What do you do with your pictures

[MarkBarbieri]

So you got that digital camera. You took lots of pictures. Now what do you do with them?

I post mine to my smugmug site.

I make slideshows for many of our trips and another at the end of each year.

I have the screen savers on all of our computers show them like slideshows.

I don't print too many. Most of the ones I do print get printed at 11x14 are displayed around the house. The only time we print 4x6s is when we need to send them to my wife's non-computer using relatives.

Once an HD video format becomes common, I'll probably start incorporating them into video/slideshows rather than using photo only slideshows.

 

[WillCAD]

I'm just about the same as you; I keep my pics digital and never print them. I use them in screen savers, as desktops, and projects once in a while.

The screensavers are the most common use for me. My PC is in the living room and is on whenever I'm home, so I see the screensaver all the time.

 

[RobinMarie]

I pretty much do the same. I put them up on webshots, send emails to the family for viewing, and look at 'em often. I do have a screen saver show in my office which sits behind me. I can tell when the screen saver kicks in because the person I am talking to starts looking over my shoulder.

 

[mabas9395]

I've started to put them on smugmug as well. My wife will print out a few of the best ones to put into the scrapbooks. I've just started working on video/photo slide shows. When I got our video camera two years ago, I wanted one that I could download the movies onto my computer. And last year when I upgraded my computer, I made sure it could handle video editing. So for two years I've been "planning" on doing this. But just this week I downloaded the Sony Vegas Movie Studio 30 day trial and I've been playing with that. My goal is to make a year in review DVD like MarkBarbieri has on his site for all of my kids to have when I finally kick them out of the house (DD just started kindergarten so it will be a while).

Some times I find my kids sitting at the computer waiting for the screensaver to come on so they can see the pictures, so I really should get these dvd's done while they're young enough to enjoy them.

 

[fitzperry]

When we first went digital about 5 years ago, I printed everything that was fit for paper because I was so accustomed to having prints. I've sort of evolved into printing only those things I have some kind of a plan for. We have plenty of prints around the house in various sizes from 4x6 to 16x20 (mostly 5x7's and 8x10's). I also have some prints made for our more technologically-challenged relatives, and I make photo books as gifts for them too.

I also scrapbook, but I've given up the notion of scrapbooking anything but vacations, so I choose the best of our vacation photos and have those printed. I'm pretty far behind on those too at this point, though I did do an album for our Disney trip last year. I haven't gotten into the digital slide shows. I have used some digital scrapbooking tools to make cards though, which has been kind of fun.

 

[RadioNate]

I scrap our vacations. Usually just Disney or other randon trips. Like fitzperry I've given up on scrapping anything but 'big' events.

I do DVD slideshows and photobooks.

I have those Pottery Barn style collage frames in my family room and I update those every so often.

I make poster sized prints for DHs office and if I eventually get a house with a finished basement or game room I'll probablly blow up some of my shots for that.

 

[0bli0]

it depends on which photos. sports photos - i generally print out many for sale to parents (a few thousand a season across all teams and codes). for teams that i'm not revisiting, i will put them up on a website for sale - but i've found people are more likely to buy (and order enlargements) printed out than online. and of course the portraits i do for customers get printed.

i also print out a ton of photos of my family. my office is a veritable shrine to my kids - with about 35 photos - mostly of the kids and some of other things (scenes from africa, around sydney, asia, etc.).

at home we have 2 digital photo frames in the living room and also the computers around the house show images on screensaver.

and i have images up on a few different sites for family, friends, publishing on boards like this one, etc.

 

[handicap18]

I look at mine

 

[jann1033]

so far being pretty new to digital they are all sitting on my computer and discs...i just signed up for photobucket pro ( probably a waste of $25) and am going to go through my over 3000 pics and make some slide shows...husband keeps telling people he'll show them our vacation pics( like they are just panting for the chance to see them ) and as yet not sure how that is going to happen maybe this winter i'll do some scrapbooking but haven't as yet

not to derail but would i need a special program for dvd slide show or would i just make the slide show on photoshop e4 then burn it on a dvd? ( novice!)

