I always hesitate to write articles like this, because the moment I mention a free outside service, it either goes offline, or starts charging for useage. However, I’m going to go ahead and throw this one out there, because it’s exactly what the doctor ordered for some of the members of my Gluebooks group, who have endless photos to share, but no idea how to go about it.

I’m sure many of you have visited online art journals in the past. I have one running at LiveJournal, where I tracked my progress in Art by the Inch last fall (and hope to revive when the challenge starts up again this spring). Various artists use online journals or blogs (short for weblogs) to talk about their creative pursuits. Reading them can offer a great insight into the person behind the art—and creating one can give you some perspective on your own work, and also presents an opportunity to share what you’re doing with online friends.

When I decided to write this article, I went on a hunt for free online journal services, and places to post photos. Often, these are completely different services offered by different sites, which means to get your photos over here hooked up to your journal over there, you have to be a little web savvy. While I was hunting, I found a service that offered both a free journal and online photo hosting in one nice, neat package, so that’s what I’m going to talk about. (This is where we all say a silent prayer that they don’t start charging for their services tomorrow…)

GreatestJournal offers journals that are set up just like the very popular LiveJournal (in fact, I think they’re using exactly the same code to run the site). They also offer one gigabyte of free photo space in their photo galleries—that’s a whole heap of space if you size your photos down to a reasonable size. (For me, reasonable is under 100KB—on my web site, that generally translates to 72dpi, and under six inches in dimension in either direction. Too technical? Just size them down however you know how.) The galleries allow offsite linking, so if you need to show photos over at eBay, or on some message board somewhere, you’re all set with this service.

It took me all of five minutes to set up my GreatestJournal, which you can see here. I filled out the form, chose my user name, and two addresses appeared: one for my new journal, and one for my photo gallery. I simply went to my journal controls and changed the default style and color of the journal—the one they gave me was very busy, and screaming violet, which I didn’t think would work well with my artwork splattered all over it. Then I jumped over to my gallery address, uploaded a photo, clicked the Update Journal button underneath the uploaded photo, and a box appeared with the photo already plugged into a new journal entry. All I had to do was add text, and finalize the entry, and my art journal was ready to roll.

Like LiveJournal, GreatestJournal lets you add friends to your journal, and allows you to create communities. The down side is that when I clicked on some of my popular interests, like ATCs or altered books, there were very few people listed, and nobody who was familiar to me. Perhaps that will change now that I’ve posted this article? Feel free to add me as a friend if you set up your journal there.

After I posted this, Claire wrote: “I use Blogger.com, which is free, and also has photo hosting, using Hello by Picasa. I have been up and running with this now for a couple of months. It’s so easy to use!” I’ve used Blogger in the past, and found the image uploads to be a problem if you’re on a Mac—but if you’re on a PC, and feel comfortable installing the software on your computer, this is another option.