It’s So Easy: Putting Your Pictures Online and Blogging Them
A lot of what I do on my computer is way too complicated for any normal person, and why would any normal person even want to do 99 of it? But sometimes what I do is so simple that everyone should be able to do it. The hard part might just be knowing that it exists. So today i want to make sure you have a quality place to put your pictures up online and even use them to create a photo blog. If you were really crazy you might even make some general entries in said blog and start to feel a little bit like a geek.
I included a very small part about photo software for your computer but nothing major. In summary you should use Picasa on the PC and iPhoto on the Mac to organize your photos. Both are very good and do some things better than the other. Maybe someday I’ll compare them a little more closely.
Flickr
Flickr is the best public photo/image storage service that I have come across (If you have found another that you like, let me know so I can try it out). A basic account is free and allows storage of up to 200 photos, 3 photosets (albums), and 20mb of upload per month. There is a paid version for $24.95/year that I think is very worth it, I just haven’t had the need for it yet. The paid version gives you 2gb monthly upload and unlmited everything else. There are a ton of little features, I doubt I’ve found very many of them. One of the best sorting features available is tagging. You can give each photo multiple tags and then view groups of photos based on tags. You could even use tags as a replacement for a photoset. It saves the number of times each photo has been viewed and allows for comments. The note feature is very interesting, you can select a section of the picture and then write a note, when someone hovers over that section the note will appear.
To get your photos in to flicker, there are a number of different ways. You can go right to the flickr page and manually upload the pictures you want. My problem with this is my 4 megapixel camera (on superfine mode) creates pretty large files. If I were to upload them like this I would get less than 10 pictures uploaded per month. But do not fear. That’s why you have a program like Picasa or iPhoto. Resizing the picture before uploading saves an incredible amount of bandwith. The only reason for those giant files is to order prints, which flickr doesn’t even offer yet. Picasa and iPhoto also allow you to edit the pictures before uploading, so you can get all your cropping, editing, and rotating done (flickr can handle rotating, but no other editing).
There is an iPhoto plug-in for exporting to flickr. It even allows you to set all the titles and comments and individual sizes for each photo. The latest version is great, I had some problems with the last one crashing iPhoto. I was on the fence in the Picasa vs. iPhoto battle until I got the latest version of this and Galerie (which creates photo albums on your own web space and allows for complete customization).
Picasa isn’t quite as good for this. The best way I have found is to use their email export. In settings you can select how large you want to make the pictures when emailing. Then you send to the email address flickr has given you and the pictures are automatically added. You will then need to go in and changes titles, comments, and tags.
There are a few other options that I haven’t used. I have seen widgets where you can drop pictures into that will upload. Another program adds a menu item for when you right click on a picture file that lets you send it to flickr.
One final excellent feature is being able to send photos to flickr from your cell phone. This is actually pretty obvious when you think about it. All you are really doing is sending an email just like from your computer. I can see utilizing this feature quite a bit when I finally get a camera phone.
You could get away with just having a flickr account and I’d be pretty excited to check it out. I could add you as a friend and then see all the updates from all my friends on one page.
Blog
If you are really ambitions you can add another layer. A blog. Don’t be scared. Creating a basic blog has two of my favorite attributes. It’s easy and free. If you get bored with the basic you can customize the free one or move on to bigger and better things. Most have a bunch of templates that will keep you happy for a while.
The best free blogging site is Google’s Blogger. All you really need to do is sign up, pick a site name (anything.blogger.com), pick a template, and post away. LiveJournal is also free and looks to be pretty solid, you can also interface with flickr. Typepad is a paid service which I hear really good things about. I used their software a while back and it was very solid.
Using flickr and your Blog together
If you’ve seen when I post pictures directly to my blog here I have used flickr. You can blog any photo you find in flickr, not just your own.
First you have to setup your blog. Just go in to Your Account then Your Blogs. You just have to create a new blog and enter your username and password for it. It works with just about every major blog site and compatible software. If you are using something like Blogger or Typepad there are no problems. There are options to change how it looks, they have some templates if you don’t want to bother with the code.
Now that you have your blog settings setup in flickr you are set to blog a photo. When you open any picture in flickr you will see some options above the picture. You click Blog This and it will let you select which blog you are posting to. Enter a title and comments that will appear with the picture and that’s it.
If you are uploading a picture via email and want to post it directly to your blog you can easily set that up. In Your Account you can pick Uploading photos to your blog by email. It will put your photo in flickr and also post it to your blog. This also works with cell phones.
Wasn’t that really easy? I made a basic blogger page and blogged some of my pictures to it for an example of what it might look like. This was without me tweaking anything besides templates.