Backing up your photos

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While the bushfires were raging in Victoria, Australia, I’m sure many of us were thinking what would we take with us if we were in a hurry and we knew our house would probably burn down. Many think of their photo albums, but these days most of our photos are on the computer. Of course one could run with the hard disk, but rather bulky when you only have minutes to get out. An alternative is to have an extra external hard drive which would be easier to take.

We used to have CDs to back up our photos to and we still do, but how to find them in a hurry unless you are well organised? We also now have USB memory sticks but these items are also ones which cannot be in the house if you don’t have much time to get out.

The answer is to store them on someone else’s server.

If you have your own self hosted blog or web site, you can easily upload them via FTP (Filezilla is free) to your host, depending on the plan you have and how much room is there. They don’t have to link to your web site or blog;  just let them sit there. Create a folder called ‘photos’ on your host’s server. Of course, if you change your host remember to download all those photos to your own computer again. I lost quite a few photos by forgetting that once.

Then there is Flickr You can store as many photos as you like here and you don’t have to show them as public photos.

Everyone has an ISP. Most of these allow you to make a small web page for free. You could use that.

Also there is Google’s picasa - you can upload to this and make your photos private.

Off-site, online storage is really your best bet. Now, all you have to do is upload!

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Over 5000 web 2.0 applications

Dew on a spider's web in the morning.
Image via Wikipedia

This site has many free sites where you can communicate, share, and edit stuff online. They are all web 2.0 applications. Worth a good look. I tried out resize an image and that was good. Easier than going into Irfan View I suppose.

http://simplespark.com/

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How to make money with digital photography

I have been a photographer for many years and have done courses and developed my own photos. Now though, I only use a digital camera a Canon Power Shot S30 in fact. I bought a digital camera very early on and paid a fortune at the time. Since then, digital cameras have come down in price and my 3.2 mega pixel capacity is not as I’d like it. Nevertheless, I can still take quite large photos of excellent quality with the camera set on ‘large’ resolution. You can get 10 pixel cameras now for quite small prices.

Now, to get your photos ready for stock photo sites, for which you will get some money if your photo is bought, you will really need Photo Shop. I know it is expensive but it is the best. It has every feature you would want for web design, brochures, leaflets and any thing else that these stock photo sites like. You can look at my free editor page but none of them do the job that Photo Shop does and if you are serious about photography you need it.

There are heaps of Photo Shop tutorials free on the Internet, but to have them all together and to be able to look up an index, a book still serves the best function. PhotoShop for Windows & Macintosh is one of them.

Uploading to stock photo sites

I upload to Big Stock Photo, stock-xchng and dreamstime

Stock Photos, Search and Download Now!

I have been most successful on Dreamstime

You can use these stock photos at Cafe Press. Make a calendar, or any product and sell it. Or use them for brochures, book covers, web page backgrounds.

Should you want to set up your own stock photo site you can use the software package PhotoStore. PhotoStore is a professional, user friendly, web based software package that enables you to publish and sell your photographs, images, artwork, prints and products online. PhotoStore was created specifically for photographers to easily sell their photos online. With its advanced features it can also be used to run stock photo type sites.

For the personal web sites set up to share photos between friends Google‘s Picasa now has a web album

You can see mine at Picasa web albums

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