You might be asking yourself “now what?”

Well now you can start creating more Sharing Circles. Make one just for your friends, another one for your travel buddies, book reading club, AYSO team, coworkers, relatives, the possibilities are endless.

I tend to organize my Sharing Circles by the people that are in them, rather than the event that I attended. For example, I might have a Sharing Circle for a group of friends or family, and over the year I can keep adding photos that are relevant to that group of people.

You can start rating photos, tagging photos and commenting on your photos. Don’t forget to do the same thing with your friends’ photos:

Once you have your initial photos have been added you might wonder, “how do I add new photos?” or “what if I just want to add just a couple of photos?” The answer is as simple as dragging and dropping. Merely highlight the photos that you want to share and drag them to the Sharing Circle of your choice:

Forward to this year in May when I submitted to our marketing department, a series of classes (5 in all) touching on Web 2.0. I was fortunate enough to have several committed colleagues that wanted to help me explore Web 2.0 with our customers. Classes included wikis, photo sharing, audio streaming, and social networking. All of which followed my overview class. Classes didn't start until the second week of October and in May that seemed a long way off. I had thoughts in my head, bookmarks on at least 3 different computers, and a few Impress presentations slides started but nothing really solid.

Monday October 13th. Thank goodness for Christopher Columbus and the government for wanting to celebrate him by giving me a day off from work. However, the Internet service providers weren't letting me off the hook that easily. I settled in at my desk - laptop, comfy chair, plenty of Diet Coke and my English Springer Spaniel at my feet. Now if only my wifi connection had enough strength to load a page of Google image results I might have gotten something done. Alas it was not in the cards or the stars. Off I trudged to work where I could be assured (I hoped) of a blazing fast connection to the Internet. Bingo!

Felt I got a lot done but time flew before I knew it it was time to pickup my son from school. Stopped to get dog food on the way home, minor bird emergency (son's cockatiel) to attend to, dinner to fix and eat, being IT had to figure out why hubby's Windows laptop was suddenly not connecting to the wifi while my Linux laptop had no problem (solved) and at 8:30 pm I was finally able to look at what I had done that day. UGH! What I thought sounded good this afternoon suddenly didn't flow like I had first thought.

So here I am as if I was back in college pulling an all-nighter. Laptop, FineTune.com playing, and a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke by my side. Sadly the Springer is asleep in her cage. Hopefully, I'll be able to put the "paintbrush" down. I tend to tweak and tweak and tweak like a painter who is never quite happy with how things look or sound.

So when I go to demo blogs, tags, comments, RSS feeds on Wednesday night, I think I might just keep my class away from my blog. I don't want them to think I didn't care enough to do this earlier. Honestly, things have been mulling over in my brain since I first thought about doing this class in 2007. And work has been plentiful this year and in the last couple of months very intense and consuming so much so that when I got home I was usually asleep right after dinner (not a whole lot of time left to work on things).

Lesson learned - even though I know the material inside and out, upside and down it takes time to sort, organize, play a little so you rediscover features and okay, get a little too lost on YouTube (darn those Mac/PC/Linux, Eddie Izzard, and Springer Spaniel videos!).

Based on that statistic you have to wonder how many photos are taken and immediately erased. I know that I personally delete about one in ten photos and I probably edit another third of the photos I have before they are seen by anyone else. For the less tech savvy, photo editing can seem like a daunting task.

Luckily there are a lot of great *FREE* photo editing software available. With the right software you can take a photo like this:

And make it look like this:

I also love all the effects you can do, I can take an ordinary day:

And turn it in to a pencil sketch:

While I have tried my hand at a few of the programs available – and settled on Paint.NET, I recommend reading “Top 8 Free Photo Editors for Windows” on About.com and seeing which product is best suited for your editing needs.

Of course, I should add that there are a lot of great products that you can buy. Before you settle on the product that is right for you, be sure to look a comparison chart on Top Ten Reviews of the best photo editing software.

On review we have decided to replace paragraph 10 with this wording:

Content License: You hereby grant Memeo a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish any Content provided, posted, transmitted, or distributed by you solely for the purpose of displaying and distributing the Content on the Memeo System. Said license will terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you or Memeo remove such Content from the Memeo System or termination of your rights under this License.

