Organization 2 Pictures

I’m sorry about my blog not being updated. I’ve been busy cataloging my life. To celebrate the summer, I’ve delved deep into organization. I’ve decided to make all of this public, even though it will be way more detail than most of you really care for. In fact, there is so much detail, I’ve decided to make several blogs… this paragraph will be posted before each. Sorry for the unoriginality, but otherwise people will read the blog before they read the info and think I’m crazy… and I am crazy. . . crazy for organization.

Many of you have gotten e-mails about getting my pictures. I think I may be the last person who still uses film. I’ve been giving serious thought to a digital lately, but probably won’t get around to it anytime soon. I’d love to hear suggestions, though. I like things small enough to carry around with me (the smaller the better), but with quality comparable to film. I find cell phone pictures so frustrating, because they can never seem to be of good quality.

Anyway, I send my film to Snapfish, which sends me back a set of prints and puts the pictures online for a low low price. I always send a link to people in the pictures and a few have signed up to receive all of my pictures. I am always looking for ways to make it easier to share pictures, though and if you have thoughts on companies which do this better let me know. As always if you want to see all my pictures and aren’t on the list, let me know. If you are interseted in signing up for snapfish, click this link and we both get 20 free prints.

One site I found that I like quite a bit is Flickr. My personal site link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/justindula/, on which I have a strict policy of only pictures that I have taken, not every picture taken with my camera. Flickr lets you organize your pictures with tags similar to del.icio.us, which I obviously love. This makes pictures much more searchable. They have been purchased by Yahoo, but make it pretty easy to download pictures from a hard drive. I’ve started putting some of my favorites or other downloaded pictures up there. Unfortunately snapfish doesn’t give me a cd of uploadable unless I pay for it, so I have to save each on to my hard drive and upload it if I want to put it up. If anyone knows an easier way to do this, let me know.

This also has some related applications like mappr where it maps pictures from flickr. I have a few of mine up there. It is a neat application. I hear there are tons of applications related to flickr, because they let anyone tinker with their applications. Let me know if you know of other cool ones.

They are also big in the Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a group that encourages voluntary flexible use copyrights so that people can repost pictures or other things so long as they give credit, or other various exclusions. The flickr creative commons link is great for finding pictures for documents and other things, because you don’t have to worry about the strict all rights reserved copyright law. I use it quite a bit at work for that purpose. So I’ve made a point of making my pictures under a creative commons license.

So photo folks, please give me advice on which sites you use for pictures. Let me know if you would like to see more of my pictures, but mostly I hope to get advice out of this entry from my more photo and technology oriented friends.