Flickr and Picasa

I had a Flickr account a long time ago. Like many other online tools, I did not use Flickr to its full potential. Occasionally, I would share photos with family members. To confess, I did not sign up for Flickr until my brother shared some old family photos with me. He wanted me to turn his photos into a photobook for him and Flickr was the easiest way to share his photos without emailing huge jpg files. Unlike many of my peers, who have uploaded and organized their family photos nicely into Facebook, Flickr or Picasa, our family photos are still backed up in our portable hard drive. Why? Initially, my husband and I did not feel "safe" to publicly share photos of our children online. I realize now that Flickr enables me to set parameters of who are able to view my photos.

After reading chapter 7, Richardson provided me with many interesting insights in using Flickr more effectively. Humorously, my colleague revealed to me that her IT brother-in-law was exasperated with her because she told him that all she uses her smartphone for is to text and make phone calls! He replied annoyingly, "It is like having a trunk in a car and not knowing how to use it!" Richardson showed me that I can now access the "trunk" of Flickr's features. Learning how to use the annotation feature came at a perfect time! For my Back to School September bulletin board I had a library contest where students in the entire school had to guess the silhouettes of each different book character. It was a hit! Many of the students wanted to find out who the different characters were and it attracted them into the library. The prize was a free book of their choice under $25. Originally, I just posted the photo onto my library website blog; however, the photo is now enhanced with Flickr notes of the characters and a link to author websites.

Click on photo to see annotations in Flickr

Like Ben, I was very frustrated with Blogger because it does not support special html to directly view the annotated photo on the blog. I tried for over 2 hours with different html code converters to get the right code. Sheepishly, I found out from Aaron that Blogger does not support special html. Sigh!

Here is my magazine photo for my Fall bulletin board. I have used BigHugeLabs before and previous Grade 5 students have enjoyed making Canadian geography magazine covers.

 

Another problem with Flickr was that when I uploaded my BigHugeLab magazine cover to Flickr, I could not share it even if it was set on public. I had to save it to my desktop to paste it into Blogger. Hmm? I have subscribed to some of my friend's Flickr accounts and viewed wonderful pictures they have taken and commented on them. Flickr is a great platform for photo sharing because there are some amazing photos out there taken by amateur and professional photographers. I am intrigued to find out if Picasa will be more user friendly. 

 

First off, Picasa seems to be more user friendly because of its link to Google products like Blogger and Google+. Since this is a Google Blog, uploading photos were a little simpler. Picasa uploaded my 22 photos just a bit faster than Flickr. Also, Picasa offered more than one printing service and the movie maker was definitely easier to use when I downloaded the Picasa desktop. Oddly, it looked like Flickr wanted me to upload all my photos again in order to make a movie and it only provides a 90 sec movie. Here is my Picasa movie of my Noodle Boy!