Many of us have large collections of digital images on our computers and
maybe we don’t often view or share them. I did a webinar on sharing digital images forhttp://4cinitiative.com and for anyone wanting to know more about how to share images the full webinar is on the site and lasts 45 minutes. A brief synopsis is as follows. A great free piece of software is Picasa 3 and this can be downloaded from Google (Gmail account required). The program will catalogue all your images automatically and will also be able to group images of people using its inbuilt facial recognition routine. Once catalogued it is easy to setup the websharing application. You can share images or albums by email or on your webspace and make your images public or private. A nice feature is the photo collages you can create with added music or slideshows which can be made into movies and easily posted to YouTube. If you want to add locations to images this is also easily done.
Another web based sharing facility is available from www.photobox.com This site allows you do many of the same things as Picasa but if you want to make calendars or tee shirts from your images there is a charge for this. Images you post to Photobox are easily transferred to Facebook and your albums can also be embedded into your blog quite easily.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with Flickr and again this has the same features of the other programs. You need a Yahoo account to use Flickr.
The NCTE has a photo sharing resource called Imagebank. Go to www.imagebank.ie and you can search for images by category and save them to your Lightbox. All images use the Creative Commons Licence and so can be used freely if not for profit. You can upload your images to Imagebank and the site is fully moderated so there will no inappropriate material there.
I also like www.Photobucket.com as this site has versions for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. If you have the application on your phone you can upload images form your phone to your Photobox webspace. Another sharing site is www.pix.ie and finally I’d also recommend Photo Story 3 for Windows as a great way to make multimedia rich movies from your images.