Friday TechTip for May 9, 2008: Digital Photo Rodeo, Pt. 2
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
July 10th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hey Andy,
Looking over the API’s on Flickr - I really liked the Spell with Flickr one. Actually, I wanted to have my own blog have its title spelled out in the image collage that Spell with Flickr creates. I tried to do it myself, but no luck - I couldn’t figure out how to embed the code for my collage into my blog. Anyway, it’s all just for fun.
July 18th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Hey David, so I take it copying and pasting the code didn’t work… can you tell me more about your blog and what platform you’re using? If it’s Wordpress it could be due to php image issues…
July 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Oh, I’m using Google Blogger. Here’s my blog address:
http://warmingupariff.blogspot.com/
I went into the Dashboard, then “Layout” - clicked “Edit” in my Header tab. That brings up the “Configure Header” window, where there are options to insert an image either from a file saved to my computer, or from a web address. So, given that there isn’t the option to embed code, maybe this request won’t work…Either way, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.