Everybody loves looking back at pictures from a party, but unless you’re lucky enough to have one of those friends who brings a camera to every party and does the work for you, documenting the event can be a pain in the ass. Most of us would rather be, you know, partying. Today I’ll show you a few ways you can effortlessly—but extensively—document your next party, using everything from freeware software to some cheap hardware for your camera. When you’re done, you’ll be able to automate your party photos or make taking pictures fun, giving everyone incentive to contribute to the documentation process.
Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don’t just throw away a laptop because it’s banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen. With some free software, a little know-how and some creative thinking about your home network, nearly any old laptop can find its second wind, and today I’ll run through some of the best ways to get it there.Photo by daveynin.
Take beautiful, detailed close-ups with your compact digital camera with DIY weblog Curbly’s guide to macro photography. Macro mode is an excellent but underused (for most of as, at least) feature available to most compact digital cameras that focuses sharply on a small, close-up area, leaving the background nicely blurred. A good introduction to macro photography can open a whole new world to your point-and-click, so if you’ve never gone macro before, get ready to go on a snapping binge. Macro Photography – It’s the Little Things That Count [Curbly]
Mac OS X only: Freeware iPhoto plug-in FFXporter integrates with iPhoto to seamlessly upload your pics to the popular photo sharing web site, Flickr. Exporting pictures from iPhoto to Flickr with FFXporter is simple, and the uploads preserve the transfer of all your iPhoto metadata into Flickr—including titles, keywords/tags, and ratings. FFXporter also supports importing photos into your existing photo sets and can create sets from your uploads. For a slightly more robust but currently shareware iPhoto-to-Flickr exporter, check out Flickr Export. Otherwise the freeware, Mac-only FFXporter handles exports to Flickr with ease. FFXporter
Blogger Vinayaka CA details how he uses Google’s excellent photo management application Picasa to manage multiple photo libraries. His solution: Create a Picasa library under another user account (e.g., PicasaUser) on your Windows PC, then put a shortcut to Picasa on your main desktop. Whenever you want to use your alternate Picasa library, right-click the shortcut and select Run as ->PicasaUser. You’ll have to provide the other username and password every time you do it, and this isn’t as clean as if Picasa actually supported multiple libraries (like iPhoto and iTunes do), but it’s a good workaround if you want to separate your pics into multiple libraries. I gave it a try and it seemed to work, but if you’ve got a better method, let’s hear it in the comments.
How you can use picasa to maintain your p**n ? [Vinayaka's Blog]Windows only: Suck down Flickr pics en masse by username, user email, tag, or group with open source application FlickrDown. The latest release of Flickr Uploadr has made it easier than ever to upload your pics to Flickr, but if you ever wanted to bring those Flickr pics back to your desktop—or just suck down a bunch of pics from a Flickr group or tag you really like, FlickrDown handles your Flickr pics in the other direction. FlickrDown is free, Windows only, requires .NET 2.0.
FlickrDown [via gHacks]The fsckin w/ linux blog points Linux users to a really cool tool that creates detailed (and extremely huge) photo mosaics out of your own pictures. All that’s required is a folder full of pictures, a free command line tool named metapixel and, well, enough memory to process and open the output picture if you just copy and past the blog’s instructions (try knocking the “=-scale=X” value down a bit). We’ve shown you web sites and Windows programs that get similar results, but metapixel puts out results that are ready for your local print shop. Using the linked guide requires a free download of metapixel, which is available in some Linux repositories or as a download.
Generate Awesome Photomosaics on Linux with Metapixel [fsckin w/ linux]
