9UNP0178SD_David_Lee_WordPress

- Good afternoon everyone. We'll get started here. My name is David Lee. I work here at the HSLC with the application development team. And just to do a little talk here on digital photos. It seems to be a good topic everyone's interested in. So, what I wanted to talk about today is kind of how to make the most out of your digital photos, and how to share them with people or some different things you can do with some of the services on the Web now for your photos. So perhaps probably the most common thing when people think of as easy to take photos is the Polaroid. This has been around for a long time. 

It's really easy to take photos and share them with people. Granted, not a long ways away. You'd have to put it in the mail and send the picture to them. But just recently, Polaroid did make a statement that they're pretty much discontinuing everything with their instant film products. Basically, this year everything will stop as far as the film goes. And then within 2009, all those supplies will be used up. The reason why is everyone is starting to use digital cameras because it's really cheap and easy to take photos. Now, once you have all those photos, though, it's a little daunting. You can quickly take hundreds, if not thousands of photos of something. And then what do you do with them? 

Well, photo sharing sites on the Internet allow you to do a number of things. One thing that most thing overlook is that they're a great backup for your photos. Because you can actually take your pictures, and since they're stored elsewhere, you have your copies and you also have copies elsewhere. So if anything happens to your computer, the photos are still accessible. You can still get a hold of them. Something that's rather important when they're just digital and quite easy to lose if your hard drive crashes and they're not backed up. Also with the Internet, part of the whole idea of the Internet is to share information. And this makes it really easy to share your photos with just your family members, friends or the whole entire world. And even though they're in a digital format, it's still really easy to get actual physical prints mailed to you. Obviously, that costs money, just like developing film does. 

But it's the same idea. You can get prints from your digital photos. Going into backing up photos, it is a good idea to have them backed up. You know, either yourself if you can back up your local computer. Or for these photo sharing sites, you can get photos stored up there. Now none of the photo sites out there actually guarantee that they're going to back up your data. So really, the backup is through just having multiple copies in multiple places. A few sites are more geared toward backing up the data, where they will copy your photo multiple times, so if they have a server problem, they're less likely to lose your image. So, sharing photos, you have a few different options how you choose to share your photos. You can either not share them with anyone. 

Just use these online services only for yourself. You have a user name and password. You know that, and you log on. You can organize your photos, view your photos, but not let anyone else see them. You can also share them with selected people, or your friends or family members. And then essentially, you let them log onto the service and only see the photos that you want them to see. Or you can also share it with the entire world. Which, the majority of pictures out there, people take a picture and they really like it, so they want to put it out there and let everyone see it. Maybe make some critiques and comments on the pictures. They can become a better photographer. 

And then there's also another option of actually selling your content. If you think that you have great photos that people want to buy. There are sites out there that will help you sell those to people. One thing in dealing with putting your photos out there for everyone to see is copyright issues. So anything you put out there is technically has copyright under your name. So people are not supposed to use it, you know, steal your photo and use your work. Now, a lot of people feel that they want less restrictive copyright, allow people to use their images, maybe by just attributing that image to them. There's a group called Creative Commons, which has come out. It's essentially a different form of copyright that's a Creative Commons license, which allows you to essentially reserve some of the rights for your photos. So you can say, well, people can use this as long as it's not for profit. 

If you're making a profit, I still want money from you. And so there's a few common licenses that Creative Commons has defined. Basically, the attribution license means you can use my work as long as you give me credit. And non-commercial license means you can use the work, only just not for commercial products. No derivative works means that you can take that image and use it, but you can't modify it. And share alike means that you can take that image, modify it, you know, if you wanted to edit the photo or change things around, but then if you're going to post that anywhere, it has to be under the same license. Now, these licenses can be joined in any order. So you could have an attribution, no-derivative works license, which means people can take your image and use it, as long as they attribute it to you, but no one can actually make derivative work. They can't take that image and then edit it later. Getting into the idea of sharing photos, the modern way to kind of notify people of updates is something called RSS. 

There's been a number of talks on RSS before. And actually, there's an RSS presentation workshop, actually, going on the 23rd and 25th. There's some information on that in the Ebling Library. So that might be a good one to drop in on if you're unfamiliar with RSS. But basically, what that allows you to do is modify your pictures, put them up there on the Internet for people to see. So your friends can then subscribe to your RSS feed. And as soon as you post new pictures, they'll get notified that there's new pictures in your account. That'll usually come up in their mail reader, and they can see, oh, there's new images here. I can go look at the images. Email, really, with modern pictures is not a good way for sharing photos. 

