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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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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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What are Digital Storytelling Stories?

October 24, 2008 at 5:43 pm · Filed under blog ·Tagged ,

Digital storytelling stories are stories that are created by using photographs, music, graphics and voice recordings. This is a relatively new way to express creativity and tell a story. The digital storytelling stories you create can be fiction, educational in nature or just a great way to display your own photographs. These digital storytelling stories become useful when you like to go on family trips each year and take a million pictures. You can take each trip and make it into a digital storytelling story, and look back at the wonderful time you had spending time together. You can also tell your stories with spoke words using audio photo sharing.

How Do You Create Digital Storytelling Stories?
There are many tools both online and off that can be used to create digital storytelling stories. A simple example would be a PowerPoint presentation that includes music and a narrative. There are several other free programs available for download on the internet and some websites where you can simply create your digital storytelling stories online.

What are the important elements of digital storytelling stories?
As with any type of story, there are certain elements that are required to make it compelling. First you need a topic. The topic of digital storytelling stories could be about almost anything. A story that can be told in anywhere from a couple of minutes to about ten minutes at most is best. The story needs to have a definitive beginning, middle and end.

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The other important elements of digital storytelling stories are the pictures, words and sounds that are used. The pictures should almost be able to tell the stories themselves and the words should give further illumination and detail. Music should be used, as it is in movies, to evoke the emotions.

Why should you create digital storytelling stories?
This is where digital storytelling stories get really fun. They can be about almost anything. Often they are used to convey a particular point of view through the use of a story. An example would be a story about global warming and the importance of reducing pollution in the air. Other times they can be used to educate. An example would be a story about proper tooth care that showed how to brush and floss properly.

Fiction stories are also a fun use of digital storytelling stories. You could use a book and the illustrations would each be a frame of the story. Sound effects and music could be added with the narrative to make the story come alive. Another option would be to have “actors” play out the scenes in your story and to take digital photographs of the action.

As mentioned above, family vacations and other fun family events such as birthdays or holidays make great topics for digital storytelling stories. This is a great way to preserve family memories and they are a lot more interesting to watch than an old fashioned slide show or 8mm home movie!

Summary
Digital Storytelling stories are a fun way to combine traditional storytelling with modern technology in order to truly engage the viewer. Audio photo sharing can help enhance the experience. Stories may be true or fiction and can employ various graphics, words and music. They are a great tool for preserving memories, educating people or just plain good entertainment.

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What You Should Know About Free Image Hosting

October 7, 2008 at 3:28 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

There are more blogs and other website that are coming on board talking about uploading photos. If you have a free online photo album, you can use free online photo storage to host your images. The demand for these hosting services is constantly increasing. These images are usually stored on a server and other people can see them.

It only takes a few minutes to upload images on you free online photo album. You have to decide which images you want to upload. Select those and then transfer those images to the server. Free image hosting allows you to upload more than one image. This saves time when you’re uploading them to your free online photo album.

On your free online photo album, you can upload different image formats, such as .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .bmp, .gif and .swf. Whatever formats you decide to upload to the server, you can show those images to your friends and family by providing them with a link. Or you can send them thumbnails where they can access the larger size of the images.

Free online photo storage is also helpful to create photo blogs or slideshows. You can also add commentary to the images that you have uploaded on your free online photo album. It can also be used to change the sizes of the uploaded images.

Using free image hosting allows you to use those services that are offered to the public. Keep in mind that you will be exposing your images to people that you don’t know. So anyone that has access can see your photos. However, the benefit of using this is you can upload as many images as you want. You will also have plenty of space with no limits. They also offer plenty of image views each month. This is provided at no cost to you. After uploading photos, you will have thumbnails for you to use on blogs and other sites.

There are plenty of free image hosting services out there to choose from. You won’t have a problem finding one that suits your needs. Make sure that it works well with your free online photo album. You will want to look at the features that they have prior to making a final decision. You want to make sure that your images upload correctly and that they look nice on your online photo album.

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How To Protect Your Online Photos

October 6, 2008 at 8:04 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

It only takes a matter of minutes to post photos online. That’s one of the great things about technology. It has evolved so much and so quickly in the past few years. The idea of free online photo albums was a great idea. Now more people are starting to embrace the concept.

