Creating order out of digital chaos

Are your digital photos badly in need of organization? Are they collecting in ominously large numbers on various hard drives, disks, and online sites, randomly sized and named? When you think of how important some of them are to you, and how you could lose them all in one theft or flood or fire - does it make you feel so bad that you're in denial about the whole thing?

Well, what if I told you that for about $2/month, and a little of your own time, you could have them all in amazingly great order, stored safely on reliable servers, and have tools available to you to share them easily with others, order prints - or just keep them private?

Sorry for the corny introduction, but I'm really pleased that I finally tried out Flickr.com, and it's so useful that I'm feeling like everybody should know about it.

For those of us who are trying to lighten our material possessions and live the virtualista lifestyle, Picasa is a godsend.

Okay, the basics. You can sign up for a free account which is pretty good, but won't serve the purposes I describe above. A free account allows you to upload 100 MB of photos per calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of server space. When a new calendar month begins, your limit is reset, and you can upload another 100MB. They'll keep all of your photos, but the catch is, you only have access to the most recent 200 of them. (In comparison, a free Picasa account allows you 1,024MB storage, period.)

Just as their business model is designed to do, I tried out a Flickr account, realized how awesome it is, and pretty quickly upgraded to a paid version.

A Pro account is $24.95 per year. That may sound like an annoying bill to have to pay, but think about it -it's only once a year, and works out to only $2.08 per month. When you realize what you get for it, and how it is completely capable of solving your troublesome digital photo problems, it may seem well worth it, as it does to me.

A Pro account gives you:

• Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Archiving of high-resolution original images

But it's not just that you can dump all of your photos into an account. Flickr also makes organizing all of those pictures doable. I was going to say "easy", but the truth is, you have to make the effort and spend the time to organize them - but the tools they offer (a "photostream", "sets", "collections", etc.) are top-notch and are working really well for me.

But wait - there's more! (And I'm really not getting paid a cent for this!) If you want to email photos, or post them on your blog or web site, you can easily link to each one. Your original high-resolution photo (if that's what you have) is stored, and you can instantly access each photos in any one of several smaller sizes, and grab a URL which you can send or embed anywhere.

And then there's the slide shows - I really like this feature. In one click, you can create a slide show from just about any selection of photos, and embed or link to it, so that your email friend, blog readers, etc. can easily view it in that form. Here's an example:



You can also order and purchase actual prints from any photos, if you're into that! (I actually plan to - something I've been procrastinating on for years because it was just too hard to get organized to do it.)

The Pro account also allows you to upload videos. I haven't used this feature yet, but it may very well be a nice alternative to YouTube.

Flickr has a whole community aspect - sharing your photos with all kinds of people - which doesn't really interest me, but if you're a social networking web site fan, you may enjoy it. There are a lot of features designed to allow you to communicate and collaborate with others there.

But, if you just want to store your photos privately, there are a whole set of options for determining who can see your photos - from only you, to anybody at all, and several levels in between.

Obviously, I'm sold. It may not be the perfect thing for you, but if you have an hour to play around with it, a free account will allow you to find out.

Tried iGoogle yet?

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with iGoogle, Google's dashboard-desktop application. Right now, it's "on" again between us.

I'm continually trying to improve and smooth the way I work on my computer, particularly since I gave up paper almost entirely, and this is part of that effort. I depend heavily upon GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs; in fact, those three applications are crucial to my operations these days. The iGoogle page allows me to see all of them on a single page, creating a sort of central control panel for my digital and online life which I like. Sometimes.

iGoogle also offers hundreds of other widgets, gadgets and thingies that can be added to this desktop - clock, weather, quote of the day, puzzles, currency converters - you name it, there probably is one. Most of these are created by third parties, so your mileage will vary, as they say.

It may be "off" again between iGoogle and I in a few days; we'll see how it goes.