 

[WillCAD]

FYI for those who might want it, this is the screensaver I use to display my pics:
http://www.joeltechnologies.com/PSindex.html

It is free, but it is one of the better pieces of software I have come across. It doesn't make any massive changes to your Windows registry, it doesn't take much hard drive space or ram to operate, it is very simple to configure, and it has tons of options that can be set, such as captions, transitions, and saved sets of pics called "collections", which you can change with a single mouse click.

 

[juligrl]

I scrapbook so I do end up using all the prints that I choose to get made. Also, I have a grandmother who always used to say "But I never get any pictures..." Now we always go armed with our favorites of the girls.

 

[MOmousefan]

All of my pictures are on my hard drive in addition to being backed up to a DVD. I post some on Photobucket, make slide show/movies with MovieMaker and Photostory. With the advent of digital photography, I don't print that many pictures out any more.

 

[handicap18]

Ok I actually did intend to expand upon my earlier post, but I got side tracked by the kids and unexpectedly was taken away from the computer for a while.

anywayyyy
When I first started with digital I printed all my pics (well at least the majority of them) and keep them in photo books to continue my film photos. However, with the addition of each child that has become more and more difficult to keep up with. Especially now that I have the dSLR since I find myself taking a LOT more pictures than I had in the past. Since Jan I've taken just under 3000 shots (including a 4 day trip to Disney with DW back in June). Granted I haven't kept all of them. Many get deleted after I take them and others are just duplicates of the same subject just with slightly different settings to try and get the best picture.

With that, I'm leaning more towards creating Picture CD/DVD's. Haven't really started it yet because we need a new DVD player in the main living room. The one there is about 7 years old and has a hard time with playing CD/DVD's I create. Once it is replaced I'll use that tv and dvd player to show more pictures. I'm also thinking of added the screensaver software WILLCAD mentioned to the other computer that is in the main living room. I think the family will enjoy that.

I haven't decieded yet if I'm going to continue to print all pics and add them to photo albums. That is what I've been doing for 25 years, but the photo albums are starting to take up a lot of space. We'll see what happens.

Also, all my digital pictures are backed up to a CD or DVD before they are deleted from the media card. I lost about 8 months worth of pictures about 3 years ago because I didn't have them backed up when I had a hard drive failure. I did have most of them printed out, but its not the same. Lesson learned.

 

[boBQuincy]

We print some, scrapbook (digital) some, and use some in video slide shows.

The rest we post on DisBoards!

 

[AZ JazzyJ]

FYI for those who might want it, this is the screensaver I use to display my pics:
http://www.joeltechnologies.com/PSindex.html

It is free, but it is one of the better pieces of software I have come across. It doesn't make any massive changes to your Windows registry, it doesn't take much hard drive space or ram to operate, it is very simple to configure, and it has tons of options that can be set, such as captions, transitions, and saved sets of pics called "collections", which you can change with a single mouse click.

Oh wow, you weren't kidding. You really are a computer geek that likes to take pictures. I thought I was the only one that finds software based on Windows registry behavior. As a card-carrying member of the kingdom of geekness, I would like to invite you to our club meetings. I am in charge of the secret handshake. I haven't got it completely defined yet but it does require opposable thumbs.

Jeff

 

[WillCAD]

Oh wow, you weren't kidding. You really are a computer geek that likes to take pictures. I thought I was the only one that finds software based on Windows registry behavior. As a card-carrying member of the kingdom of geekness, I would like to invite you to our club meetings. I am in charge of the secret handshake. I haven't got it completely defined yet but it does require opposable thumbs.

Jeff

I don't FIND software based on its registry behavior, I find it GOOD based on its registry behavior.

The way I figure it, if a piece of software is un-intrusive enough to install on a Windows XP machine without administrator rights, it's un-intrusive enough not to trash my registry when it gets upset.

