With your images still highlighted, point your mouse towards the tool bar at the bottom, left-hand side of the screen and click the following: align left, distribute vertically, align bottom, distribute horizontally. This pattern will ensure that your photos end up in a horizontal line. Go through and eliminate any images that stick out, or resize them.

The easiest way to align your images is to right-click and select “Arrange into Grid”, filling out the values and creating your own table. For this particular project, we’re doing 4 columns and a 0 cellpadding. There is also the option to drag and place them yourself. This becomes a simpler task if you zoom out and use the entire canvas to your advantage. Eventually, you should have something similar to the image below.

You can separate and arrange your images anyway you like; it all depends on your preference and how you want to present your photo album. We’re going to stick with one big cluster of photos, which will fit one screen and make scrolling and zooming simple.

4. Export your Project

We’re finally headed into the homestretch of this photo album project. Select “Export” at the top of the window. You’ll see a preview of your finished project on the left-hand side and options for exporting the file on the right. You can either upload the file as a singular image to Windows Live, providing you have an account, or you can select “Custom”, which will provide you with a few options.

Saving your project as “Images” will export processed image chunks of your project into dozens of folders. Be forewarned – this could mean up to thousands of tiny pictures. Exporting as Silverlight Deep Zoom saves your project as a Deep Zoom file, but the one we want to use is Seadragon Ajax so we can embed the final product onto an .html page for the entire world to see.

Select “Seadragon Ajax” as your output type and provide an project alias. Then, take note of the location where you’re saving it and choose what format you’d like to export it as. We went with JPEG at full quality, since it loads up quickly in most mainstream browsers. Keep in mind that if your pictures were not high quality to begin with, they will inevitably blur whether you save it as JPEG or PNG.

5. Upload your Album

If you’re running your website off of a free hosting service, such as Blogger or Geocities, you won’t be able to upload your photo album unless you have some sort of FTP access to these sites (Geocities does offer FTP access with a paid account). However, inexpensive shared server hosts, like 1&1 and Dreamhost work like a charm.

Locate the generated album folder. If you stuck with the default location, then it should be in My Documents\Expression\Deep Zoom Composer Projects\ project name, under Exported Data. Inside this folder, you’ll find your .html file and a folder titled Generated Images. All of these should be uploaded to your webspace in order for the script to work.

Fire up your FTP client, preferably something light like FileZilla, and upload all of these files, including the entire contents of dzc_output_files, located in Generated Images. If you take a closer look at the properties of this folder, you’ll notice there are roughly thousands of image files in this folder. Depending on your bandwidth, this may take up to an hour to load, though the end result is worth the wait and the hassle of uploading individual photos to your website.

Upload every single one of those files to your server, placing them in the same folder as your Deep Zoom generated .html file. Assign your .html file a name, if you wish to do so, and you should be set to share your Deep Zoom photo album.

6. Share your Album

In order for you to share your photos with your friends and family, you should let those who will be viewing it know that they have to have both the Silverlight 2 and Seadragon Ajax plug-in to view it. Though you cannot right-click and save individual photos, this is a great alternative for artists and photographers who want to share their artwork but are afraid of copyright infringement. 

The great thing about Deep Zoom Composer is that because the final product is exported into an .html file, you can play around with the HTML and customize the page to your liking. Add a background, change the text color and size, and add your own descriptions. You can even take some liberties and create your own web layout to go with your exported product.