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PART I1I SHARING YOUR WORK
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ONLINE STORAGE, GALLERIES,
AND PUBLISHING
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CHAPTER 6: DISPLAY AND DISTRIBUTION
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How cool is it that you can upload images to a site that will store your files and also make them available to others—all for free. Of course there is a commercial agenda for such largesse. Such sites inevitably offer an extended range of additional services that they want you to pay for. These
books and albums
are generally very good deals. The photofinishing (print- ing) comes out with a polish you can rarely match on your desktop.
Online services like those above make it quick and easy
to turn your photographs and other design artifacts into professional-looking publications. Costs are very reason- able. And the best parts are that a bound volume of your work finds an elegant home within your home, exists in a hard copy in case your computer dies, and can be viewed in- timately by individual readers. The last of these is the most important. Due to the years of conditioning we all receive, the act of reading spins a cocoon of focus and privacy. The simple act of leafing through a book may be the very best way of all to share your work.
There is room here to list only a few of the largest, oldest, and best-known sites.
Flickr offers online photo management and sharing, with over two million geotagged photos per month. KodakGallery used to be called Kodak Easy Share Gallery. You’ll find a line of Martha Stewart exclusive designs. Shutterfly claims to be number one among professional photographers. Its services include storage, sharing, editing software, and many related products.
Here are five examples of the types of books and albums you can create:
Snapfish announces over forty million users on its home page. It seems to have more products than the others. Zazzle It is less a storage space than a creative zone where you can show and sell your own design work. YouTube is the six-hundred-pound gorilla of user-generated video.
• Digital scrapbooks. These often come in a 12 x 12–inch format.
Vimeo takes a customizing approach that lets you ex- change videos only with the people you want to.
• Coloring books. These books include outlines from your original photos. Then kids can color them in.
cards and stamps
Zazzle.com lets you choose a size and the denomina- tion you want (267 cents for a postcard, 42 cents for a first-class stamp, and so on). Turns out the U.S. Postal Service is eager to turn a buck. You can choose a photo or a personal logo that will be printed onto a stamp that can be sent through the standard mail.
For a long time now my wife has been using Shutterfly to create a series of spiral bound, 5 x 7–inch albums (top photo) with the copyrighted name Snapbooks. The first twenty pages cost $10 or $15 with additional pages 50 cents each.
Your personal media can be handsomely circulated via our fine U.S. Postal Service. So don’t overlook these options:
A talented young couple visited our family with their dog, Jack. A few weeks later we got the book sampled in the bottom two pictures. Each shot felt appropriate
to a dog’s point of view. Apple was the provider of Jack’s handsome cloth-bound volume. Geraldine Laybourne;
Todd and Hannah Calvert
• greeting cards • postcards
• sticker books • note cards
• Classic landscape format. This is an 8.5 x 11–inch coffee table book with a cloth or leather cover.
• Mini albums. These small, bound books can hold collections of snapshots.
• Pocket photo books. These often come in a 5 x 7-inch size. This is a nice format size for personal photos.