Out of curiosity, I searched Google (photos resizing online) and found many options (1,370,000 hits – and no, I didn’t bother narrowing it). Then, I checked flickr to see if I could do it through my account. Sure enough, flickr has a partnership with Seattle-based Picnik, which offers web-based photo editing. After several false starts (Firefox has been crashing a lot over the last several days), I used IE and in no time flat, had resized my profile photo by 50 per cent, saved it to my hard drive, and uploaded it successfully to my identi.ca profile. I don’t see any real difference between the original and the resized image when I compare the thumbnails on several of my social networking profiles, but at the size below, I can see some loss of definition in shadows and highlights.

Original photo (535 KB)

Resized photo (190 KB)

Since then, I’ve been exploring image sites further and learning more about mashups, of which I’ve had a general idea for a while. The 7 Cool “Mashup” Websites – What Are Mashup Websites? YouTube video was very helpful. Some mashups covered that look interesting:

• Map Your Buddies – creates a mashup of Facebook, GoogleMaps and Amazon
• twittervision – a world map with dialog bubbles popping up in real time as people tweet
• Cloudme Search – an application for simultaneous search of Yahoo, YouTube, and flickr
• tuneglue – a mashup of last.fm & amazon ecommerce; the interactive maps are fun and it’s interesting to see the connections between artists
• vDiddy – shows random video clips from a number of sites; unfortunately, this site isn’t searchable

I explored the mashup awards photo category, which has lots of really interesting and fun things to see. Probably my favourite is Multicolr Search Lab, which allows searches of creative commons photos by colour and colour combinations. Once a set is created, clicking on individual photo tiles takes you to Flickr to see the full size photo. Also very interesting is Tag Galaxy. Below is one of the tag galaxies I created using this utility, as well as a Flickr set created by Multicolr Search Lab.

Image created by Tag Galaxy search on

Flickr set created by Multicolr Search Lab

I created a Flickr badge and have code to plug into my blog or website – now I just need to figure out how to add it to one of the side bars. I tried to make an e-card with delivr but it wasn’t working at the time. I notice that someone else working on SLA23Things had the same experience.

I checked out other tools briefly – enough to know which ones I’ll go back to and explore in depth:

• Captioner for creating captions on Flickr photos
• Flickr Color Pick
• Created a map of a couple of the groups I belong to using the Flickr map function
• Created a Flickr montage for the tag “boxer” using Montager – lots of beautiful dog photos popped up on mouse-over
• Looked at Slide – slide creating site
• Looked at Animoto – analyses your photos and music and creates a video
• Looked too briefly at Mosaic Maker – site to create mosaics from your flickr or uploaded photos
• Flickr Graph – fun and interactive way to explore photos of your friends/contacts and their friends/contacts
• Big Huge Labs – some fun-looking Flickr toys

programmableweb has a mashups directory to explore (as well as How-Tos, APIs and other resources) and warrants a return visit when I have a lot more time.

My photosets on Flickr

I’ve been using Flickr for some time – I’m not quite sure when I created my account and starting uploading photos. I have a Pro account because I wanted to create multiple sets and not be limited by maximum allowable uploads in any given month. I have both private and public sets. I figured most of my family wouldn’t want their photos on the Internet, so I’ve protected those only. I’ve geotagged most of my photos.

Things I’ve done during this week’s exercises:

• Explored Flickr more fully – created several collections (The Dogs, Travel, Family, Lost Pets) in my account
• Joined several Flickr groups (Rescued Boxers, Funny BoXers, That’s my Boxer)
• Added a photo to the group Photos of Fairchild at the invitation from the group administrator, joined the group and added a few more photos
• Explored some of the photos from other Flickr members on my maps (created by my geotagged photos)
• Blogged a photo from my Flickr photostream to Freckle & Ceilidh’s Blog (a blog devoted to our boxer and pug)
• Explored very briefly some of the other photo-sharing sites: Fotki, Photbucket, Picasa (using my Google ID), Share on Ovi, Smugmug, Shutterfly, Webshots
• Used some visual search tools: Pixsy, Retriever, Riya, Xcavator

One of my favourite sites not mentioned in this week’s SLA 23 Things is Earthshots, a photo site with amazing photos of the world we live in. I get an email from this site every morning and it’s a great way to start my day on the computer.

Things I still plan to do, at a later date:

• Figure out how to subscribe to my “recent comments” feed on Flickr.
• Continue with the remainder of Week 4 tasks.

I have a much bigger project, barely started – retrospectively scanning of my slides and negatives, and old photos from family albums. This project will take years, I’m sure.