Modern pictures are really large, and they clog up the email system and take a while to send. And it's really hard to manage things in multiple emails. So this provides a much cleaner interface for that. And it doesn't clog up the mail system with large photos. Also, all of the photo sharing sites will resize all of your pictures for you. So if you have relatives or friends that are on a slow Internet connection, they can see smaller pictures, which will download faster. And so, they can still see the content. But they don't have to wait for minutes to actually get the pictures that you're trying to share with them. So that's all done automatically on the back end. So you don't have to worry about thinking, you know, oh, these people have a slow Internet connection, I'll need to resize my photos so they can see them. 

And then, of course, via the Web sites, you can go and visit them any time to peruse people's pictures and see the pictures. And as far as prints go, all of the services make it really easy to make prints, mostly because they make money off of the prints. Prices range anywhere from, you know, ten cents or so, for little 4x6's all the way up to, you can get poster prints of things. All in all compared, it's about the same price as a local film delivery place, once you take into account the price of film along with the delivery. So usually, it's easiest to use whatever company the site is partnered with. And they'll usually pick a good one for you to use. One thing to be careful of is your digital camera, how your images come in, they have to be high enough quality to actually print. If you have either a really old camera, or one that is set to really low resolution, it won't look good when you actually print it out. Now for the most part, modern cameras, once you take that image, it's going to be as good, if not better than an actual film quality image. This chart here, it's from Design 215, which is a Web design Web site. 

But it's basically a chart, where the numbers diagonally are the number of megapixels that your camera is. And so most cameras now are around 8 megapixels, if not more. And then the inches across the top are the print sizes. So if you wanted to do like a 4x6, a 3 megapixel or higher camera would do 4x6 prints just fine. You would not be able to tell the difference between that digital camera and a film camera. But if you want to start doing larger photos, like 8x10's, then you have to start looking into 8 megapixel and higher cameras. Otherwise, you'll notice a difference between the digital version and the film version. So that's just something to be aware of when you order prints, or when you take photos that you think you might want to print out for people. The cool thing with printing, is there's a lot of places that do some really neat printing options. One of these, moo, is actually based out of the UK. 

They have lots of really cool things that you can do with your photos. They'll actually do business card styles with up to 100 different photos of yours that you can put on there. That allows you to, you know, hand out little cards which can be kind of fun things. And they'll do sticker books, so you can actually take pictures and put them on stickers. Then you can use those stickers with cards or anything like that. So there's a lot of really cool options out there for prints that you can't usually get from, you know, say like if you have something taken on film. I'm going to go over a number of the more popular photo sharing sites out there. There's a few different classifications of them. Some are chat based, where the real goal there is to kind of chat with other users and occasionally share photos. That was really popular a few years ago. 

It's kind of dropped out of favor now. There's also ones that are just kind of meant for storing random images. There are a few of those out there. A number of them primarily sell prints online. But also have online photo sharing because you have to upload the pictures to get the prints, so they added on photo sharing. Most of them are focused on user created photos, so pictures that you take and want to share with people. Another thing is pretty much all of them have a free component or a paid component. Some you can actually get a lot of functionality out of the free account. So you have to pay absolutely no money, and they'll let you host your photos up there. Other ones, you have to pay money for, and you get some added benefits with that. 

So as sites go, Zooomr was a really popular Internet start-up. They're primarily focused around chatting. So, if you want to share photos, it's not that great. But if you like chatting and sharing photos, it's a great product. Photobuket stores lots of random photos everywhere. It's kind of a popular one. You might run across it at some point. A lot of people use it to store photos for their Web sites. Snapfish, you might have heard of. It's actually done by HP. 

This is an example of a site that lets you share prints, but basically is only for printing out photos. Same with Shutterfly. Another really popular Internet print service. You can send them your pictures. They'll send you prints. .Mac is worth mentioning here. If you have an Apple machine, .mac is really easy to use and actually has lots of help and support built into the Apple machines. As a result, it is very simple. Within a few clicks, you can actually share all your pictures online. The downside is, it is a for-pay service. 

It costs about $99 a year to use. But it does make things easy. There's lots of information on the Apple Web site about it. Picasa is one that Google has for photo sharing. So you might have heard of it before. It also has integration with a lot of other Google tools. It makes it somewhat easy to use if you're familiar with any of the Google tools, which there's been a number of talks on this series before. SmugMug is a site that aims at professional photographers. Basically, you can use it as an individual user. But they also have options in place to post your photos and let people buy them. 

