How do you organize your photos?
Not unlike the shoeboxes of yore, the “My Pictures” folder is insufficiently robust to keep your photos organized and easy to find. There are many available tools that can be used, but only two really stand out for ease of use and universal access:

1. Picasa – Google’s photo organizer is available for Windows and Mac (Intel Chips only!). It will look on your hard drive for all photos, finding every jpeg, Photoshop file, and tiff you’ve ever uploaded onto your drive.
2. iPhoto – If you’re on a Mac, this comes with iLife, which is either included on your computer or can be had for a mere $79.

Both of these will do the following:

• Allow you to do some basic photo manipulation, like correct white balance, crop, resize, change colors, etc.
• Allow you to label and tag your photos
• Identify photos of people and let you specify who’s who. Later, you can search for them.
• Let you assign a location to your photos so you can see them on a map.
• Let you create albums and slideshows.
• Let you send photos to printers, calendar makers, and more.

Hours of fun! But wait, there’s more.

How do you upload them?

Uploading your photos “to the cloud” means that you can access them from any computer, anywhere with an internet connection. There are a zillion photo sharing sites, and with all of them you need to start with:

1. Set up an account. If you have a gmail account, you have free access to Picasa’s online sharing site, Picasaweb. If you have a Yahoo account, you have access to Flickr.com. Otherwise, you’ll have to sign up for an account.
2. Some sites charge, others are free. Read the fine print.

We recommend the following sharing sites:

1. Picasaweb.google.com – Google’s photo sharing site starts out free, and lets you share photos with people by sending them a URL. There isn’t a lot of community on here, but it’s a good site.
2. Flickr.com - Millions of photo afficionados upload photos, comment, organize, print, etc on what is an amazing fun online experience. You can add photos to group pools, share with others, and add photos to other websites. You can
3. Smugmug.com – This is more of an album-focused site that allows individuals and families to create some pretty fancy showcases of their photos. You can even sell prints.

We are at the end of the workshop, and didn’t answer all the questions, but everyone is left with an assignment – organize and prepare photos for uploading and sharing, which is going to be a continued subject in our ongoing workshops.

Thanks as always to Ted Curran, our fabulous instructor.

See you next time!

There are 20 days left to finish our 10-post Blogging Challenge. How are you doing?

Wanda suggested looking at past success. What have you accomplished in the last 12 months of blogging?

As for technologies, we discussed a couple of useful tools:

• Print-on-demand books, which are available from a number of places.  The link takes you Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which aggregates and reviews a number of choices.
• For Mac users, there is a community of iWork template creators (iWorkCommunity.com).  You can download great templates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes for things like books,

Anca taught us about Jing – a tool for Screen Capture and Screenshots.

• Uses Jing to annotate screenshots
• It’s good to rehearse to get it just right
• Likes to specify the size of the screen grab – you can shoot an entire window, or just a little bit.
• Now it can do webcam recording, too!
• Great for working with clients– showing them how to do things.  Anca uses videos to teach people how to do technical stuff with their sites.
• Does image capture
• Can annotate images
• Upload to YouTube, Flickr, and other sites.

An alternative to Jing is Skitch, which does screenshots, annotations, and uploads to your favorite sites as well.

Both of these tools have a hosting service where you can upload your files and share them with others.

Ted’s favorite plugins this week:

Google Ajax Translation – puts a link into your blog posts that connect them up to Google Translate, so your readers can get your content in something roughly resembling their language.

Ajax Plugin Helper – Sets up your WordPress installation to activate and deactivate plugins via Ajax, saving you time when it comes to configuring your blog.

Social Grid – produces a grid of social networking sites that you connect to your blog.

This week’s suggested exercise – Top 10 Lists

One thing that many sites are doing at the end of the year is creating top-10 (or more) lists.   This is a great way to produce something of value for you readers (and maybe a bit simpler for you to write).

Send us your Top 10 list and we’ll post it for everyone else to read.