Good Friday afternoon!
Today is the last part of the digital photo rodeo. Apparently you can’t beat a dead horse too much. 
Over the past couple of Fridays we’ve covered various tools to organize your photos on your computer as well as hosting options to share your pictures with family and friends. In today’s tip I want to tell you about two online tools for editing your photos. The great thing about each is that they fully integrate with both Flickr, Facebook and other services, so you if want to edit photos you’ve already uploaded elsewhere, you’re in luck!
Picnik – http://picnik.com – Picnik has a very colorful, Web 2.0 look about it. You can even use it without creating an account, however you’ll need to establish one if you want to access the photos you’ve already uploaded to other services. In addition to Flickr and Facebook it also interfaces with Picasa Web Albums, MySpace and other services. Picnik offers a full slate of editing and photo correction features for free. They also offer more tools for Pro accounts which cost $24.95 per year. When I’ve used it I’ve found that the free version has met all of my needs. Picnik is also a great tool to use to edit a photo you have stored on your computer. Simply select your computer as the source, upload the file, make changes, and then Picnik will save the file back to your computer.
Photoshop Express - https://photoshop.com/express – Adobe has decided to join this space as well and now offers Photoshop Express. Currently it is an entirely free service and also offers 2GB of online storage allowing you have yet another place to share photos with others. It also interfaces with Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums (sounds familiar doesn’t it). They offer a series of short instruction videos under the help section to help you get started on the path of photo editing excellence!
Personally I really like both services for different reasons and think there’s room for each. As with the services mentioned over the past two weeks, it really comes down to what your needs are when deciding which one is best for you. Next week we’ll be moving on to another topic, in the mean time please take 60 seconds to answer 3 questions to help me better gauge your needs and interests:
Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=KiwaGqSvfQdi22AGqI5orA_3d_3d
In last week’s techtip I recommended a few different digital photo management tools, including Picasa from Google and Windows Live Photo Gallery. Both tools are free and give you multiple options for searching your computer for photos, organizing, and minor editing. Once you’ve gone through this process, you’re ready to share your photos with family and friends, and the world if you choose!
A few sites (and there are many) I’d like to recommend for sharing your photos are:
Flickr – http://flickr.com – This is considered to be THE web 2.0 photo sharing site. There’s a downloadable application that makes it very easy to choose the photos you want to upload. Once uploaded, photos can be organized into collections and sets, tagged for easy searching, etc. Flickr also allows you to join groups and share your photos with other members (see Boatwright Kids for an example of a test group a few of us are experimenting with: http://www.flickr.com/groups/boatwrightkids/). There’s no limit on storage, however if you’re a free member you’re only able to upload 100mb per month, pro members ($24.95 per year) are allowed to gorge themselves on unlimited uploading. As far as privacy, you can keep your photos completely private and for-your-eyes only, visible only to family and friends, or wide open for everyone. Requirement: Yahoo! Login.
Picasa Web Albums: http://picasaweb.google.com – This is the companion web tool for Picasa. It offers many of the same features as Flickr, but doesn’t have the same community feel in my personal opinion. Uploading from Picasa on your computer is very simple as it’s part of the local application. Storage is a little trickier for Picasa Web Albums; you’re given 1024mb of storage and can purchase more, which is applied to ALL of your Google accounts (Gmail, etc.). My personal feeling is that if you only interested in having a place to direct family and friends to your photos, Picasa is the tool for you! Requirement: Google Account.
In addition to Flickr and Picasa Web Albums take a look at the following:
Photobucket - http://photobucket.com
Kodak Gallery - http://www.kodakgallery.com
Webshots - http://www.webshots.com
There’s really no “must use” tool listed here, just take a look at each and see which one best meets your needs
Now that May is upon us (and the semester is ending) most of our thoughts are probably turning to summer! That means summer vacations, family gatherings, weekend trips, etc. For many of you an essential item for these events will be your digital camera. When you think about how easy it has become to photograph all of your life events and the random things you come across, you also quickly realize how much you need a way to organize all of your photos! Like all other gadgets, digital cameras have become much smaller over the past few years and therefore easier to take with you everywhere you go. Also virtually all cell phones now come with cameras, so most of you now have a camera with you at all times. Because of this it’s very easy to quickly a mass a collection of thousands of photos. Once that happens it’s critical you find good software to manage your pics! This week I want to recommend a few of the best options to do this.
- Picasa - Picasa is my personal choice for managing my photos. During installation it offers several configuration options. You can let it search your entire computer for all photos, select only specific directories (such as your My Pictures folder on Windows PCs), or only load the photos you choose. Personally I recommend the first option, especially if you have a lot of photos. It could be that you may have forgotten where some of them are stored! Picasa also offers options for editing and touching up your photos. Picasa is free (and wonderful).
- Windows Live Photo Gallery (For Vista and XP computers) - Microsoft has done a good job of improving the photo management abilities they included in XP. Windows Live Photo Gallery does the same thing as Picasa. It searches your hard drive and creates a chronological view of your pictures based on the EXIF timestamp. Windows Live Photo Gallery is also free.
- Adobe Photoshop Elements - Elements will do all of the above functions but also offers a more editing options as well as the ability to create photo scrapbook projects, etc. Elements sells for $99.99 unless you can find it on sale at an office supply store.
Of all these products, I highly recommend Picasa. I think it will meet all of your management needs and also has some very easy ways to share your pictures with family and friends, which is what we’ll review next week. Keep in mind that managing a large collection of photos can quickly get out of hand, just like a large cattle herd (or cats for that matter)!
Enjoy your weekend! -Andy
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