Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Thing #37 -- Photo Tales

For organizing personal photos I use iPhoto and combine it with the Gallery feature of my MobileMe account to share them on the web. I've found iPhoto extremely easy to use, and it's pretty economical for getting prints of pictures. The application comes with tools to design cards and upload the images and your design to Apple for printing. We used this for our Christmas cards this past year. One other project my husband is working on is a family memory book of old family photos. He is using iPhoto to layout the pictures on each page and add captions of who is in each photo. Once he's finished we'll be able to get a hardcover book of the pictures to give to family members.

Obviously, I have found a lot of use for these kinds of tools in my personal life, but (as with many of these Things) I'm not sure what place they have in my library. My college has a Flickr account used to share photos of student events and other happenings on campus, but the library doesn't. Photos that we share are posted to our Facebook page. One potential use of the tools in this thing would be to post links to some of the stock photo sites or captioning sites for students who may need to use images in presentations. But then again, how likely would students be to think of the library web site as a resource to fill that need?

I've played around some with iMovie, but for this Thing I tried One True Media's montage site. It is pretty intuitive to use, and offers a lot of choices for editing, even if you don't have a premium (ie. paid) account. My only quibble is the image quality of the online sharable version isn't very good, and the watermark takes up a lot of real estate. I used it for this project, but don't know if I will go back to it agian. Given the time of year, I created a story about my garden.

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