And then you basically set the price and they can license your work and buy prints. Then you get the profits from it. So it's pretty popular with pro photographers. They also stress back up a lot as well. They'll actually keep multiple copies of your images distributed throughout the U.S. So they don't guarantee it will be backed up, but it is very resilient to any failures. And then there's flickr, which is actually a very popular photo sharing site. And I'm actually going to do some demos and kind of go through the interface of flickr for you guys. But flickr has been around for a while. They're kind of the first, one of the first, really noticeable Web 2.0 applications. You might have heard that word thrown around. 

But basically, the whole simpler-to-use interface, kind of bright, bold, in your face advertising. It changed the way a lot of Web sites were designed, in just kind of how you deal with customers. So let me pull up flickr here. This is flickr. They offer free accounts. So any one of you can get an account. Actually, if you already use Yahoo!, flickr is affiliated with Yahoo!. So if you actually have Yahoo! mail already, you already have an account for this. 

But it allows you to upload photos, share them with the world, keep them private, share them with just only friends and family. And probably the easiest way to kind of show you what it's about is to do a quick search to see what photos are out there. As you can see, it's pretty popular. The little tag line is "over 4,000 things uploaded within just the last minute." So that's new photos. And that's pretty much constant. So all the time, new photos, thousands and thousands of photos. The way that it gets organized, is there's a few different ways you can categorize things. And then this also uses tagging, which allows you and other people, if your images are public, to put a tag in to describe the image. When you actually do a search, you can come back with pictures. 

With this many pictures, it's obviously hard to find ones. But we can search for tulips. And so, they have about 300,000 pictures of tulips, or at least somewhere in there are tulips. You can sort them by relevant, recent or interesting. But just a quick kind of overview of some pictures that are up there. And we can look at one of these. So if we want to find out more information about this photo, say this top one. We can click on the photo. That will pull up more information about it. So just to describe some of the interface parts of flickr here, we have the picture, obviously, that you can see. 

And this person here has a number of different things. They have sets of photos, which allows you to arrange photos that they've taken into groups. So you can really use that however you'd like. But this person has most popular. This is a group that he created saying these are my most popular photos. Same with Washington, DC, and USA. You can create your own sets. flickr also has something called pools, which is a public thing that someone else can kind of designate that that photo is part of. And then these are the tags that I was talking about. I don't know if any of you have dealt with tagging things before. 

But sometimes there's tags in there that don't really work very well, like tag 1, tag 2 or tag 3. But then "tulips" is actually a tag there. So that's part of the reason when I searched for this, it came back with tulips. There's also the Washington Monument and some other key words in there. The other thing you can do is comment on other people's photos. So you can highlight an area and then leave a little comment. This works really well if you want to critique people's photos, or kind of point out things. It works really well for family reunion photos. You can kind of comment on every single person in there. You can actually figure out who's who. 

And then comments. These are flickr users from all over the world. They can leave comments on the photo. Once you get an account, you can sign in. And once you sign in, this is what you see. Now, I have the free account. Right here, they're saying, hey, you can get a Pro account for $24.95. That's actually, aside from the advertising, that is cheap. $30 a year is not much to be charged. Now the way flickr works is they give you an allocated quota per month of size of photos you can upload. 

So you can take 100MB of photos every month and upload them up to the service. If you upload more than that, you have to get a Pro account. But free, you can upload 100MB worth of pictures. Now for most cameras, that's a number of photos. I mean, most of your pictures will probably be around 2MB for the standard camera. So that's about 50 pictures a month you could upload. So for a casual user, it works great. For a Pro account, $30 a year, it's not that expensive. There's a few different things with flickr here. Basically, this is the home page here. 

And you can kind of take a look at what you've done. And I have a few photos out there that I uploaded for this presentation, just to take a look at. You can actually take a look at photos that you've uploaded. So this would be a photo that is uploaded from there. And they have a few different options on what you can do. You can add notes, like the Washington, DC, monument had notes. This is where you can add in and define what you'd want to do. They also allow you to edit the photo. Some things to look at here, as far as tags. Basically, it shows that this photo is private. 

No one else can see it. Only I can log on and see this photo. All rights reserved. That means that the standard copyright is held on that. You can change this to be a Creative Commons copyright. So if I wanted other people to be able to use this photo for whatever, you know, for however they'd like, I could edit this and actually apply that license. So when people search for it, you can search for photos that are licensed to allow you to use freely. It also tells you what camera you used to actually take the picture. And it also gives you an option to place the photo on a map, which with more modern cameras and devices, you can actually automatically record where you were when you took the picture. And for cameras that don't have that, if you want to have a location specific picture, you can actually place it on a map and say I was standing right here when I took this picture. 

