Science & Technology	UPDATED: Friday, January 13, 2006
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A Three-Part Look at Self-Publishing (Part 2)

Posted on Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Last month I started a three-part series dealing with self-publishing. A lot of multi-talented people, with many diverse ideas and experiences, want to share them with the world.

Now, thanks to the Internet and some simple tools, doing so has become very easy. This month I’m going to talk about sharing photos.

There are many options when it comes to sharing your photos online:

Start a personal website and build your own photo gallery (of course, not everyone is a webmaster and that could get complicated—this column has always been about making things easier).
Open a free account with an online service bureau. Shutterfly (www.Shutterfly.com) and Kodak Easy Share Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com) are both good sites and will serve as online storage as long as you keep your account current. Once the account and galleries are created you can invite people to view your images and order prints, books, or a variety of other products offered (see my article “Create Your Own Custom Digital Photo Book” in The Erickson Tribune, April 2005).
Start a photo blog. A photo blog is similar to the blogs we discussed last month in “Ask Joe.” Starting a photo blog is easy, and sharing photos online can be a lot of fun.

Picasa

If you followed along last month and set up a blogger.com account, you’ll be happy to learn there is an easy way to get your photos to Blog Spot. There is a free program available for Windows from Google called Picasa.

In addition to connecting to Blogger to allow easy publishing and sharing of your images, Picasa is also great for organizing your photos. Instead of just displaying cryptic files names like DSC4105.jpg, which is what you’d typically see from a digital camera, Picasa attempts to make the process of organizing your files easier by showing you thumbnail-sized images of your photos. It also allows you to add descriptions and keywords to the file’s metadata so you can easily search and retrieve images later.

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But Wait, There’s More!

Picasa has some great built-in photo-editing capabilities that will help you make the most out of your digital images. There are functions for improving color balance, contrast, redeye reduction, and my favorite, “I’m Feeling Lucky” —one click of the button and all of the work is done for you.

Picasa also has some artistic features like instant collages and filter effects. You can adjust lighting on a specific portion of an image, add black and white filter effects, and straighten images.

Best of all it’s not overly complicated for beginners. The interface is well laid out and very intuitive. To get your copy go to http://www.picasa.com.

Flickr

Flickr is another way to get your photos out to the rest of the world. With Flickr you can show off your favorite photos, blog the photos you take with a camera phone, and securely and privately show photos to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

A basic account is free and you can sign up by going to http://www.flickr.com. Right now Flickr is in beta, so you may notice some growing pains. But you can look forward to more improvements soon because Yahoo! recently purchased the Canada’s Ludicorp Research & Development —the company that developed Flickr. With Yahoo!’s innovation and product development, there are bound to be changes in the coming months.

Flickr will apparently remain a standalone site for now, but it has been rumored there are plans to relocate staff to California from Vancouver at some point. Experts predict it will be absorbed into Yahoo!’s new Yahoo! 360 blogging service.

Flickr promises that current management will remain in place and will not be turned into “a bunch of suits.” The companies will continue separately, while Yahoo! will gain some of Flickr's features.

More to Come

Next month we’ll take a look at Podcasting. I’ll explain what it is, why people are doing it, and let you know how you can get started listening in or creating your own.

Have a computer or technology-related question for Joe? E-mail your question to: askjoe@ericksonmail.com.