Archive for November, 2008

Why People Use Free Online Photo Storage

November 11, 2008 at 7:45 pm · Filed under blog ·Tagged , , ,

Digital cameras have managed to save people a lot of space because pictures are stored as bits of memory rather than film or sheets of paper. The problem is memory takes up space too, and if you take enough picture eventually you’ll run out of space on your memory card. You could always transfer the pictures to a computer, but even then the pictures will build up and will leave little room on your hard drive for other things. The solution to your space problem without extra cost is free online photo storage.

What Free Online Photo Storage Does

Storage is a tricky thing, especially when you don’t know much about how to store your photos. There are many different formats that your photos can be saved as and each acts a different way. The smaller of the formats, JPEG, takes up very little space but unfortunately can distort a picture as the size changes from the original. Larger formats such as TIFF and PNG take up to 10 times the amount of memory as a JPEG. None of the matters when using free online storage space. You can save the file the way you’d like and simply store it online where memory is limitless.

It’s important to keep in mind when saving your files what your future use for those pictures will be. If you plan on editing them at another time where you’ll be adjusting the size, free online photo storage means you don’t have to skimp out on quality. JPEGs are nice when you’re trying to save space but they won’t give you the best quality picture. TIFF or PNG files are malleable and will allow you to change your picture however you want without showing the annoying pixels that come with enlarged JPEG files. When it comes to your pictures, quality is everything.

Safety of Free Online Photo Storage

Many people worry about the safety of using the Internet for personal things, from purchases to storage, but online photo storage is perfectly safe. Security measures are put in place in order to make sure that your images stay your images. Just because sites are free doesn’t mean that they have any less quality or protection. Often times these sites will provide special services for an extra charge such as online digital photo printing or sell products such as photo albums. They make the money to support their service through these extras so that they can provide the same quality as sites you pay for without charging you anything.

Of course that isn’t to say that there aren’t fake free online photo storage websites. They are rare and they generally won’t look like they’re a legit company, if you look closely. If something seems off to you, don’t use the site. Websites with testimonials samples of their products and services, and a price list are legit companies. Free online photo storage websites know the value of your pictures and store them safely just for you.

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Other Great Hoorray Blogs

November 10, 2008 at 4:22 pm · Filed under Other Hoorray Blogs

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We are launching a series of blogs to educate the public on several of the unique features Hoorray offers.

Here are a couple of blogs we built to highlight our

Free Online Photo Storage

Free Online Photo Album

Free Printable Calendars

Online Digital Photo Printing

Free Online Photo Sharing

Online Photo Printing

Digital Photo Album

Online Photo Sharing

Photo Greeting Cards

Check it out and let us know your thoughts!

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Digital pictures help you capture your stories

November 8, 2008 at 3:32 am · Filed under blog ·Tagged , ,

Each of us has a story to tell. Granted, some of us have a story longer than others. However, there comes a point in everyone’s life when it’s important to recount memories and events that took place over the years. Most of us don’t write. Not all of us are blessed with the gift of gab. Not many of us can paint or draw. But all of us, all of us can take a picture (at least we can with the advent of the new, easy to use digital camera). So, when the time comes to tell your story, you don’t necessarily have to rely on words. You don’t have to put pen to paper. Nor do you have to draw or paint. Why not? Because the advent of the free online photo album will allow you to share photos stories with greatest of ease.

Once you’ve opened a free online photo storage site, in order to convey your message and tell your story all you need to do is upload the appropriate photographs. Choose photographs that go along with the story plan to tell. Do your best to keep your story in chronological order and try and recount the story and your mind as you organize your pictures.

Once you’ve signed some order to your photographs, you can begin uploading them to you free storage site. Your online photo album will offer you the option of editing photos as you upload them. This is perfect when you’re goal was to tell a story using your photos. As you edit your photos be sure and add captions and messages that will help to tell your story. It’s a good idea to convey the emotion you felt when each photo was taken.