That allows you to search for pictures in a certain area geographically. One of the first things to do is to actually upload photos to flickr. And flickr, you can either upload via the Web interface. Or they actually have a separate program. So if you're going to be uploading lots of photos, it's a lot faster to use their program. We can go through the upload photos. So I'm going to upload a new picture onto flickr so that it will be there and visible. So basically, it's a pretty simple process. You just choose pictures. So these will be pictures that you already have on your computer. 

You basically just have to navigate and find the picture that's on your computer. So you could do this photo. And so you can just keep adding more and more photos there and get them uploaded. It's a little tedious to kind of keep adding photos. They do have a utility I'll show you to upload more than one photo at a time. But basically, you set who you'd like to see it. For this one, we can make this one public. And you can upload photos. So this picture is 1.62MB. It's kind of the standard size that comes out of my camera. 

It's probably about the standard that most of you get. And again, you have 100MB per month. They actually tell you up on the top how much you have left for this month. So you can gauge how much you use it based on some of that. Once this gets uploaded, it's there and you're able to tweak some of the, add comments, edit the picture. I'll show you that. So for example, we can add a description. So you can add tags, descriptions, etc. This is a bridge. And the title is just the image that you have. 

You can leave it at that or you can change your title to something more meaningful. I forgot what the name of this bridge is, so I'll leave it at that. But then here we have this added into my pictures that I have. Once you have a number of pictures up there, you can also organize them. And one other thing with the free account that you don't get with the Pro account, is you can only have three sets. They only let you have three sets. You really only can group your pictures in three ways. You can have as many tags as you want. But if you want to group your pictures, you're limited to three unless you get a Pro account. And it's pretty straightforward to edit them. 

You can just drag photos up. This works on any computer, any Web browser. So you can take these. And so now I'm working with these three pictures. What we can do is we can add them to a set. And we can just do set pictures from outside. And now, I have a set that contains pictures that I've taken outside. Actually, this one is outside, too, so we can add that one there. So now we just added another picture to the set. Groups. 

I'm not a member of any groups. But basically, flickr has groups for everything. Now, these are public groups that you can join. And it's essentially people that take similar pictures will join these groups. And then it's easier to find topics that you like. You can have an example here. So flickr will point out some groups that they've seen. And so, recipes to share. There's over 5,000 members in this group with over 9,000 photos. But within this group, all these members will post pictures of things that are within the group. 

So recipes to share. These are all pictures of recipes that they have and the finished product once it's done. The way to upload multiple pictures at once. Getting back to that. The flickr uploader tool works for both Mac and PC. It's the same thing. This makes it a little bit easier to add multiple photos. You can just drag them into here, or you can hit the add button. And then select the pictures from your computer. So you can do a group of pictures at once. 

It will put those up there. And then you can apply these all to those photos. So once you select them, then you can say who can see these photos. We'll keep these ones private. And then, friends and family, you define when you add people to flickr. And you can do upload photos. This also goes a little bit faster than the Web site version as well, because it can talk directly to the server. So I don't know how long it took to upload the one. These files are all the same size, except there's five of them instead of just the one. It goes a little bit faster. 

We're already three through. Going through some settings for your user, things you can be aware about as far as what is exposed to the world. Basically, you can change your little icon to be something that's more fun. So when you post a comment on someone else's photo, it will show up a little bit nicer than just kind of the standard thing. But you can basically include a whole bunch of other stuff. If you are a photographer and you would like to get your work out there, you can put your Web site address in and link back to more information, and other things that basically allow other people to find you easier. This does have a part of the whole social networking thing to it. So you can flickr as kind of a little meeting board for finding people. And the flickr uploader. It looks like the network kind of died on that one. 

But some of them did get up there. And you can save those new photos. And I have a number of photos up there. That's pretty much the basics. You need to get your photos up onto flickr. The other thing is if you wanted prints, you can really easily order prints. You need to define a little bit of stuff in your profile, like where you'd want the prints mailed to and things like that. But basically you can select any photo, hit print, and see all the different prints. This 4xD print, that's a little interesting. Digital photos are a different aspect ratio than most film photos. 

And so, it's not exactly in standard dimensions. Now if you want, you can get 4x6 prints. But generally, the digital photos, it's 4x5.3 inches, so it's not quite the right aspect ratio. If you get a 4x6 print, it'll just kind of crop off some areas to make it fit. This lets you see prices for that. So a 4x6 is 15 cents for a print. And then you can basically add these to your cart and check out and get them all mailed to somewhere. You can either mail them directly to yourself or you can mail them to friends or family. They'll just receive the photos in the mail and look through them. So if someone doesn't have a computer, it's really easy to just select prints, mail them off and they'll get photos in the mail. 

