Category: Productivity

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Making your photos worth 1000 words

This is a joint post between Sue Waters and myself about integrating Flickr with Picasa, and has been cross posted on each of our blogs.

Let’s start with a little background on this post’s origin

After spending some time yesterday migrating Linda’s entire photo collection (well, most of it… did I mention that regular backup is very important?) into Google’s Picasa photo management application and then giving her a bit of a tutorial in how to use it tonight, she asked the next obvious question… how do I put some of these photos onto Flickr? A good question. After all, Flickr is without a doubt the best online photo sharing website around. With amazing tools and options, an incredible online community for sharing and learning from each other, and a huge array of APIs that enable Flickr to work with a range of different online and offline services, the decision to use Flickr as your online photo storage tool of choice is a bit of a no-brainer.

However, on the desktop it’s a different story. Flickr is purely a Web2.0 service, and there is no local desktop component offered with it. This means that while Flickr is wonderful at managing your photos online, when it comes to dealing with the photos stored on your hard drive the only real options you have is whatever tools are already on your computer. If you have a Mac, iPhoto does a great job of photo management. It’s free and comes with every Mac. If you are more serious you can always look at Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, but these are quite expensive applications. On the Windows side, there are probably dozens of “photo management” applications but most of them are pretty awful, and some are also expensive. Most people just settle for managing their photos directly in Windows Explorer which is an average solution at best.

Using Picasa for your offline photo management

Enter Picasa from Google. Picasa is a wonderful free piece of photo management software and lets you sort, arrange, adjust, crop, rename and generally manage your photos on your computer. It really is an incredibly sophisticated yet simple tool for photographers and the price tag can’t be beaten…. you can’t do much better than free. It is available for Windows only, which makes perfect sense since it essentially does most of what iPhoto already does on the Mac. As well as the desktop app, there is also a “Flickr-like” online photo service from Google called Picasaweb. I say “Flickr-like”, because although it lets you store your photos online it lacks the same community and API sharing that makes Flickr so compelling. If you’re serious about photos online Picasaweb could be a little disappointing. However, being from the Google stable of products, there is some common functionality for exporting photos directly from Picasa on your computer to Picasaweb on the net, which is a nice touch.

The trouble is that while Picasa may be an obvious best choice for local photo management, Flickr is the obvious best choice for online photo management. It would be nice to have the option to manage your photos locally with Picasa and then send your best shots up to Flickr to share with the world. Nice, except that Picasa is owned by Google and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, and when companies are in direct head to head battle like Yahoo! and Google are, the last thing you want to do is anything that promotes your competition. This is unfortunate, since the losers in that battle are you and I, the consumers. We just want to manage our photos using the two tools we like, but it’s not as quite as straightforward as that.

Connecting via Twitter

Talk about synchronicity. As I was pondering this question tonight, the exact same question floated through my Twitter feed. Mrs_Banjer , sujokat and Sue (dswaters) were discussing the very same issue – how to manage your photos on and offline, what service to use, how to integrate them, and essentially they were tweeting on the very same things I was thinking about. One thing led to another, so via Twitter we discussed, chatted, talked and shared links. We pontificated on the pros and cons of Flickr versus Picasa. This is just one example of the power of an always-on personal learning network. Eventually though, I felt I needed to clarify a point in the discussion so rather than overTweet to the world, I Skyped Sue Waters in Perth and chatted about it directly. While we were talking a tweet came through from sujokat asking “someone do a blog on this please this is fabulous but all too quick for me to take it all in”. Sue and I decided that we’d do that… write a post about the pros and cons of Picasa and Flickr, but we’d do it as a joint post. So this is being written in Google Docs and is a collaborative effort between Sue and I… over to you Sue.

Now for My Thoughts On Picasa vs Flickr

Getting photos off the Camera

One of the best aspects of Twitter connectivity is the challenging of your thoughts, beliefs and making you really think; often about issues you had not considered. This was definitely the case with Picasa vs Flickr. I have rarely used Picasa as Window Explorer and Picture Manager have been adequate for my needs but really into Flickr. In all fairness to Picasa more likely that I have not spent enough time exploring the virtues of Picasa — it did take me 12 months to realise the benefits of Flickr. So my homework for the next few days is to throughly road test Picasa and report back to ensure I have done my usual through research.

It is definitely benefical to import photos from your camera directly into Picasa because it means you don’t import multiple copies of the same photo.

Uploading to Flickr

For Mac users, there are several options for getting photos to Flickr. As iPhoto is a standard application found on every Mac it is a much simpler proposition for developers to create APIs that hook directly between iPhoto and Flickr, so there tends to be a number of uploading tools available, the best known of which is Flickr Uploadr. As well as the Flickr Uploader, there are free tools like FFXporter that plug directly into iPhotos Export option to offer direct Flickr integration. Another option is to use Flock as your web broswer… Flock has Flickr uploading tools built right in.