Once your photo story is completely uploaded to an online photo sharing site, edited, and conveyed through your online photo album, you will easily be able to share your story with your friends and loved ones. Most photo websites offer the option of sending an invite to those she loves. All you need is your address book and a little time.

Your friends and loved ones will truly enjoy the visualization of your online story. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, if this is true of photo story in your online photo album is the perfect way to speak volumes without ever opening your mouth. If you have a message to spread, but you’re a man of few words, why not try saying it with pictures? Online photo stories afford users the opportunity to be creative without spending a lot of money.

Don’t be intimidated by the process of organizing an online photo album in constructing your own photo story. The step-by-step instructions that most all photo websites display for their users are simple to follow and easy to use. Uploading and editing photos has never been easier than it is today. Our new technology has made it possible for all of us to utilize high tech methods to complete low-tech tasks. Even the most novice computer user will find the process of completing an online photo story enjoyable and exciting.

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Five Good Reasons to Create Photo Books

November 8, 2008 at 3:02 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Do you take a lot of photos? Do you have a lot of old photos? Have you thought about how to display them? Chances are you have them all stored on a hard drive or a free online photo storage website, if they’re digital, or in a shoebox if they’re paper. Chances are all those precious memories are being ignored. If you would like a convenient way to share your memories, and generate interest in them, consider creating photo books using online photo printing

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Create Photo Books For Your Family Photo books are a lot like photo albums but a lot more permanent and durable. Photo books also have another advantage over albums—they can be reproduced. You probably have lots of photos of your family, documenting your whole life together. Why not put them together in digital photo books you can give to everyone in your family? Organize them by year, and if the photos aren’t already digital you can scan them or have them scanned, and you can easily create custom photo books at many of the websites where you upload and share your photos.

Create Photo Books to Document Your Family Tree Have you researched your lineage? Do you know your ancestors’ life stories, and have the pictures to prove it? Why not document your family’s history by creating photo books? Just think—you could take everything you know about your family tree, combine it with photos, and create a photo book to give to all your family members, even your extended family. All you’d have to do is scan those old photos, or have them scanned, and assemble a photo book from them!

Create Photo Books to Remember Your Vacation What was the best vacation you ever had? Whether you took a year off to travel around the world, or a long weekend to go to your favorite fishing hole, you probably have lots of fond memories of that vacation—and lots of photos too. Chances are, those photos are probably parked on a hard drive or in a shoebox somewhere, aren’t they? Wouldn’t they be better in a professionally printed photo book that you could make for everyone who vacationed with you? Memories, after all, are made to be cherished—and shared.

Create Photo Books to Commemorate Your Pets Do you have fond memories of your favorite pet from childhood? Most people do. Do you have a pet now? If you do, you probably take lots of photos of your pet. If you haven’t taken lots of photos of your pet, you should probably start. What better to cherish memories of your lovable pet’s place in your life than assembling all your photos of that pet into a photo book?

Create Photo Books to Show Your Love to That Special Someone Finally, remember how you met your significant other? Over the years you’ve spent together you’ve likely taken quite a few photographs. Why not surprise the love of your life by giving them a free online photo album of your prized memories, customized just for you and the love of your life?

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Tips On Page Layout to Create Photo Books

November 8, 2008 at 2:38 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

If you’ve decided to create photo books, you might do well to think a little about page layout. Most likely your photo books are going to be combinations of words and photographs. You’re probably aware that some online photo galleries and free online photo storage sites offer you the opportunity to make photo books. These photo books are professionally printed at online photo printing sites and look like real books. Why not invest a little effort and make the page layout look like a real book too?

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There are a few basic principles graphic designers use to lay out pages that you should be aware of. While there are no hard and fast rules to a creative discipline like graphic design, there are some principles that all graphic designers are thoroughly versed in, and in practice rarely, if ever, violate. These principles are simple, and don’t require the kind of visual talent you’d need to paint the Sistine chapel, by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, they don’t require as much talent as taking good pictures to understand and apply.

