Thing FOUR

Reading to little sister, originally uploaded by aawikstrom.

Two of my favorite library patrons. (Okay, my two youngest daughters.)

Thing Four:

I don't know what our library would use Flickr for. We're small and I don't think we'd have time to do some of the really cool stuff that other libraries have done with it. (How fun to scroll over the books in a picture and be given a link to the library to see if they're available!)

I'd heard of Flickr, but never really explored it before now. How handy to have a place to download and share all those pictures that are stagnating on my computer. I'm sure I'll slowly download a bunch of them in the weeks and months to come for my own personal use. The only other place I've downloaded pictures to is Snapfish--you know, then get them made into actual hand-held photos. Although you can share your pictures there, it doesn't have a space for others to post comments about them. I sent an invite to my Mother-in-law who is spending a couple cold winter months down south. What a great place for me to send her photo updates on how her grand-girls are growing! I think Flickr is great!

It was a bit intimidating to try to come up with tags for the public photos though. I must admit it does make me a bit nervous to have them out there for the world to see. At the same time, I do wonder if anyone would have anything to say about them or if they'd think of other tags that should be added.

I played around with Picnik. Fun options there for things to do with your pictures. I do still need to figure out how to get the picture I want onto my blog in the way I want it. What fun! This is my first experience with messing around with photos, so I don't have any cons on this one. I set up a picture to go along with my name and postings. I doodled over a picture of myself. I didn't have the steadiest hand, so it didn't come out exactly the way I would have liked, but in the end I guess it's something like abstract art.

I went to the Picasa and SmugMug websites. Picasa is another free offering from Google, and I found it a little difficult to figure out. SmugMug has some fabulous shots on it, but from the looks of it, it seemed more geared toward professional photographers than rank amateurs like myself.

I put some of my pictures into sets on Flickr. Great tool, now I can find all the pictures from January 2008 in one spot. I'll be sure to use that more in the future.