I can show you the geo tagging feature in flickr, which is kind of an interesting thing. More and more, people are starting to do that, where they're actually specifying the location where the picture was taken. This allows you to search for things based on location. So we can do a search for Madison. And then all these dots are where pictures have been taken in Madison from a flickr user that's then uploaded that image. So you can take a look. Picnic Point, it looks like there's one there. And so here's a photo that was taken at that location. Then over here. And if you want to see any one up close, you can click on it and it will take you to the actual page that has the photo. 

So it makes it really easy to find photos of a particular area. It's actually really handy if you're going to go on vacation somewhere. You can just type it in and kind of look and see what the place is like. This usually offers a nice view of the different areas of the city. Then there's a few other ones that are down in the same area on the map. Now interestingly enough, for Madison, Wisconsin, there are 44,000 geo tagged pictures. So within this area, there's 44,000 pictures that have been taken, that people wanted to say they were taken in this area. So it is amazing the sheer number of photos that are on flickr. If you look around, you can pretty much find a photo for anything. The other thing to look for is if you-- Kind of a cool statistic that they have is they keep track of which cameras are used to take pictures. 

So you can see, this is also a good way to, maybe if you were going to buy a new camera, you can search flickr for a particular type of camera, and kind of see what the overall picture quality of it is. Most of these are pretty high-end cameras, because most of the people that are seriously into flickr have really high-end cameras. But they graph the popularity over time, which is kind of fun. The other way you can upload photos as well, is you can also upload them directly from your mobile phone. So sometimes you'll find people that take pictures of events as they're happening. This is for the popular camera phones. It does that via email, since they're smaller pictures. You can email them easier, because they're not these huge files. And there's a popularity of how many are used for uploading photos. From within that, these are all the pictures that were taken with an Apple iPhone, or at least were, you know, thought to have come from an iPhone. 

You can kind of trick it if you know what you're doing. But basically, there's a whole bunch of different photos there. Then, of course, they're hooking into compare prices and buy, and get money and all that stuff. But flickr is primarily sponsored by advertising, which is another thing with the Pro account, they don't show ads along with your pictures. Otherwise, there will be ads there. So if you send it to someone that, you know, hey, look at my pictures, there'll be ads there unless you have a Pro account, and then those ads will be gone. Okay, that's pretty much everything with flickr. It's a pretty simple interface. The idea is you upload the photos. Then you end up, you know, organizing them into sets or groups. 

And then you can tag them with different information so people can search and find your pictures. And then, you can also define who gets to see them or not. So within users, you have a user account and you can say only let my friends see this, or only let my family see this. And then you can add users to those groups. Now, those people do have to be members of flickr, but the account is free. You can sign in and, you know, there's no charges for that, to view photos. So that's it for flickr. Are there any questions at all? Yes? 
- If a photo has a copyright, can I print that? 

- The question is, if it's copyrighted, can you actually print it off and use it for yourself. It's hard to say. Technically, no. However, if you print it off and use it for your own personal use, no one will probably find out. 
(laughter)
 
- If it's Creative Commons? 
- If it's the Creative Commons, it's much better. In fact, with Creative Commons, if it's sent, basically anything under the Creative Commons, you can pretty much safely print out. Although, usually they want attributes given to the writer. 

So you could print it out and then just, you know, have "photo taken by" and you'd be fully within the Creative Commons. And you could do whatever you wanted. In fact, if it doesn't have the non-commercial, you could even use it for commercial purposes. There was actually an interesting case in Australia, though. That is just rights for the photo. That isn't necessarily rights for what's in the photo. In Australia, an advertising company used a flickr photo of a girl and got sued because the girl didn't like being in the photo. And so, the rights of the photo are different than rights to represent someone's image. So there's, essentially, if you're using it for commercial purposes, be careful. Thank you. 

Any other questions? Yes? 
- How safe is this site? How many times have you been contacted by people...? 
- The question is how safe the sites are, and how many times are you contacted. Well, if you want to put them up publicly, then people can see them and can contact you. That really just depends on how well your photos are found. The way that they contact you is through flickr. So they never, if you set it up, they will never actually get your email address or any of your personal contact information if you don't put it in. So by default, that's how it works. 

So they can send you a message through flickr, you can completely ignore it or you know, you can respond back to them. But it's none of your personal information that's out there. Or, you can also keep everything private and use flickr just to you know, order prints, and organize your photos. And then, no one can see that or access it. Any other questions? Okay, well that was my presentation on flickr. If you'd like to contact me, at all, with any questions afterwards, feel free to do so. Again, my name is David Lee in the directory, digitally to: @wisc.edu I'd be happy to answer any questions later on. All right, thank you. 
(applause)