Uploading

For Windows users who like Picasa as their photo management tool, uploading images to Flickr from Picasa is also a relatively simple process, even if not quite as obvious or integrated as that enjoyed by Mac users. Just download and install Flickr Uploadr on your desktop, open the Flickr Uploader and Picasa windows alongside each other, then drag and drop the images from Picasa library onto the Flickr Uploader. Simple!

Final Thoughts

Also worth checking out David Jake’s thorough information on Flickr (thanks sukojat for the link) and Philip Nichols’s guide to Picasa.

Besides learning a lot more about Picasa it has been amazing collaborating with Sue to write a post together; using Google Documents, Twitter and Skype.

Sue and I would love to learn more about how you manage your photos.

What are your thoughts? Do you use an offline photo management software? What features do you like about the software you use? Do you share your photos online at Flickr or do you use another photosharing website? And if so, which one and why?

Please take this opportunity to drop past Sue’s post and leave some tips for her as well.

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Twitter – Killer App or Overkill?

I’ve become quite a fan of Twitter, although I’ll readily admit I never really “got it” to start with. However, as I mentioned in a previous post, and also in a recent tutorial video, Twitter makes a lot more sense once you add a group of people to your network. Having a likeminded group of fellow Twits from which to tap into some collective wisdom turns Twitter from a curious plaything into a rather amazing personal learning environment.

Twitter has an open API (Application Programming Interface), which mean that programmers who can think of interesting ways to mash the basic Twitter feed into another service are able to tap into the guts of Twitter in order to get it to power their own apps. There are a number of interesting tools/toys that hang off the Twitter API, from useful local clients like Twitterific, Twitterroo, Snitter, Spaz and Twitterbox, to fun implementations like Twittervision and Twittervision 3D. And just to show how circular life is, I’ve just been alerted to Twitterposter, thanks to, none other than my very own Twitter network.

Twitterposter creates image grids of the top Twitterers’ icon files, arranged so that the more influential (most followers) are shown larger than the others – sort of a visual tag cloud idea. Two things struck me as I browsed the grid… one was the number of people whom I actually recognised, at least by reputation. @Scobleizer, @ijustine, @Biz, @Gruber, among others. Seems that despite its vastness, the Internet is still a finite place full of very real people.

The other thing was just how big some of these Twitter networks can become. There were several I saw with well over 4000 followers and the largest following I saw was @Scobleizer with 6893. That’s crazy enough, but he is also following 6923 people!! How anyone could manage that sort of volume is totally beyond me, or why anyone would want to. Surely there must be a limit to how many in your network is the “right” number? If you can believe Dunbar’s Number, the “right” number is about 150. I tend to agree, and imagine that things would start to get a little messy after that. Just doing the math, I’m following about 100 people at the moment and I get tweets popping up every couple of minutes (especially during the North American daytime), so I imagine that following nearly 7000 people would have tweets popping up every few seconds? That’s just crazy stuff, and I would think totally blows away any usefulness that you might be able to get out of the collective wisdom of the network. Maybe someone with a large follow list might leave me a comment and let me know how that works for them. I’m really curious.

PS, In late breaking news, for a long list of Twitter-based apps, take a look at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps, courtesy of @whynot88. Thanks Anne!

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So much more than phone calls

In the leadup to the release of Apple’s iPhone there was a great deal of talk about the device, mainly on MacBreak Weekly and the Apple Phone Show… both excellent podcasts that set a real benchmark for quality when it comes to the podcasting medium. There was tons of pontificating and prognosticating about the iPhone, and how it would change the cell phone market forever.

All that aside, one of the theories I heard over and over was that most people never actually tap into the full capabilities of their cell phone, with a huge majority of people using their phone just to make phone calls. Imagine that! The idea that most people never really explore their phone’s capabilities really hit home to me the other day at a conference when I saw a demonstration of a video made by a guy from footage he had very proudly taken with his phone. It was a few shots edited together with some music under it, and I asked the question at the end “Did you edit that on your phone?” He replied “No”, and then, after a pause, said “Can I do that?” Like I said, most people don’t ever explore the full features of their phone.

Being the geek that I am, I am not one of those people. I think I probably use nearly the full range of capabilities of my phone, so I thought it warranted a blog post to just talk about what exactly I do with my phone and some of the uses I have for it as a fairly fluent digital immigrant.

I don’t have an iPhone. I’d like one, but instead I own a very simple, very basic, very cheap, Sony Ericsson K610i. It was the cheapest 3G phone I could buy, but I’m amazed at what it is capable of, especially when combined with the 3G network service. Obviously, it can make phone calls and has all the usual features that a voice phone would have… address book, call register, and so on. It has a hands free mode, and can work as a speaker phone. It comes with a headset for in-car use and can also connect to a bluetooth handsfree kit for use while driving. It has a calendar for remembering appointments, a notepad for taking notes, a sound recorder, a task list, a stopwatch, a calculator and an alarm clock. I use all of these tools regularly, in fact I use the alarm clock to wake myself up every morning. I’ll concede that the standard text entry interface is not really optimal for some of these apps, but it’s good enough to be usable in small doses, which is all I ever really need it to be.

