Photo Tools Assignment

Hello All -
I chose Flickr. I did go to the websites that Ms. Scow put up for us to look through, since I thought that maybe there was something pretty neat out there that I hadn't heard of yet, but after a couple of dead links and one site that merged into another one and blah blah, I went ahead to Flickr's site. I've been on there from doing image searches through Google, but I have never used it for my own pictures.

I had to create an account with Yahoo!mail before I could open my Flickr account. Great, yet another email to check (my friend uses an email address that checks all of his emails for him at the same time - Mozilla Thunderbird? - I should probably check that out). The site is easy to use, with a nice clean interface with big numbers next to the directions. Yay! I'm really tired of cluttered websites that assume I care enough to figure out how to use them.

I chose Flickr mostly because it's so widely used now and I felt behind the times on not knowing how to use it. I liked that there were gift/stuff-making options - I'll probably never use it since it seems kind of spendy and time-intensive, but it's fun to know that it's there. My sister went ahead and made one of those Blurb books out of her blog of traveling in New Zealand for two months - considering it's all pictures and it's a vanity press (known for being generally expensive) $45 or so isn't bad.

Most people use Flickr personally, but I don't know whether I'll really bother for the most part since I'm on Facebook and I already have a place to share my pictures with people. I don't really like the thought of my good pictures getting ripped off by people, so I don't plan to put anything seriously awesome up. I do see it as a good place to back up photos from work events, though - with the privacy setting enabled, it would make good storage that could be accessed by anyone in my department whenever there's a need.

I am not particularly concerned with what this tool says about me, but I don't plan to post very personal pictures, either. I dislike posting pictures of my children for any weirdo to look at.

One other thing that I learned is that there are many tools for conveniently getting pics off of a computer and into Flickr. I downloaded a desktop tool that allows me to put more photos in faster than their online uploading tool.

For those who may be interested, I added a few pics from my family vacation last summer. http://www.flickr.com/photos/zombieviscer8r/