I have thousands of pictures at my house. Storage boxes here... Storage boxes there... All taken on film with our once trusty Nikon camera. Once that camera broke (when I dropped it just before vacation) the wife and I broke down and bought a Sony digital camera.
We would never go back to film now. Now boxes of paper wrapped photos and negatives from Wal-Mart. No shelves loaded down with photo albums of the pictures we liked the most. Just Gigabytes of storage on a much smaller hard drive.... With a backup on another hard drive... and CD's filled to the brim with another backup.... Just in case something happens.
If you have fallen into the same scenario you might be wondering what's out there to help organize and share your newly found digital freedom. Well, I've found a couple of web sites and software tools that might just make your digital darkroom easier to move around in.
First up is Zooomr. Yes it is spelled with three o's and is missing an e but it is an up-and-coming photo storage/sharing site that I highly recommend. Similar to Flickr (um... yeah its missing an e too... see a pattern here?) which is quite a bit more popular, Zooomr doesn't have as many tools but is updating all the time and has a few things that make up for what it trails behind in. While Flickr was bought out by Yahoo a couple of months ago and has a great many coders working to add features, Zooomr has only one (maybe two depending on the day). Zooomr also has evangelist Thomas Hawk spreading the word and helping to bring people to the product.
So, what does Zooomr do? First, it lets up upload your digital photos and stores them as full (although compressed) resolution. It then creates 5 mini-versions of the picture for dropping into blogs, websites, or using with other software. Second, it lets you SHARE you photos with others if you want. You can mark photos as public, private or visible to family and/or friends who join the network. Third, and important to me, it give unlimited storage to all users. That's right, upload all the photos you want and only be restricted by the monthly upload limit. What's the upload limit? All users are limited to the amount of bandwidth they can use each month to upload. Flickr does this just like Zooomr but unlike Flickr, Zooomr makes all your photos available, not just the last couple of hundred and if you are a blogger like me, Zooomr will upgrade your basic account with 100 MB per month limit to a whopping 4 GB Pro account just for posting at least one photo on your blog. Talk about the love!
Anyway, if you like digital photography and even if you already use Flickr, try out Zooomr. They are adding new features quite often and I think are doing well against the competition.
The software for organization I recommend is a program from Google called Picasa. Picasa was purchased a couple of years ago and released as a free download immediately afterward. What's so great about Picasa? Mostly the organization ability of the program. Sure it does some basic cleanup on your photos like Red-Eye removal, color touch-ups, and straightening, but its strong suit is organizing your photos so you can find them. I've hooked many people on the program just for that feature alone. It also give you the ability to backup your photos to CD/DVD directly from the program and will create Gift CDs for friends and family so they can take your photos with them. Its no Photoshop but for most people, it is all they should need to get their photos organized.
If you want to check out my Zooomr photos... the public ones at least, my Zooomr account site is here. Send me a message (ZMail is available on Zooomr) if you're a friend and want to be added to my Social Circle.
Enjoy the links and start uploading!
Update! I forgot to mention that Picasa offers online photo hosting too... not unlimited storage but the same upload limits as the basic Zooomr account. The webalbums site is hosted on Google's servers and isn't too bad if you only want to work with one system. As of right now Picasa cannot upload to Zooomr directly.
Technorati Tags: Zooomr, Flickr, Picasa, photos
We would never go back to film now. Now boxes of paper wrapped photos and negatives from Wal-Mart. No shelves loaded down with photo albums of the pictures we liked the most. Just Gigabytes of storage on a much smaller hard drive.... With a backup on another hard drive... and CD's filled to the brim with another backup.... Just in case something happens.
If you have fallen into the same scenario you might be wondering what's out there to help organize and share your newly found digital freedom. Well, I've found a couple of web sites and software tools that might just make your digital darkroom easier to move around in.
First up is Zooomr. Yes it is spelled with three o's and is missing an e but it is an up-and-coming photo storage/sharing site that I highly recommend. Similar to Flickr (um... yeah its missing an e too... see a pattern here?) which is quite a bit more popular, Zooomr doesn't have as many tools but is updating all the time and has a few things that make up for what it trails behind in. While Flickr was bought out by Yahoo a couple of months ago and has a great many coders working to add features, Zooomr has only one (maybe two depending on the day). Zooomr also has evangelist Thomas Hawk spreading the word and helping to bring people to the product.
So, what does Zooomr do? First, it lets up upload your digital photos and stores them as full (although compressed) resolution. It then creates 5 mini-versions of the picture for dropping into blogs, websites, or using with other software. Second, it lets you SHARE you photos with others if you want. You can mark photos as public, private or visible to family and/or friends who join the network. Third, and important to me, it give unlimited storage to all users. That's right, upload all the photos you want and only be restricted by the monthly upload limit. What's the upload limit? All users are limited to the amount of bandwidth they can use each month to upload. Flickr does this just like Zooomr but unlike Flickr, Zooomr makes all your photos available, not just the last couple of hundred and if you are a blogger like me, Zooomr will upgrade your basic account with 100 MB per month limit to a whopping 4 GB Pro account just for posting at least one photo on your blog. Talk about the love!
Anyway, if you like digital photography and even if you already use Flickr, try out Zooomr. They are adding new features quite often and I think are doing well against the competition.
The software for organization I recommend is a program from Google called Picasa. Picasa was purchased a couple of years ago and released as a free download immediately afterward. What's so great about Picasa? Mostly the organization ability of the program. Sure it does some basic cleanup on your photos like Red-Eye removal, color touch-ups, and straightening, but its strong suit is organizing your photos so you can find them. I've hooked many people on the program just for that feature alone. It also give you the ability to backup your photos to CD/DVD directly from the program and will create Gift CDs for friends and family so they can take your photos with them. Its no Photoshop but for most people, it is all they should need to get their photos organized.
If you want to check out my Zooomr photos... the public ones at least, my Zooomr account site is here. Send me a message (ZMail is available on Zooomr) if you're a friend and want to be added to my Social Circle.
Enjoy the links and start uploading!
Update! I forgot to mention that Picasa offers online photo hosting too... not unlimited storage but the same upload limits as the basic Zooomr account. The webalbums site is hosted on Google's servers and isn't too bad if you only want to work with one system. As of right now Picasa cannot upload to Zooomr directly.
Technorati Tags: Zooomr, Flickr, Picasa, photos
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