Friday, February 28, 2014

23 Mobile Things - Thing 10 : Sharing Photos

Thing 10 “Sharing photos with family and friends is as easy as could be with apps, and as popular as ever. Selfies, sporting events, cat and dog pictures, Throwback Thursday, and more, people are taking picture of every aspect of their lives and sharing them with family and friends.”

So right up front I'm going to say -- Yup, that's me with photo sharing. Remember my post for Thing 9? I am all about capturing and sharing pics.

Instagram
So once again I've had this app for awhile. And once again I've not really used it. (Hmm, I see a trend here-- I check out apps & then use them for a little bit & move on if I'm not totally hooked right away.) So I'm giving Instagram another look & try. 

Right away upon signing in for the 1st time in 2+ years I see I have 3 requests to follow me. Why? I've posted 6 photos to-date. Here's a snip of my so-far pathetic account:



As you can see above: I need to update my profile and I have no followers nor am I following anybody. Boring. I do like the photos that I shared. 

I looked at finding some people to follow and opted for the FB link. I was surprised how many of my FB friends showed up! I then looked at a few of their profiles (if public) and their photos. Um, from the ones I previewed they all seemed to be pics that they shared on FB -- ones I've already seen. If that's the case then I'm not sold. I can see them on FB. Well, unless I just want to view pics and not feeds. Would I want to do that? 

Next up I tried "Instagram suggested". About 8 suggestions and nothing that jumped out at me as to why suggested? I'm not sure. I'm not a NASCAR fan. The others seemed random. Maybe random is in? I don't see where my profile gives a lot away about me that the app could have tried to determine my likes. Hmm, more wondering.

So lastly I looked via "Explore". Um, I'm not a prude but 1/2 of the suggestions were of girls in bikinis etc. -- those were the pics before I actually tried to explore. And if you're going to give me scantily clad people I'll take them in the good looking male version please and thank you. 

Exploring-- I tried "Paris" for a search term since I've been there and I'm of French descent. The general pics were a wide variety but I suppose that's to be since any user can assign any hashtag to a photo. Kind of like "tagging" in library catalogs. But I digress. "ParisFashionWeek" was more fun with lots of fashion to look at. stylewatchout had this graphic:





And lujanotova had this graphic:




I concur with both! So I'll leave Instagram for now-- I need to think it over a bit more as to how I would really use it and if I would use it. Maybe that's why I've had my account for almost 3 years and not really done anything. Hmm. Like I said, if I don't insta-ntly love it, I won't use it. 



Wednesday, February 26, 2014

23 Mobile Things -- Thing 9 : Taking & Editing Photos

Thing 9 “…there are a lot of apps to help you do a lot more with your photos without you having to be a Photoshop master. With some of these apps you can: add captions, change photo colors, add filters, add frames, and so much more.”

Oh this is fun! I am an overachiever when it comes to taking iPhone photos! I had to download a ton from my phone before I could upgrade to iOS 7 because there were so many taking up memory! And I'm horrible 'cuz I leave on the HDR so I get not one but two copies of each photo sucking up space. I like the double option because sometimes the lighting and details are better in one vs. the other -- and it's not always the HDR version. 

So 1st up was CamMe -- billed as a great selfie app that makes it look like you aren't doing a selfie. jd+Points right there. I have long arms so you'd think I'd be good at taking selfies -- um, wrong. I never look natural. I'm almost always looking in the wrong spot. So I gave the hands-free CamMe a try -- here's a snap that I did using the photo booth/old-type filmstrip option. 



As the app worked there was a countdown I could see. I opted to move slightly for each vs. it looking like it was the same photo x 3. Not too bad I'd say. 

Next up was Color Splurge. This is fun but you still need to putz a bit with the options and coloring. A lot depends upon the detail of the photo you use and how much detail you want in the end result. Here are a few that I did quickly:
This was my 1st attempt. I wanted to give a bit of contrast around our faces for a pop of color. I did 2 shades of purples on the fur trim for a bit of effect. (By the way, this photo was taken on our trip to the Ice Caves at the Apostle Islands. My friend, Julie, and I went in January, 2014 -- awesome!!) I found it a bit difficult to zoom in & out to get up close to do more detailing on my phone. And you can only do so much with your fingers as your tools. 

In this photo I wanted to just highlight our skin tones and focus only on the three of us, none of the background people or details. 

This is the window in my office. The detail isn't all that different although all I colored was the wood frame.

Here I took the photo above from CamMe and I simply colorized each section. I just quickly did this so I could have taken more time to play with the color combinations but this gave me an idea of what I could do. And even though the colors maybe aren't the best I almost like this version better than the original. 

Overall these photo apps are great little tools that add some fun to photos. They still can take a bit of time to be creative (depending upon what level you want to go to) but you can do them on the go with good results too.

23 Mobile Things -- Thing 8 : Social Media Management Tools

Thing 8: "...the opportunity to explore tools to help you manage all of your social media."

I'm on Facebook (mainly personal), Twitter (mainly professional), and LinkedIn (professional). I also mange our library Facebook and Twitter accounts. I have Google+ but I don't really use it. I was on Foursquare but I've pretty much abandoned that.

So looking at Social Media Management tools or apps was a little problematic for me -- I wasn't too impressed with the options that I found or I really don't think that I need them. I was interested in Slices that Heather (@HevWam) talked about in her Thing 8 blog post but I can't find Slices -- guess they've disappeared. 

I do use TweetDeck as a desktop app via my work PC. There isn't an iPhone or iPad app but that's okay. TweetDeck gives me the ability to keep track of both my Twitter account and our library Twitter account all at the same time. I can have multiple columns of display -- news feed, each account, mentions, maybe a hashtag content I'm currently following etc. Here's a snip of what it looks like (not all columns are shown):



For now this is probably the only Social Management tool that I really need. If I want to share something across platforms (say Facebook to Twitter or LinkedIn to Twitter) I can do this directly from those apps/products.  

I guess if I was really in the market for a Social Media Management tool I'd look more closely at Cloze -- it seems to offer a lot of integration with options.