42×44 pixels size is offered.
The illustration on the right shows what I am talking about.
Click the size you want, the URL is shown in the Link URL: box. Click it to select it then press Ctrl+C to copy the address to your clip board.
Using the image URL
In Live Writer click the Picture command (in the Insert group on the Home ribbon, or in the Media group on the Insert ribbon).
Select From the web …, in the Insert Web Image dialog paste (Ctrl+V) the address into the Picture web address: field. The main area will show a thumbnail of the image. Note my clever illustration here of the dialog window showing a screen clip of the insert operation.
All the images in this article are sourced from my myPicturetown site. In fact, I kept the upload app open as I prepared this post and uploaded the illustrations as I needed them. One of the illustrations links to a larger image, move the pointer over the images to see the one (all right, it is the one showing the blog links).
Getting a link to a slide show is more complicated, you need to “share” the album (click the 
icon in the tool bar). Sharing is done by sending an email which contains the link, a very long URL. See this illustrated in my Café Ludwig post Sharing Photos with myPicturetown
Nikon myPicturetown is a very blog friendly site. You will likely be as impressed with as I am.
.:.
© 2011 Ludwig Keck
Live Writer Basics 