In layman terms, you let us access your photos and videos only so that we can send them to your Sharing Circle® and post them in your private online gallery.

This applies to current users and anyone that signed up prior to the change. Privacy is something that we genuinely value here at Memeo. We want all of our users to feel like their content is theirs and theirs alone.

Feel free to review the entire EULA for Memeo Share.

1. Visit http://www.memeo.com/memeoshare_press_download.php and select the version of Memeo Share that is appropriate for your computer. For the sake of this blog, I will use the PC version.

   

2. Click the Next button.

   
   

3. Then click Install – this will create a folder where your photos will be stored.

   
   

4. Click Finish to complete the installation.

   
   

5. Assuming you are a new user put in all your vital information.

   
   

6. Follow the three simple steps to set up your Sharing Circle® by clicking Next.

   
   

7. Get started by naming you Sharing Circle, you can even put in a small description of what is being shared. This is where you can change the privacy settings for the Sharing Circle. The default is that your Sharing Circle is private and can only be viewed by those you invite and that anyone from your Sharing Circle can add their own photos and videos.

   
   

8. Next, import your address book from outlook, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc. or manually enter the email addresses of the people you would like to share photos and videos with. Once you have added the email addresses click Next.

   
   

9. Finally, select which photos and videos you would like to share by clicking on Add More Folders.

   
   

10. And choosing a folder (note the filtering options).

    
    

11. You can keep an eye on the progress of your photos by watching the lower corner of your screen.

    
    

12. At this point all of your friends have received your invitation to join the Sharing Circle and after they download Memeo Share they will see your photos and video downloading on to their desktop.

The burgeoning popularity of online photo-sharing sites has seen the emergence of many successful internet brands in the new generation of web 2.0 sites. Photo sharing sites have flourished as more and more people - both professional and amateur photographers - continue to post their work and invite comments, links and general debate about their photos.

Uploading your photos and sharing them online has a range of benefits. For starters, if it's your child's first birthday party and you're keen to share the photos with family and friends across the world, you'll be able to do so - both simply and affordably - by placing them on an online photo album. Sharing your photos in this way avoids the expense of having to post photos to multiple recipients by mail, and is far more convenient than emailing large photo files that can take a while to download. What's more, using an online photo sharing site can also act as storage space for your photos, so you'll be able to keep them for an indefinite amount of time without cluttering up your computer's hard drive.

If you're a budding professional photographer, placing your photos on an online photo sharing site can be a great way to get yourself noticed by your peers. Many photo sharing websites let users add tags to their photos, so that other members of the photo sharing community will be able to easily find and view photos on similar subjects or from the same geographic location.

Tagging photos that you've uploaded to a photo sharing site means your photos will have much better visibility, and will also be likely to generate more user comments and constructive criticism of your work. Search engine Yahoo!, for instance, have recently started incorporating photos of famous world landmarks into their search results.

Online photo sharing, therefore, has a variety of merits that can be enjoyed by a cross-section of web users. Whether you're a developing photographer keen to share your work with the world, or you simply want to find an easy way for your grandmother to see photos of your new baby, online photo sharing is the answer for you!

PicVix WebSite

I've always loved taking photos, which probably explains why I am obsessed with Flickr! Despite my lack of interaction with other Flickr users, I tend check my photo stream many times a day... there is something strangely addicting about Flickr!

It seems that everybody’s doing some design update these days. First Facebook, then Mashable, and Flickr earlier last month joined the redesign craze.

It seems clear that Flickr wants to promote the use of its social features and the best photos from the community, rather than simply using Flickr as an online photo album. The new design succeeds in promoting new content, whilst allowing to keep track of comments, favourite photos and contacts updates.

But most importantly Flickr is now conversational, which is in my opinion the most exiting change that could happen within the Flickr community...

I got introduced to Share on Ovi earlier this year when I stumbled into the worldwide event, Pangea Day. The event organizers promoted Share on Ovi as the site to share photos and videos.  It's not hard to see why they promoted the site.  Pangea Day was sponsored by Nokia and Share on Ovi is a relatively new service of Nokia. I checked it out a little bit but didn't look into it in details until I videotaped a special event for a friend.  She wanted to share the video with her family so I thought posting the video online in a private space would be the best solution instead of making copies of DVD's.  Since then, I posted other videos and photos onto Share. The great thing about Share is you get unlimited storage and uploads and it supports many file types. The major limitation is a single file must be 100MB or less and video is limited to display 10 minutes (the norm for most video sharing sites, like YouTube).

