by Derek Hatchard

Never in the history of humankind has it been so easy to take photos and share them.  Digital cameras are everywhere.  Your cell phone probably even has a half-decent digital camera built into it.  So the question is:  when you run events for your community group, team, or church, do you take pictures?  Do you share them afterward?

The Joy of Sharing

Photography is amazing; it captures a moment in time like nothing else can.  We all love looking at photos of special events.  Proud parents, grandparents, coworkers, parishioners, and pretty much everyone else with a heartbeat will flip through photos when given a chance.

For really special occasions we put photographs in special places like frames on the mantle and photo albums on the bookshelf.  But what do you do with photos from the not-quite-really-special events?  What about the little league semi-finals or the church picnic?

Easy answer:  share them online!

You can share photos online easily and it doesn’t have to cost you a dime.  The steps are insanely simple:

1. Create an account at an online photo sharing site.
2. Copy image files from your camera / memory card to your computer.
3. Upload image files from your computer to the online photo sharing site.
4. Share the URL (web address) with the world!

Online Sharing Services

I use Flickr (http://flickr.com/) for sharing my photos.  It’s a great service.  You can do a lot with a free acount from Flickr including uploading 100MB of photos each month.  I have a Flickr Pro subscription which costs $25/year and includes some extra perks like archiving of high-resolution original images and unlimited photo uploads.

A couple other top notch photo sharing sites are Shutterfly and SmugMug.com.

Sets and Tagging

Once you have shared some photos online, you should consider taking a few advanced steps.  On Flickr you can group photos into sets and collections, which is useful for organizing your photos.  You can then share your sets with people.  For example, here’s a set of photos I took in Athens last year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hatchard/sets/72157609677416675/.

Another useful thing you can do is tag photos.  Tags are keywords or terms that you choose to associate with a photo.  The act of assigning tags to photos is called tagging.  Other Flickr users can then find your photos via tags.  And other users can use the same tags on their photos!  When holding an event, encourage participants to use a common tag for the event and you will be able to follow the photos being posted by others about your event.  Here’s an example:  participants at Microsoft Canada’s Tech Days conferences are using the tag techdaysca for their photos.  You can see the photos being share here: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=techdaysca&m=tags.

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

If you’re still not feeling completely comfortable with this whole online photo sharing topic, try watching this video:

http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing 

Try It Out and Let Us Know

Feeling brave?  Why not go create an account right now and try uploading a few photos.  Leave a comment below to let us know how it goes.

Happy sharing!

(Photo Credit: photographer)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.