The first thing you need to think about when you are arranging things on a page—in this case, you’re arranging pictures and text to make a photo book—is how arrange the elements on the page. This includes thinking about what stuff goes on which page, and where to put it relative to the other elements. That is an important notion—the notion that things are placed relative to other elements. Graphic designers think not only about the elements they put on the page, they think about the arrangement in terms of what those elements, as shapes, do in terms of giving the page structure.

If you really want your pages of your free online photo album to look aesthetically pleasing, you should think about the shapes that the elements make out of the empty space that remains on the page. This is called negative space, and your first priority is to make sure the pages of the photo book you are creating look organized. One way to do this is to think of the page in terms of a grid. The grid is never visible in the finished page, but think of your favorite newspaper. Think of how the columns, the photos and the headlines are arranged. Even though you don’t actually see the grid itself, you can look at the pages of this newspaper and know where the grid is, can’t you? A grid is a great way to organize pages, not just for beginners but for professional designers.

Are you planning on using text in your free online photo album, either to tell a story or to caption your photographs when you create photo books? There are a couple of things to bear in mind. Firstly, color. As tempting as it is to use pretty colors on a prettily colored page for your text, if you want people to be able to read the text in your photo book, the color of the text and the color of the page need to be as different as possible. That’s why most books are black and white—it makes it easier to read.

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Create Photo Books Around a Theme

November 8, 2008 at 2:20 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

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Have you started to create photo books out of all those photos you take yet? It’s easy, if you store your photos in an online gallery. Many free online photo storage sites offer you the opportunity to print a free online photo album. You can have the photo books you create bound like real books, the kind you buy in the bookstore. You can print multiple copies for whomever you see fit to give them to.

Knowing it’s so easy to have photo books printed at an online photo printingonline photo printing site, what do you put in them? No doubt you have lots of photos, but how do you organize them? Your photo books will be more interesting if you organize them by theme. For example, you’ve probably organized photo albums primarily chronologically. You take some pictures of your dogs, your cats, a beautiful sunset, your mother, your kids, a sporting event, your kids sporting event, a fishing trip with the guys, etc. You dump them all in an album together, more or less in the order you took them.

Organizing the photo books you create chronologically is alright, but think about this: will everyone who will be interested in the photo books you create want to see all the photos? If you think about it, they probably won’t. The kids will want to see pictures of themselves and of the pets, and your spouse will be bored to death by the fishing trip pictures. Your buddies, on the other hand, know what your spouse looks like, could care less about those cute pictures of your fat cat trying to stuff himself into a shoebox, and just want to see the pictures of the fishing trip you went on with them. Why not, then, organize your photo books by theme?

You took the time and energy to buy the camera and figure out how to use it. Why not take a little more time to organize your photos into themes for each specific audience? That way you can create a free online photo album you know your friends and family will enjoy. It just might encourage you to take more pictures too. If your kids love the photo books you create of your beloved pets, wouldn’t that spur you on to take more photos of your pets?

You can even add text to your photo books. This can range from the very simple and obvious, merely describing what’s in the picture, to more complex storytelling. For example, you can come up with witty captions for the fishing trip photos (if ever any vacation inspired witty captions, it’d be a fishing trip, wouldn’t it?) You can, of course, include ordinary information like dates, times, places, and people’s names, but you can also have some fun with it too. In fact, you can add more text than just the description of the photos if you want. For example, if you take pictures every time your son has a little league game, you can include reports on the game and even box scores.

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Create Photo Books to Tell a Story

November 8, 2008 at 1:54 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

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Every picture tells a story, doesn’t it? If every picture tells a story, then combining pictures surely must tell a story. You can add words to the story, too. Wouldn’t that be a great way to present your photos, especially those documenting an event with family or friends? It’s easy to do. Many free online photo storage websites, the kind that offer you the opportunity to create online galleries of your photos, also allow you to create a free online photo album. If you want to use this medium to tell a story, its’ easy!

The first thing you need to think about to create a photo book to tell a story is, not surprisingly, what story you want to tell. This may seem obvious, but there is a subtle side to it. Let’s say you want to create photo books of your son’s little league season. Do you include every single photo? Well, you could. But chances are, you took a lot of photos. You don’t need to include them all, do you? Probably you won’t want to. Think about what happened over the course of your son’s little league season, games lost and won, and special moments for your son, such as his best plays.