Earlier this week, I had to put together several postcard designs for another friend to order the cards through 4by6. I was not paying for the postcards so I was not in charge of uploading the files to the site.  However, I needed to provide the postcard files front and back separately in PDF's to my friend. With all the artwork and logos involved, the PDF files ranged from 1MB to almost 2MB each.  Both of our email accounts can handle files of that size but it became too much trouble when I had to send 6 files.  I ended up posting the files to Share in a private channel, gave my friend access and she downloaded the files at her end.  It was a smooth operation in the file sharing point of view.  There were many hiccups going through 4by6's proofing process.  May be I need to upgrade the Adobe software on my computer.

Today, I discovered Share provides embed codes for individual media and Flash type slideshows, tickers and grids. Then I remembered WordPress.com prefers using VodPod to post a variety of Flash media. A combination of Share and Vodpod allows me to display this slideshow of photos I've taken in Hollywood a few months ago:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1619758&w=425&h=350&fv=]

And here's the ticker of my public media on Share:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1620498&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Q: Isn’t Memeo just another photo sharing website?

A: No. All of those websites let people “share” links to web galleries where people only view photos. But, what about when your mom wants to print the photo or she wants to put it in a digital frame? Or maybe she just wants to have it on her hard drive so she can show it to people? These websites don’t allow you to download the full quality photos and videos that have been posted to your website.

Q: But can’t I just E-mail the photos?

A: Sure, you can, but with E-mail you can only send a few photos at a time. Memeo Share is like E-mail for your photos and videos but better. It removes all the barriers that E-mail presents, and makes it easy to exchange photos by allowing you to identify the photos you want to share, invite people to share them and be done.

Q: Can I share videos using Memeo Share?

A: Yes.

Q: Is there a size limitation for videos?

A: No

Q: What types of files can I share?

A: jpg, jpeg, bmp, gif, png, raw, tiff, mov, avi, wmv, mpg, mpeg, and m4v

Q: My children are on a Little League team, and all of us parents take photos, is there a way for us to all easily exchange them?

A: Memeo Share allows community sharing; once you (or another parent) set up the Sharing Circle™ everyone can add their own photos. Everyone will receive your photos and videos, and you will receive everyone else’s photos and videos. Of course, you have the ability to set filters to decide what you want to receive and what you don’t want to receive.

Q: I have family members that I want to share photos and videos with and I have some friends that I like to share photos with. Is there a way to separate who sees which photos?

A: In a case like this, you can create two Sharing Circles. By default they will be private so even if someone were to search for you in Memeo Share’s online gallery, they wouldn’t be able to view them.

Stick around, later this week I will answer some more questions on how easy it is to share photos with your Sharing Circle, including drag and drop features, tagging and rating content, etc.

- وب‌سایت PixelPipe

Last month our Social Media article focused on how to get the most out of YouTube.com. This month we will focus on how to get the most out of using your own photo galleries and floor plans to drive traffic using Online Photo Management and Sharing Community, such as Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Picasa.

Why do you use these online communities to share photos?
It’s all about building interest to drive traffic. You never know where your next lead will come from, so these online communities are a great way to show off your interior designs, architecture, community features, community events, and more – all in an effort to build a rapport with the next future home buyer. Think of online communities as a networking tool, and you will understand why these sites are important in driving traffic and delivering eLeads.

Using these online tools process an extra bonus too - they can help boost your overall SEO, because these sites count as part of your “free” links. And if people actually click on your images (and Flickr now offers video to compete with Google’s YouTube), and go to your site, then your site’s popularity increases increasing your search engine positioning.

Are Photo Sharing Websites hard to use?
Once you set up your free accounts, you just upload your photos through your photo account manager. You can even crop and edit your photos online – no special software needed! Categorize your photos by community or photo type (interior, exterior, community events, etc) and add keyword tags to these photos so your images can come up when someone searches.

5 Specific tips for Photos:

1.      Have good-quality pictures.

2.      Title the image appropriately using a one to two keywords.

3.      Add a description for the photo or write an article to go with the image.

4.      Always tag your images with keywords. Be specific, and add as many tags as appropriate, using optimal terms as phrases. Don't overdo the number of same keywords.

