On Friday the 27th February I gave a few online presentations (conferences) for the MoLeNET programme.
One was on images and photography in relation to mobile learning.
Presentation on images, creating images, editing images and using images on mobile devices. The use of images for teaching and learning with an emphasis on cameraphones.
Would you believe that three billion photographs have been uploaded to Flickr? And not all by me!
Impressive.
Then you hear that Facebook has had ten billion photographs uploaded.
For me this shows the huge potential of these online sites for finding out about places and stuff.
Look at the search results for Gloucester for example. Want to find out what a place looks like? Need to know about a piece of technology? With three billion photographs you will probably find it. As photographs are tagged, it is possible to find images very quickly as unlike putting photographs into a single category, tagging allows it to be placed in multiple categories. These images have been tagged with Gloucester.
Flickr also has the potential to be faster than news sites for images.
I saw pictures of a gas explosion in Bath on Flickr, before the news had even made the BBC. The pier fire in Weston-super-Mare was also captured on Flickr.
Also what is nice with Flickr is that a lot of people (including me) licence our photographs under Creative Commons which means that you and your learners can use them (legally) in presentations and teaching and learning. Now unlike Google Image Search which (though indexes Flickr) most of the images found there, are either copyrighted or too small. A lot of images on Flickr are at full resolution, which work well not just in PowerPoint but also for printing.
Another feature of Flickr is the community and social networking side. You can comment on people’s photographs and in some cases add notes.
If you haven’t checked Flickr out, have a look.
From Twitter, via AJ Cann’s Blog it is now possible to embed a Flickr slideshow into a webpage or a blog entry.
Alas you can not use it on a WordPress.com blog (like this is) as WordPress.com strip out something from the HTML code. Ah well.
Simply start the slideshow of your choice on Flickr, click share, and copy the relevant HTML into your webpage or blog entry, vle or similar.
You can customise the HTML so it fits the space you want better.
I have been meaning to write a blog post on Flickr for some time now.
Well now I don’t need to as TASI have done an excellent guide on Flickr.
This document looks at the ways you can use Flickr and some of its associated tools and services to help organise a collection of images.
Whether you have a small number of photographs you would like to share privately with a few colleagues, or a larger collection you need to make more widely available, Flickr offers a possible alternative to setting up an in-house image database.
I found it very interesting and learnt a lot from it. One interesting fact was the way in which other institutions and museums are now using Flickr to host digital collections.
You can view my Flickr images here.
Adobe have released an online photo editing app which they have called Photoshop Express.
You shot it — now do something to it. Make it pop. Make it impossible to ignore. Upload, sort, polish, and store up to 2GB of photos. All for free. Resize, tint, distort, and more — add your mark to all your images. Then show them off on Adobe® Photoshop® Express or your Facebook page.
A bit of a warning, this is not an online version of Photoshop. This is an online photo editing application which Adobe have called Photoshop Express.
It reminds me a lot of iPhoto and many Mac users will find it pretty simple and easy to use and very familiar, but obviously Photoshop Express also works on Windows PCs.
Unlike (the real) Photoshop which has a pretty steep learning curve this has a pretty simple interface which works quite well.
Certainly worth a look as both an online photo editor but also as an online photo storage tool.
At a recent MoLeNET podasting event, my colleague John Whalley spoke about PhotoStory 3 for Windows.
Create slideshows using your digital photos. With a single click, you can touch-up, crop, or rotate pictures. Add stunning special effects, soundtracks, and your own voice narration to your photo stories. Then, personalize them with titles and captions. Small file sizes make it easy to send your photo stories in an e-mail. Watch them on your TV, a computer, or a Windows Mobile–based portable device.
You can download the software from Microsoft (follow the link above).
A quick demo of how it works.
An interesting product was voted best of show at CES this week, a wireless SD card for your digital camera.
The card allows you to upload photographs direct from your camera to a photo sharing site on the interent via your wireless network (or a wi-fi hotspot).
I have been using a similar function (via shozu) with my cameraphone, but Eye-Fi allows you to use any camera which uses a SD card slot.
Very clever, though not yet available in the UK or so I believe.
If you have read this blog before you will have noticed that I have embedded my Flickr photostream into the blog (look further down the page). You may have even visited my Flickr account and looked at my photographs.
However not everyone knows what an online photo sharing service is and therefore visiting Flickr for the first time may appear daunting.
TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) who are funded by the JISC have posted a guide which highlights the advantages and potential issues that using these sites have for educational institutions.
Photo sharing has become increasingly popular in recent years as a means for individuals to publish or distribute their digital images online. As a result, some of the photo sharing sites that host these images have become useful sources of free or low-cost images. Many of these sites also include enough features to be seen as practical tools for managing and organising your own collection of images. This paper looks at the most common features offered by a number of photo sharing sites, highlights the pros and cons of using such sites, and offers some practical tips for both finding images and organising your own images.
Thanks to eNews from the JISC Regional Support Centres in Scotland for the link.
Just under four years ago (November 2003) someone on the ILT Champion mailing list asked about getting a “cheap” high end digital camera for printing images at A2 size.
I posted the following reply.
To be honest in order to get anything decent to scale up to A2 then you are going to need a minimum of 3000×2000 pixels (preferably higher than that) which means a 6MP digicam which will be at a minimum £1000, probably nearer £3000 to get something decent..
There is an easier way and you will get a much better quality image as well. As the need is for marketing purposes, the instantability (sp?) of a digital camera is not needed. I would use a normal SLR film camera (£300) and when it’s developed get it scanned onto CD. My local camera shop will put a whole 35mm film onto a CD scanning in at 3000×2000 pixels for just £10.00.
You don’t even need a SLR, as even those 35mm throwaway cameras can give you a better quality image than a 6MP camera. You could do what is needed for less than £20!
You could get an even larger number of megapixels by using a dedicated flatbed scanner.
Digital cameras are great and have their place, however for your needs I think that you will be better off with a film camera and get it scanned onto cd when you have it developed.
It’s incredible how much has changed in the last four years…
I now have a 7.2MP camera, a Sony W35
It also has a decent Carl Zeiss lense and a lithium ion battery (so a charge will last all week).
The price of digital cameras has really come down in price. Look at all these 7MP cameras
Today you need to be less concerned about mega-pixels and be more concerned about the quality of the lense, the life of the battery, how quickly the camera starts up and how quick it is to take photographs.