There are a ton of useful messaging options on the phone… SMS which I use a lot, and also email, MMS and voicemail. I can send pictures and videos, as well as text, through these different formats. I send and receive a quite lot of SMS, so I like the way it manages the messaging with the usual inbox, outbox, sent mail paradigm. There is also a templates mode, so messages that are sent often can be templated so you don’t have to type them from scratch all the time. That’s a useful feature.

I’m also impressed that the phone has an RSS aggregator built in. I can subscribe to blog feeds on the phone and it will regularly check the web to see if there are updates. It works exactly as you’d expect… when the phone finds an updated feed it indicates it on the main screen. This is a super-useful feature, and one I use a fair bit.

Being a 3G service, the phone’s service provider offers an interesting range of sites within the walled garden of their network. Hit the browse button and I can access news, weather, sport, comedy, finance news and special features like mobile TV. This is all video based too, so I can watch it all with proper video. I don’t often watch the TV news, but I will sometimes reach for my phone before I get out of bed in the morning and catch the early news bulletin, check the weather or watch a bit of Family Guy before I start my day. Other things I can get from the network include music video clips, ring tones and wallpapers but I have never bought any of these… more on that later. Other useful services include the ability to check the cinema guide for my nominated local cinemas, and watch trailers for the latest films. I can check my horoscope, find out what’s on TV, look up a restaurant in the food guide, check what bands are playing, or see what’s on TV. I can look up a train or bus timetable, check my lottery numbers, get the racing results, and even browse through online services like eBay, realestate.com or RSVP. This really does start to make you realise how the information landscape has changed. Our kids carry these information appliances around in their pockets. Adults just make phone calls. We are so on different planets.

The phone is also a media center. Load it up with MP3 or M4A files and you have a reasonable music player. It’s not quite an iPod, but it’s not too bad. It takes removable memory cards so you can store as much as you have space for. Flip the phone over and there is a decent camera built in the phone. It’s not a fabulous camera, but it’s ok, and given a decent amount of light it will take a pretty acceptable image. Once you take a photo, you have the ability to send it to someone via SMS or email, and you can also Blog it directly from the phone. Yes, the phone is able to establish a direct connection to a nominated Blogger account and send photos directly from the phone to the web in three clicks. Very cool, and something I use ALL the time.

It also takes video. Not the greatest of quality, but good enough. And yes, built into the phone is software called VideoDJ which lets you edit your clips together, directly in the phone. Once you capture the footage, you can trim and edit each one, arrange them in order, add a soundtrack and text and transitions, include stills, add music… all within the phone itself. It really is quite an impressive app for something so lightweight. Once the edit is complete, you have an option to send it to another phone as an MMS message, or to export to a computer using Bluetooth. Very cool, and so easy to use. (Hmmm, I might have a film festival at school where all the films have to be made on the students’ mobile phones! Could be interesting.)

Since the phone can also run an Java based application, there are lots of possibilities there too… as well as the obvious games (which are generally pretty naff) you can also get a portable Java version of Google Maps (including the ability to find locations and to navigate from place to place), Gmail, MSN Messenger and Opera Browser. I’ve also added a thing called Salling Clicker, which lets me use the phone as a remote for my Mac and enables remote control of slideshow presentations, iTunes, iPhoto, and a bunch of other computer-based uses. Finally another app called Shozu is a digital upload centre for all your mobile media. From within Shozu you can upload any media file (photos, audio, video) to virtually any web service (blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc). So photos that get taken on my cell camera can be pushed straight to Flickr on the spot where they will quickly appear on my blog thanks to the Flickr widget. It really is quite impressive. Using the inbuilt web browser (or Opera) I can browse the web, search Google, check Twitter… all from the phone. I realise that most people don’t do all this stuff with their phone – they just make phone calls – but look at what is possible.

Finally, I just love the simple Bluetooth connectivity to my Macs. With a couple of mouse clicks I can drag media to and from the phone using the Mac. I can use the Sync tool to wirelessly synchronise my phone’s address book to the Mac Address Book app. Seamlessly. Simply. In fact, the other big plus for the Bluetooth connectivity is how easy it makes it to add media to the phone for things like ringtones and screen wallpaper. I use Photoshop to trim my favourite photos to 176×220 pixels to fit the mobile’s screen, and I use Audacity to edit MP3 files into short grabs to use as ringtones… it’s easy to do, easy to transfer, and makes the phone a lot of fun to use.

Amazingly, all this is available on just a standard, garden-variety cell phone. Nothing fancy. Unlike a lot of users, I DO actually use most of this stuff quite a lot. Apart from the fact that I really do enjoy learning about this stuff, I also enjoy the idea that I am learning about and using the same technologies that the kids use, and on that basis alone I really hate hearing adults say “I just use my phone for making phone calls.”

That’s so last century!