5.      Make photos publicly viewable - sharing pictures with news organizations, for example, can help bring valuable “free” inbound links to your site.

How much does this cost?
Here’s the best part – it’s free! It does take time to do this though…and it can be addictive! But adding something new each week is a better strategy instead of uploading everything you have all at once.

What are these free photo sharing web addresses?
Flickr.com. Picasa.com, snapfish.com, webshots.com, shutterfly.com, and photobucket.com are among the most popular.

Want more tips & tricks for maximizing your online photo sharing communities? Email me at debbie@creatingwow.com or call 321-285-1660x 4 for more help or to hire Meredith Communications to produce these videos or uploads for you. See you next month for more social media optimization tips!

Hospital Patients' Photos Posted On MySpace

The photo I've chosen to blog about this phot of an old library in Utrecht, Netherlands.  The light and use of a fish eye lens make the photo really intriguing.  I'm also drawn to it because I travelled to the Netherlands my senior year of college to study social policy.  It was an amazing trip to open up my eyes to the way the Netherlands is so very different from America.  They treat social problems as a syptom of larger issues instead of trying to stop them without first stemming the causes.  Another thing this great photo tells me is that this library was one of the places in Utrecht to escape the heavy bombings during World War II.   Utrecht was ravaged during the war and many of the buildings are very contemporary because of this. 

There's also a silly part of me that wants to straighten up all those tilted books, but that's just the librarian in me.

I LOVE MY FLICKR ACCOUNT. Flickr is pretty popular now.... but for anyone who does not know what it is.... this is for you. Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. It’s a site where people can upload there photos and share them with anyone. It was my very first portfolio & online presence. and I have loved it ever since. It makes me happier than a website or blog. Flickr Is free and easy to use, and it features various methods for sorting, categorizing and tagging images.

You can network with other flickr users or give the URL (to view as a portfolio) to friends and family. People can then comment and rate pictures, and you can make all or just some photos private or only viewable by friends and family. I think Flickr is easily one of the best photo storage and sharing sites available. Flickr is even useful as a private gallery to backup images off-site from your hard drive. i love it because i can be anywhere anytime and be able to access my photos online at full quality. That top image is the flickr home page.I have a few screenshots from my own flickr account here:

(above)It has an awesome portfolio viewing feature that lets you veiw the selected gallery as a slideshow.

and you can do awesome stuff with your photos online, like make little album books, fun & funky size business cards, gift cards, calendars etc. The two above are my favorite. click the bar below to view my flickr portfolio.

Photo sharing Sites

My thoughts aren't as scattered this week, and to prove it I've provided the following chronology of my journey to choose and explore photo sharing sites:

1.  I did all my background reading first.  I read recommended reading, reviews and articles and made a list of recommendations/sites to explore: Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Openphoto.net, Phanfare, Webshots, PhotoBucket, Smugmug & Zoto.

2. I logged on as a student would at a workstation in the library at my school to see which ones are blocked or not functional to narrow down the list. Surprise of all surprises! None of them were blocked. At my adult high school, students have access to a less restricted web server - although most sites utilizing javascript are blocked for student use. I did discount Webshots because their images didn't display properly on the computers in the library. I'm thinking that for those schools/sites which do block some or all aspects of other photosharing sites, the free Picasa 3 download MAY be the answer. 

3. I had originally thought that I would explore Zoto 3.0 in full because I read that it would publish directly to WordPress blogs. Looking carefully at Flickr, I learned that it too can publish directly to WordPress blogs too. So based on its reviews, popularity, services and tools I chose Flickr to explore and use in depth.

4. Based on Will Richardson’s recommendation, I re-sized and reduced the file size of some select photos from a chunky 4.0 MB each to under 2.0 MB each. To do this I used the free, downloadable photo converter/editor “Irfanview” which I already have installed on my home computer.

