Thing 10: Sharing Photos

I have heard so much about Instagram, I decided to check it out. My husband is the family photographer, taking at least 1000 pictures during a 2 week trip. I thought it might be good for him to have a place to store photos where others could have access.

It turns out that Instagram is less a personal album and more a picture search. Somewhat like Pinterest, pictures can be searched and posters can be followed. In Instagram, posters who want to share photos with others are encouraged to label them with hashtags.

I tried topic searches several times for cities in Germany, where we will travel in May. It delivered many pictures, even for obscure, tiny towns. But, the pictures were quite random: what caught the eye of someone, with little consistency of intent. Was it to highlight architecture, catch the crowds, the fog, concentrating on tourist venues, food, businesses? Captions in most cases did not help to define the picture and on my iPad mini I had to scroll down to see the comments - really annoying.

Another feature is that the poster can place pictures on a map. How cool. In practice, though, when I looked for Munich, as I zoomed in on the map, many pictures would open at once and covered the map, so I could only get a vague idea of where a picture was taken. Plus, in this feature, there were no captions.

My conclusion is that Instagram is useful for casual pictures. It would not help organize travel pictures. It would not make a good fit for an album of pictures for a class project.

After this disappointment, I searched for a different photo storage app and found Adobe Revel. It looked like it might work well and it was Adobe! What a disappointment it was to discover after trying a few features that the app was free for 31 days, and then would cost $5.99/month or $59.99/year.

Not much luck in this category.

Thing 9: Taking & Editing Photos

Since I do my photo editing with Photoshop, I didn't want to duplicate that format. Therefore, I tried Color Splurge. It is as easy as the creator on the video said. I took a picture of trees in my back yard and then highlighted the sky, which was bright blue. I was pleased with the effect - and I did it with my finger.

The effect is quick and easy. This could be used for library promotional materials. Highlight one color on a book jacket or the title or the author.