What Is The Best Online Photo Management System?

Posted by Ian Kee on 17 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Online Applications

The best online photo management system is an important thing to find. You can do a lot with the internet, for example, backing up your photos and sharing them. If you want to have people see your photos at all, you’re going to want to upload them somewhere that gets traffic. You could build your own website and bring traffic to it, but that can take a long time. An easier way to do this would be to upload your photos to a photo sharing website such as Flickr. Flickr is well known to have hundreds of thousands of photos and people like to browse around to see what is being created. You can make this a part of your best photo management system.

To get an idea of how popular Flickr is, I just went to their website and there have been nearly 3,000 uploads to their site in the last minute! Yes, you read that correctly, 3,000 in the last minute! Obviously this means there are millions of photos on Flickr and so you may get lost in the sea of photos, but if you tag your photos correctly you will have a good number of viewers checking out your photos. I know of people who have been contacted by National Geographic because of their photos on Flickr. Flickr is a great way to get your name out there and to be noticed. If you feel like you have something to offer, get it up on Flickr right now!

One important thing to remember is that you need to protect the copyrights of your photos. If you upload anything, you need to be aware that people can steal your photos. It is therefore in your best interest to watermark your images and don’t upload the full size resolution photos. These two things can greatly reduce the risk you run of having someone steal your photography. No one wants to use a photo if it is too small to be used, and if there is a watermark on your images, this makes it even less desirable in terms of theft. Do make sure that your images aren’t too small or too marked up by watermarks however, as this can make your images no good for even viewing.

Part of having the best photo management is getting your photos out there for the world to see. You can easily do this with Flickr so I highly suggest that you get off your bum and do it.

An Introduction To Photo Management

Posted by Ian Kee on 16 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Information

Having the best photo management system available to you can not be underrated. The management part is so important because you want all your photos to be easily accessible at all times. This means everything needs to be organized in such a way that you can find it without spending hours searching through your hard drive. The type of software or organization that you need will depend on the amount of photos that you take. If you take thousands of photos a month, you’re going to need something that is capable of handling this much information, but if you’re just taking photos as a small hobby with only a few hundred photos a year, you don’t need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the best photo management software.

Let’s assume for right now that you are a professional photographer that takes thousands of photos every month. You are definitely going to want to have the best photo management that you can possibly have. There are several great pieces of software for you, but the top two that come to mind are Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Both of these are able to easily handle thousands of photos and put them in to very structured folders. You can tag each photo with various meta data, including keywords. This will allow you to easily pull up any photo if you know just a little bit of information about it, such as what year it was taken, who was in the photo, or which camera you used to take the photo. Not only can these programs aptly handle the organization of your photos, but they also have advanced photo editing capabilities. That discussion is for another time, however.

If you’re not a professional photographer however, you may be interested in other photo management software that doesn’t cost several hundred dollars. If you are an Apple user, iPhoto does a great job of organizing photos. For windows users, you can use a program made by Google called Picasa. Picasa 3 is now the latest version of this. These programs will let you manage photos with ease and they are both free. You may also be interested some of the best online photo management solutions if you want to print your photos or share them with others. In fact, using online photo management solutions is a great way to backup your photos. This way if your local computer crashes, you’ll still have your files on the internet. Flickr is currently the number one online photo management and sharing application available.

So as you can see your specific use of photography will dictate what kind of photo management system you will use. In the following articles I will continue to give you advice on how you can have the best photo management.