5. I uploaded 10 photos from  yurting holidays my husband and I have taken over the past years. (see my yurting post for more information on yurting)

6. I tagged and described each and saved them.

7. I added them to the Flickr map in the  Nutimik Lake Campground, Manitoba.

8. I created a “set” and called it “Yurting”.

9. I added the photostream to my Delicious account directly through Flickr.

10. I edited one image using the Picnik application accessible through Flickrand saved it as a brighter more beautiful image than the original. (NOTE: when I was logged in at school as a student, the Picnik online photo editor did NOT work . This is good to know so we could direct students that need to edit photos to do it first using our PhotoElements software)

11. I added my Flickr photostream as a RSS feed to my Bloglines aggregator.

12. I added my Lifelonglearnerrhonda Wordpress blog to my Flickr account and sent a test. I then sent a photo to my blog with a posting (yurting blog). I then sent the above image to this blog. Click on it above to see my full photostream!

13. I changed the permissions on all my photos to “Attribution- Non Commercial Creative Commons” allowing others to use, change and share my photos as long as they credit the source and do not use it for commercial gain.

14. I checked out the New Printing service only to discover that it is not available in Canada . . . yet.  That’s okay, I’m already registered with kodakgallery.ca for printing my digital images.

15. I checked out Flickr Tools @ flickr.com/tools and notice that The Windows Live Photo Gallery will be useful for me to install before I upload any more images from my digital camera.

16. I checked out Flickr Services at flickr.com/services and had a blast with the Flickr Colour Picker @ krazydad.com/colrpickr.  I e-mailed the URL to our Art Specialist.

17. I   checked out the FlickrReplacr Bookmarklet @ www.kokogiak.com as suggested by Will Richardson to highlight words in your web browser and have them replaced with a tagged image from Flickr, but was disappointed to discover that it didn’t work in my newly installed IE beta version 8 web browser. This does give me something to explore again at work on Monday.

18. I checked out Flicktion @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flicktion/ .

Educational Applications: The Journey Continues

My experience with using photo sharing with students up to this point has been extremely limited. I did work with the grade 12 History and World Issues teacher last year to have students from both classes create some beautiful posters using photos from Flickr and other sites. One of the objectives was to have students choose images from Flickr or websites granting permission to use the images for non commercial purposes and to cite the source properly. We found the easy to find even hard-to-find images searching for tags like "early man" or "neanderthal man". Students were required to examine the copyright permissions carefully to be sure they could add their comments and print them out as posters. The Fair Use rules Richardson describes in chapter 7 do not apply in Canada.

Just yesterday, a group of basic literacy adult students came into the library with their teacher to create visual poems using images and words provided by PicLits.com (http://www.piclits.com/compose_dragdrop.aspx). Although PicLits is not a photo sharing site, I gleaned some very useful insights from the way the students approached the site.  This is the first time I've instructed students to create an account to save their work, then e-mail their best "PicLit" to their teacher. (Note: I discovered ahead of time that PicLits didn't work for the student login, so I logged the computers on using my staff login and avoided frustration and delays.) This activity was surprisingly (or perhaps not suprisingly) successful. In the past basic literacy students have balked doing and saving simple writing tasks using Word software. None of the students seemed to have difficulty entering their school division e-mail addresses or following the saving and e-mailing instructions. I think the visual appeal is what made the difference in their motivational levels. Next time we can expand the activity to Flickr and have them write "Tag Poems" or visual stories and tag them so they'll appear @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/flicktion/ .

Up until now I've been oblivious to the educational value of the social conversations and collaborative learning afforded by the photo sharing sites. Next time I help with engaging a class in Flickr, I'll ask that they leave a comment for any photo they find appealing and especially for those they use in their work.

Now that I've learned we won't have problems with our server, I've decided to approach one of the English teachers who does a fair big of digital photography with his students to have them post some of their images to Flickr publicly. We'll follow and teach the privacy precautions as outlined by Terry Freedman in his article " Photo-sharing and clip-art". We'll teach them how to assign tags and descriptions and ask them to examine the Creative Commons licensing carefully to decided which permissions they'll allow. I don't think there's a better way to teach copyright! We can then create a group and have photos archived for existing and incoming classes. I'm sure we'll see other applications and benefits as we go along.

Additionally, as Steering Commitee Chair of my school division's Senior Years Technology Mentors Group, I'm going to recommend a PD/sharing sessions for using Flickr with our students. Even if it is blocked in all the other high schools in the division, it's high time educators re-write policy for the benefit of our students. I have no doubts that other educators will feel the same way once they've taken a first hand look at how beneficial Flickr can be.