Over the past year, my wife and I have taken tons of photos and video of our baby. We are constantly getting asked by friends to share pictures and videos of little floppyhead (hence the name of this site, though his head is no longer as floppy). Here are two suggestions for sharing photos and videos:
1) Use Picasa. It is a free digital photo album tool from Google. You can organize your photos, do a little bit of touching up, crop photos, and e-mail photos to friends and family. You can also send a link to a Google web album, which are free and does not require your family to register for an account like some of the other photo sharing services. The best thing about Picasa is that it handles large picture files very well. We bought a Digital Rebel camera so most of our images are quite large and are a pain to e-mail. Picasa automatically down sizes anything you e-mail or post to a web album, all from within the program.
2) Use Adobe’s Premiere Elements. I have yet to find a free piece of software that is as easy to use as Premiere Elements. Consider the $99 cost of the software as an investment in saving you time. Through Elements, you can make DVDs that include menus and chapters. DVDs in many ways are an easy way to share video. Everyone has a DVD player, even the older generations in your family that have no idea of YouTube. Plus, I am still alittle uneasy putting family videos on YouTube. Even if you are sharing videos online, Premiere Elements helps you make a slick looking video without a large learning curve.
August 27th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I was searching for suggestions like this a few months ago! I was starting to think my husband and I took too many photos of our babies-we were having a hard time trying to organize them all! We don’t have a camcorder so I have never tried Adobe’s Premiere Elements, but I did give Picasa a shot when I first heard about it. I thought it was ok- nothing all that spectacular but I thought it had good features and helped me organize all the photos we were taking. But, I was worried about the privacy element of online sharing with Picasa. It’s great that people don’t have to sign up to see your photos, but I want to make sure that my family photos are secure and that when I send people e-mails, with photos, they can’t be forwarded to anyone I don’t know about. I found another site that has great privacy features for both photo and video sharing. It is called Pixamo (www.pixamo.com) and that is what we have been using. For each photo, I can pick and choose who can and can’t see it. You can upload and control video like this as well. So far, it seems to handle our large files well- they upload quickly and the full size originals are always available. Pixamo automatically imports the date each photo was taken too, making it great for sorting through the hundreds I would download off the camera at once. Unfortunately, there is no photo editing tool, but I have found some good free ones online that work well for us.