Tasks 5 and 6 - Flick, Pic, Pix!

Task 5 - Flickr vs Picasa

Sharing photos is one of the most fun and sociable ways to spend time online. Like anyone, I am very selective about what I upload, but generally I add photos to Facebook from social events to share with friends and family, and to allow them access to the photos if they want a copy for themselves. I appreciate all of the photos available online as searching through photos is often how I research places I’d like to travel (bearing in mind that many photos have been edited and beautified).

I’ve signed into Flickr in the past and have an account – I’ve found it frustrating because previously it’s only been available through Yahoo. Because I don’t use Yahoo account details for anything else, I often forget my login details and it’s a tedious process to go through to renew your password (as it is with any program). I can now login with my Google account (Yay for Google), which thrills me, but when I attempted to close my yahoo account, it announced that it would not free up my username, hence I’d have to come up with yet another username – best to leave it as is methinks! Facebook offers a login option as well, though for privacy reasons, I’m not entirely comfortable having loads of photos migrated to Flickr – having them all online on Facebook is enough…for now.

I’ve not used Flickr to upload my own photos, so what do I use it for? Family and friends of mine do use it, and so I set up RSS feeds for their photostreams. This is great for keeping up to date with their activities without having to log into the program. However, signing into Flickr for the 23 Things program, I’ve been delighted to discover the ‘Explore through tags’ option – its very interesting to see what the common tags are: instagramapp, London, Nikon, wedding, art, cannon… The explore function is also helpful, particularly the Creative Commons photos.

On to Picasa… I went to the web address, and thanks to Google, my Picasa account was already set up and open– I didn’t even have to login – Picasa gets my vote! I haven’t used it before, I haven’t uploaded albums to it, so I was a little surprised to find this photo in there - (I will investigat this later!!)

I had a flick through all of the functions and really enjoyed Creative Kit – very easy to use. And I can tell you that in complete contradiction to the statement above, I would happily migrate my photos to Picasa (from Facebook). The reason quite simply is because it’s Google-based, which means I can have a single account for loads of different uses. It’s quite important to me to have everything centralised for ease of use. To echo my last post – I heart Google.

Task 6 - PixLr

PixLr was a lot of fun! I especially like that I can download it as a Chrome add-on - big plus there. Here's a few photos:

First try (a Chalet at Mt Tamborine)

Cheese! 

London

I love this effect in the London photo, it's called 'Harry' (very appropriate). It's looks like a really old school photo but I took this in 2010. Great effect!