Select your photos so that they tell the story of his season. It will be even better if you plan your digital photo album before the season starts. That way, you can make sure you get the photos you need to tell the story, not just the occasional snapshot when you think of it. You will need a few photos to document the general action of each game, and not just the highlights of your son’s play if you want to do this right. You may be wondering why you’d need to tell the story of the whole team, instead of just your son’s contribution. If you think about it the answer is obvious—the photo book you create isn’t just for you, it’s for your son. If you document the whole season well, your son can give copies to his teammates as well. Wouldn’t you rather have a free online photo album that your son will enjoy, that will enhance his stature amongst his peers, than just a photo book to make you happy?

Probably the best way to create this particular photo book is to adopt the sports yearbook format. That means one entry or chapter per game, with pictures, box scores, standings, and any interesting anecdotes from on and off the field. You may also want to shoot pictures at some of the team’s practices as well. If you do it right you could have a lasting testament to your son’s season, one that both he and you will cherish.

This particular example is based on a sports season but the principles used to create photo books with a narrative apply to any other subject. It could be your vacation, your daughter’s first ballet class, or even giving the dog a bath. All you need to make a story is a beginning, middle and end.

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How to Create Photo Books Online

November 6, 2008 at 3:32 am · Filed under blog ·Tagged , , ,

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By now, you probably have been taking digital photographs exclusively for quite some time. Not many people, except the most stalwart of professional photographers, still shoot their pictures on film these days. Chances are you have your photos all stored on a hard drive or a free online photo storage website, if they’re digital, or in a shoebox if they’re paper. Chances are all those precious memories are being ignored. If you would like a convenient way to share your memories, and generate interest in them, consider creating photo books. With digital photographs, it’s easy to create permanent, hardbound a free online photo album. If you shot film, and your photos are still paper or slides, it’s till pretty easy and affordable to digitize them and create photo books from them.

If you want to create free online photo album, the first thing you need to do is assemble the photos you intend to but in the book. Choose them and decide what order they will be arranged into. Once you’ve done that, you need to think about any captions or other things you may want to write to accompany the photos. If you are old school and you have prints on paper of photos that you shot on film, you can still create photo books online. The first thing you need to do is scan the photos. Scanning is pretty easy and a decent quality flatbed scanner can be had very cheaply. There might be a learning curve. Don’t be intimidated, learning curves are stressful when you’re in the middle of them but once you’re up to speed you quickly forget the pain of learning the task. If you don’t want to scan the photos or slides yourself, its’ easy and affordable to send them out to a service bureau who will scan them for you and give you digital photos back.

Once the photos are scanned, play around with arranging them on the page to arrive at the most pleasing arrangement possible. Don’t just think about arrangements that look good. Instead, try to arrange the pictures to tell a story. This will guarantee that they’ll look good together, as they have a built in relationship between them determined by the narrative. Once you have arrived at the storyline and arrangement of the photo book you’re about to create, you should write any text that will accompany the photos. This can be as simple as notating the who, what and when of the photo, or you can write elaborate diary entries. It is up to you, and depends entirely on whom you want to read the book and what your personal preferences are.

The last step in the process is to upload the scans or photos to a free online photo storage website that will print photo books for you. Once the photos are uploaded, the site will most likely have simple wizards to guide you through the process. Lastly, you just order the book to be printed and specify how many copies.

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Share Your Photos with Online Photo Printing

November 6, 2008 at 3:21 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Like most people, you probably take lots of photos. What do you do with them? Here’s where you don’t want to be like most people. Most people stash their photos away on their hard drive, or if they shoot film, they stash them away in a shoebox, rarely if ever to be seen again. Make up your mind you’re not going out like that. Photos were meant to be shared!