People that are interested in creating a free online photo album can get one free from the internet. You can create it however you want. You will have to make your selections based on how many photos you have and the size you want them in the album. You can also decide what colors and what theme you want to use.

Creating a free online photo album is very easy and simple to do. In fact, it shaves a few hours from your time. If you were creating a photo album with a book, it could take several hours to do.

In addition to uploading photos, you’ll want to have a place to store and protect them. Some people can get a little overzealous if they see something that they like. You can create private folders and create sub-albums.

When you create private folders after uploading photos, you will need to also create a password for access to the folders. This would work for free online photo albums that you would want only certain people to access.

Some sites allow you to store your photos on their server. When you’re ready to create your free online photo album, you can retrieve them from the storage area. It’s up to you which pictures you only want certain people to see and which ones can be seen by the public. For the most part, you can just point and click the photos to place them where you want them to go.

It’s easier to have a free online photo album because you can show it to anyone you wish. You can even make comments or captions to reference them. There is even a place where other users can leave comments regarding them.

You are in control of whether or not you want to make your photos public or private. Having a password area is really a great idea if you just refuse to allow certain people to look at what you have.

In addition to that, your images will be safe stored away securely, even if your home suffers damage from a fire or flood.

It’s also nice to be able to show your photos to others, but it’s also nicer when they can stay in the right hands.

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How To Tell A Story With Digital Storytelling

October 6, 2008 at 7:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Digital storytelling is a creative way to tell a story to others without having to sit in front of them. You can do this by creating a free online photo album and adding commentary or other thoughts to the pictures. It adds a special touch to what you’re trying to convey.

There are plenty of ideas that you can use for digital storytelling. You can use images from a family reunion and add text to them. You can explain who is in each image and what they’re doing or what is looks like they’re doing. This can be done in text, using commentary or captions.

Digital storytelling allows you to bring back precious memories, such as when you were in school. You can upload your school photos from years past and provide commentary or a caption under each one. You can also upload photos from any school activities that you were involved in.

People will be amazed at how you have matured each year. The photos when you were younger are usually the cutest. People are more apt to talk about those. Even with that, it doesn’t mean that your other school photos look bad. They represent an evolving of each year that you were in school.

Digital storytelling can help to bring your images back to life, especially if they are older or aging ones. The memories from years past are priceless. Even though you can’t go back to those years, you don’t have to forget them. You can stay connected to others through the wonderful images on your free online photo album.

You don’t have to concern yourself with carrying a large photo album book from place to place to reminisce of fond memories. With digital storytelling, you can easily let others know that you have photos to share.

Also, if you don’t want to use text, there’s also audio. You can do this on your own or you can have several people join you. Doing it with more than just you adds a special touch. It makes others feel honored and privileged to be part of this special project, and it’s a special way of sharing your memories with loved ones, young and old for many years to come.

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What You Should Know About Free Photo Editing

October 6, 2008 at 5:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

There are so many digital cameras and cell phones that are used to take different kinds of images. A lot of the people that take these images use free photo editing to make their images of better quality.

There are free online photo album websites that incorporate digital photo editing. It is free to use and it will help you to enhance your images when you upload them to your free online photo album.

Look to see what kind of editing functions the free online photo album website uses. You need to know what your photos will be used for and how they will be shown. This will help you to be able to enhance the photos on your free online photo album. Some of the things you need digital photo editing for include:

- Contrast
- Brightness
- Hue
- Red Eye
- Cropping

You want your photos to look as crisp and clear as possible, minus any blemishes. When you’re uploading your photos on your free online photo album, you want them to look as professional as possible. Even if you’re not a professional photographer, you still want the photos to look nice and have good quality.

If you have older or aged images that you would like to include on your free online photo album, they can be scanned and then use the editing tools to enhance the image. You can even use images that were back in the time when your ancestors were around.

That would be a great idea for a family ancestry album online. When other family members look at what you’ve created, they will be so pleased. Keeping tabs on the family lineage is important for a lot of people. This may the only way they can trace their history.

It’s a great advantage to have free photo editing incorporated on a photo sharing website. This way, you don’t have to go looking for editing software. The editing tools are right there for you to use.

You want your photos to look good. If you’re planning on photo sharing, which a lot of people are doing, then you want the recipient to be able to see the photo clearly and not having to squint to figure out who it is.

After you get rid of all the blemishes, your photos will look good as new. They should be something that you want to be proud of and show to other people.

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