Thing 3: Photo Sharing

I already have accounts with many photo hosting and sharing sites that I use for personal photos of myself, my family, and other events in my life - special and everyday. I have used, at various times, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Picasa, Dropbox, Facebook, and Pinterest. When I want to edit photos - crop them, resize, change the color or filter on an image - I generally turn to Photobucket or Picasa, which has easy tools to use for these purposes.

Of the sites I've used I like Picasa's editing features and Dropbox's sharing features best. I wouldn't necessarily have thought to lump Pinterest in with other photo sharing sites, as I have never posted my own photos there - I mostly think of it as a link sharing site. But one of its distinguishing features is all of the photos, tempting its users into making recipes or convincing users that, 'yes, you too can do this craft in a weekend' - never mind that it will turn out nothing like the gorgeous original. But the photos must come from somewhere, so I suppose it really is a photo sharing site at heart.

Because I have used so many of these sites for basic purposes, I thought for this activity I would branch out into a different site I haven't tried before. I was not actually familiar with Photopin, but I've bookmarked the page as it seems like a really good resource to find photographs that are okay to use freely. I also decided to play with Big Huge Labs, which was also new to me.

Since my son was born, my husband and I have used Dropbox to take and share photos of Benjamin. One feature I like is that you can easily share albums with other people and it's also easy to sort photos into albums and change the privacy settings on specific albums. My smartphone is set up to automatically send any photos I take using the phone directly to my Dropbox account. Below is a picture I took of my son and husband recently.

My son, Benjamin, laughing at the fish in the pond at the Crossings park, Colonie, NY.


Using the "Hockney style" collage maker at Big Huge Labs, I took the above picture and made it into this:

And then, using the "Pop Art" setting at Big Huge Labs, I made my son into a Warhol-esque image:

 

Those are just a few of the fun things I was able to do at that site; there are many more I didn't even explore, but I've bookmarked the site to explore more in the future.

There are so many potential uses for photo sharing in schools and school libraries. I am not currently at a school, working for the School Library System department of Capital Region BOCES, but when we have events, workshops, and conferences, there are definitely instances when photos will be taken/shared.

I think I've only barely scratched the surface of what can be doing with photo hosting and sharing sites, but this module was really useful to me.