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The first step in sharing your photos is to find a free online photo storage site. Make sure they offer digital photo printing, as printing will be a vital part of your plan. Look for an online photo gallery that offers unlimited free storage. Free unlimited storage is very important because photo files tend to be fairly large. If you shoot a lot of pictures, that limit that seemed astronomical will encroach on you rather quickly.

Once you have found a free online photo storage site that offers both printing and unlimited free storage, upload your photos. If they are digital photos, this will be simple—just go to their website and follow the instructions. If you are still shooting film, or if they are old photos, then you will need to scan the photos. Good quality flatbed scanners are very affordable these days if you are inclined to scan your photos yourself. If you’d prefer not to, you have the option of sending them out to a service bureau to have them scanned. This often results in a higher quality scan, as the service bureaus generally have better equipment than the $20 scanner that is available in the office supply store—a lot better equipment. Not only hat but service bureaus tend to be skilled at scanning, so your photos won’t turn blurry or develop a color cast from being scanned.

Once the photos are uploaded online, the next step is to print the ones you want to share. You could buy an inkjet printer and print them at home, but generally inkjet printers cannot equal the quality of the photo printers that most of the better online photo galleries have for digital photo printing. Not only are the printers typically better, but they also tend to use high-quality, Kodak photo paper, just like the kind of paper used for printing enlargements from film negatives optically. Their professional grade photo printers will give you excellent quality and vibrant, clear, accurate color. Most services offer a variety of sizes to suit your printing needs as well.

You may want to edit the photos to enhance them. Most of the better online gallery services offer online editing tools so that you can enhance your photos. Most of these offer typical editing tools that are essential for photography such as cropping, color correction, sharpening and more. Next stop: sharing your photos with your friends. From there, you can order prints in a variety of sizes, in either glossy or matte, with an easy online form. If you’re in a hurry, many online galleries offer express shipping and have them sent to everyone on your photo distribution list.

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Staying in Touch With Digital Photo Printing

November 6, 2008 at 3:06 am · Filed under blog ·Tagged , ,

The way the world is today, it is rare that you can be around everyone you care about at exactly the same time. People have to go where opportunity beckons, and we have become a highly mobile culture. Most extended families are extended geographically. Lately, fuel prices have gotten so high that it isn’t always practical or even possible to visit everyone you want to see, when you want to see them. All you can do, really, is try to stay in touch. There are many ways of doing this, but one of the most interesting and delightful ways is by using digital photo printing at a free online photo storage site to print photos and send to your friends and loved ones.

Do you have kids? If you do, everyone in your family is interested in not only knowing what your kids are up to, but also seeing pictures of your kids. Kids grow so fast, and your relatives and even your friends would love to see more of them but aren’t likely tot get the chance. You could, by sending them a photo at fairly frequent intervals, give them the chance to experience a little bit of the progress your children are making on their path to adulthood.

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There are many ways to send photos to people these days. The easier ones are electronically. In fact, you can email photos to people. In many ways this is the most convenient method of sending photos to friends or family is by simply using your email account. While this is easy it has disadvantages. For one thing, the files are quite large, and your friends and family might not really be thrilled at the notion of you clogging their account, regardless of how charming the content of the email. Another option is uploading your photos to one of the many fine online photo gallery websites. This has the distinct advantage of not clogging up the inboxes of your friends or family. However, it has the distinct disadvantage of only being available to them when a) their computer is on, b) they are connected to the Internet, and c) they follow the link in the email you send them and visit your gallery. Wouldn’t it be better if they had something tangible?

Why not send them prints of the photos you want to send them? You can print them from your online gallery and they will send it straight to the recipient. The recipient then has a high quality photo print that they can keep forever. It’s doubly advantageous for older relatives who may not be all that computer literate. High quality online galleries use top-quality, Kodak photo paper, just like the kind of paper used for printing enlargements from film negatives optically. Most services offer a variety of sizes to suit your printing needs. Once your photos are online, the better online gallery services offer online editing tools so that you can enhance your digital photo printing. From there, you can order prints in a variety of sizes, in either glossy or matte, with an easy online form. If you’re in a hurry, many free online photo storage sites offer express shipping, directly to your friends or family.

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