Here are two more of my all-time faves:

http://www.ghisler.com/
Total Commander, a file manager that does everything Windows Explorer does and much, much more, including batch renaming, FTP, file date changes, and a better, easier file search than Windows. I use it to manage all of my files, including my photos.

http://www.textpad.com/
TextPad, the best text file editor I have ever used. Think of it as the WordPerfect of text editors; it has an excellent spell checker, MDI, excellent search and replace, and syntax checking for those of us who like to write program code. I use it to create HTML pages, many of which display my photos on my web site.

 

[Groucho]

I too am one of those that rarely or never prints out photos. I run my own web site (first-level domain name, FreeBSD server in the basement, etc) and have a gallery on there, which is mostly car photos but also a good number of vacation photos. I also host a private forum on there that my friends and I use. (About 50k messages, so it's fairly busy for a small, private forum!)

I have been toying with going with a commercial provider to host my website, as going through my cable modem, I get fantastic downspeeds (7 meg currently) but uploading is very limited, so I don't really promote my website as I don't want it to be overloaded. Plus, I try to host relatively large photos as it's frustrating to look at pictures online that are tiny.

Most of my picture views are probably on my screen savers... I use dual monitors at work and at home (once you get used to it, there's no going back!) and few screen saver slideshows deal with them properly. I use the free version of gPhotoShow, which shows a different picture on each monitor. (I'll check out the one that was linked here earlier to see how it compares.) It's also pretty clean in terms of leaving junk on your PC.

(I despise the term "geek" though so please don't use it on me! Geeks are by definition circus freaks, usually biting the heads off chickens. I don't do that!)

Anyway, I find that the vibrancy of viewing photos on a monitor to be very appealing compared to a printed photo, plus the large size makes it easy to see details.

The last couple prints I had made were actually done by a traveling Canon trailer event, where they give you a free lunch and invite you to look at their business equipment (mostly copiers, scanners, and printers.) They had a big poster printer and invited us to bring over some pictures to print. I stopped back at the office and found a pic of my son (probably 14 months old or so in the pic) in his Subaru rally driver outfit on the back on my STi holding on to the spoiler (very cute photo IMHO) and a shot of my wife and son (then 9 months) sitting on Main St USA with the castle in the background. The first pic was sized at 1280x1024 for my screen saver and the other I had in full 5mp straight from the camera (Minolta Z5), since I had the laptop with me on the trip to back up photos to.

The printer, in only a couple minutes, spit out beautiful, big prints of them. They were, I think, maybe 17x24 or so - quite big, and even the 1280x1024 looked great (though you could see the pixels if you looked closely.) Of course, the printer did cost just over $100,000.............. it's probably $70k for the printer and $30k for the Canon badge on the front. (KIDDING, KIDDING! Just a cheap shot (no pun intended). )

I bought frames for them, now I just need to get around to hanging them on the wall.

 

[Groucho]

FWIW, I use PowerDesk (the free version) for file management and MDInotepad (for text editing), mostly because I'm cheap. I've tried a zillion file managers and used to swear by Norton File Manager but it doesn't behave so well under XP, and Textpad is wonderful but not free. PowerDesk is good but I'm sure there's something better, but I haven't found it. I'm very particular about the "feel" of my programs.

 

[grlpwrd]

Besides the hard drive, I also store important photos on DVD and I also have online albums just in case. My computer crashed last year and thank goodness I had my photos backed up.

For relatives I have an online album so they can look and order if they want. For grandparents, though, I order copies for them thru Winkflash or I go to Costco since they don't have computer access.

I also scrapbook. I have them developed thru Costco and pick them up or thru Winkflash.

For correspondence I write letters and include a copy of the pic from my printer. That way it's cheaper and more convenient.

 

[JR6ooo4]

Oh wow, you weren't kidding. You really are a computer geek that likes to take pictures. I thought I was the only one that finds software based on Windows registry behavior. As a card-carrying member of the kingdom of geekness, I would like to invite you to our club meetings. I am in charge of the secret handshake. I haven't got it completely defined yet but it does require opposable thumbs.

Jeff

maybe some sort of left click - right click pattern in the mix


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