Thing 4 - Image sites

Good grief! It's tough to start looking at picture sites and not eat up the entire day! I have accounts on Flickr, Photobucket and PictureTrail, none of which I've logged onto recently. I was AMAZED at the the changes and enhancements on these sites. It almost makes me feel giddy. I had a lot of fun with this thing. I'll figure out how to get these tools in the hands of teachers and students later. (Where are the emoticons on this blog?? I need a sticky-out tongue icon here.)

PictureTrail Cube (You may notice a theme with my pictures...heh heh).

I had an almost silly "aha" this year. One of our fifth grade students has a dad who is stationed in Iraq. His dad was on leave this fall, and I helped him set up a quick slideshow in Powerpoint to show the kids. It was an amazing and emotional show.

Later that year, the dad contacted me, wanting to email new pictures as he took them in Iraq. For the life of me, I couldn't get the pictures to pass through our school filter. I was getting to the point of telling him to snail mail a disk or something! Frustrating.

As it happened, I was working on a website I maintain for the local animal shelter. That was my "aha" moment; I think I even rolled my eyes and said "duh". I have a number of slideshows on the site, for which I use different picture sites to tag and organize the images. (There's that "lack of transfer" that I always get so worked up about when I deal with technology and students.) I worked with the dad to set up a Flickr account to share his images. The kids LOVE going to that site.

I spent some time looking at Flickr's enhancements. I am pretty impressed with Picnik. The tools are large and easy to use. The auto-fix made better fixes than Picture Manager. All I can say is Pretty Doggone Cool. The picture below shows the adjustments that Picnik made. The black is blacker and the red is fuller. This was using just the auto-fix option.
I added a Flickr badge of my dogs to the sidebar. The code wouldn't work in the body of this blog; I kept getting "tag is not closed" messages, which I couldn't fix. It worked fine in the sidebar, though. Who knows?

I spent some time tagging my Flickr pictures and added descriptions. I use tagging quite a bit on a LibraryThing account I set up for my church library, but it hadn't occurred to me to tag pictures. I appreciated the Commoncraft video information. Although I have my pictures in albums, tagging them makes it easier to sort and find. Again with the not making that transfer of information! This is good for me to remember.

Here's a link to another Flickr slideshow using Splashr - note the continued theme. What, more dogs?

I also logged into my Photobucket account, which I haven't done for a long while. It has changed radically! I like the fact that Photobucket has the links for embedding right on the main screen. I also created another avatar in Meez - another program associated with Photobucket.

These toys, I'll tell you.