Sharing :: That feeling of being backed into a corner

Recent change over at google and flickr … and seems like everywhere else as well, have seen me seriously looking for alternative to where I can post photos for blog post and the best place to share on social sites. I was starting to warm to flickr, and use their auto uploadr to make my life simpler contributing to my daily photo album. Loosing that isn’t such a big deal but  the way it was done does diminish trust. Further my trust has pretty well also been savaged by google changes.

So What do I do?

1) Blogging, I went looking for automatic uploads (to both Flickr and Google Photo, without using their native apps). This seemed simple because most programs now have social share with options. A lot have the flickr symbol and a few have google+. Well guess what I tried out all of my photo managers and only one of them work to flickr (and that's ACDsee, which I am only trialing anyway) and that actually used two steps where it invokes the old flickr web up loader, then let the web loader do the upload but it worked. Picasa sort of works to google photos but its a maze to then find to where they are stored. The new Open Live writer, works just fine with google photos, so I am happy to continue with that, but none of the photo managers offers an inbuilt upload to google photo. I even went back to withknow, and the Idea of re-establishing the POSSE approach, and the upload to flickr doesn’t work! (the twitter link does still work). I’m having a little more success uploading to Tumblr but its not a compelling enough platform to change to, and I will just keep experimenting with it for my (not exactly) daily sketches.

So its Open Live Writer to google photos when I blogging and flickr “manual” web uploader and then embedded to blog or just get a link to share as an optional extra.

 

2) Social Sharing, well I could not find anything that does what a want except DropBox. There are cross posting icons everywhere but that means public sharing. My trouble is I don’t want to share with the world (those images are dealt with in option 1 above, Flickr and google photos are my only face to the world) so I’m abandoning all the social media share hysteria. I’m just going back to using drop box which I know I can share with a specific person (or people). Drop box isn’t totally photo friendly but it is very easy to use, both on phones and computers. If thats not suitable for the recipient or time is very tight its back to resizing down and using either MMS of email.

So its dropbox, MMS or email for sharing family photos. Further I’m adopting similar approach with friends and potential purchasers of my art, none of whom have yet complained.