Picture this

A view of Noosa river at sunset

Each day in April I posted a picture along with my short recollection for the day over on Earlier Years. Many of those pictures I had sourced throughout the year from my own files and some from Pixabay. I created the daily graphics in Canva, Pixlr, Over, WordSwag or Haiku Deck. Some of these are available as apps on both iOS and Android, some have a web interface and all require minimal skill to output an acceptable graphic.

Now as the cooler weather of winter bids me spend more time indoors, I’ve sorted many digital snaps taken on my daily walks around the local area along with some photos from trips we’ve taken. I’ve  added some generic text that may focus my thoughts on a particular area of family history.

Dead palm frond

So far I’ve uploaded 35 of these pictures to Flickr in this album Images for family history blogposts. They are in a variety of sizes and shapes and will load quickly on any page. Some of these may prove useful for my readers, so I’ve made them public and set the date on all of these as June 2017, not the original date these photos were taken. If you have suggestions for further graphics along these lines, please add your ideas in a comment.

For those who will be attending Congress 2018 in Sydney next March be sure to get along to Jill’s session on Beaut Blogs: Ideas for Tarting up your Geneablogs. She will have lots more, ideas galore, for you to explore.

Graphics goodness

Made with Photofunia

Generating images

I enjoy playing around with graphics programs whether it be on computer, ipad or phone. Recently I introduced some folks to Canva a powerful design tool for posters and web graphics. Today I am highlighting a couple of other favourites.

Photofunia is just that, a place to have fun with photos and images. choose from a wide range of backgrounds, posters and situations to add your own text or photos.

No, I've not really been doing enough research to write these impressive tomes, all I've done is add a title and author to the already existing picture.

Insert your own picture at Photofunia

Next I took an early photo of two of my siblings and inserted them in this book. No authoritative sources here, but fun to lighten up your blog or presentations. Photofunia is also available as an app on all platforms.

Another on my list is PicMonkey the easy to use shape cut-outs and multiple banners provide a quick method of producing graphics for posts. No particular skills needed but if you prefer some tutorials, there are plenty of useful hints.

This is a graphic for a story that had a particularly rocky ending when some little girls were not allowed near a fast flowing creek again for quite a while.

These ones have been around for a long time. All four are useful for to generating signs or titles.
Big Huge labs for billboards, magazine covers and badges
RedKid sign generator
ImageChef
Spell with Flickr

Meanwhile back to my research!

Make a quick logo in PicMonkey

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2015/01/graphics-goodness.html

It's a Snap!

Organising photos

Time to get down to some serious organising. Our first digital camera back in 1997 did not serve to improve our photography techniques but did indeed provide a sudden upsurge in the number of photos we took.  Suddenly we had photos on a computer and we followed some basic conventions in naming and grouping them into folders.

As the years passed with new cameras, phones and other digital devices, our world became flooded with digital imagery and in our busy lives some organisation fell by the wayside. The addition of cloud storage has resulted in photos being scattered across multiple places. Add in all those years of print photos to be scanned and this looks like a mega task, but a step by step process will get it done.

Improvements in image software combined with more sophisticated methods of digital storage and retrieval systems all provide for an improved experience once image files are well organised. A systematic review along with an approach that will better facilitate search is needed. I have some ideas to guide the process.

• The more information there is about a photo, the easier it will be to find it again by search.
• Adding metadata is the digital equivalent to writing on the back of a physical photo and the best information on the back of old photos were the dates, names, places, events and comments. Now tags can be added too.
• Backup and off site storage is crucial, no one wants to lose years of photographs in flood, fire,  or some other unexpected disaster such as a computer crash.

Review

1. Make a master list of locations of photos to be sure all are processed. 
2. Decide on file naming conventions year, month, date; event, series or person e.g. folders by year, then events in that year. Consider batch renaming functions to process folders of images about an event.
3. Right click properties on an individual photo to enter basic metadata - use the photo gallery editor in Windows to add further comments and for the facial recognition software embedded in it. Highlight all photos in one folder to add a generic comment e.g. for wedding or other event photos this is a quick method to add detail about the event to all the photos in one go
4. Consider names, date, time, places, source, photographer and other comments
5. Do some quick edits to fix lighting, focus, orientation, crop or one of a dozen other edits: use free software. 
6. Work on and complete one folder at a time. 
7. Backup each time a batch is finished.

Some useful tools

Free software

• Irfanview
• XnView
• GIMP
• Picasa

Free web apps no need to download software

• Pixlr family 
• PicMonkey
• iPiccy

Mobile metadata editors

• PhotosinfoPro - iOS app, excellent for adding metadata
• Photo editor- Android, edit images and metadata

And I'm underway, Day 2 and facial recognition of known people done. Bulk metadata added to comments field in three separate folders.  All those albums to be scanned, arrgh... to be done slowly.

Windows Photo Gallery

Windows photo gallery is part of the Windows Essentials free suite of tools

Open picture in Windows Photo gallery

  

Toolbar - simple metadata entry options, includes quick find by person after facial recognition applied.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/its-snap.html

It is very tempting but do you want wet feet?

There has been a lot of hype around the Getty announcement re using its images on blogs and websites for noncommercial purposes, but Judy G. Russell at The Legal Genealogist advises us to read the Terms of Service first. You may well be surprised at the issues she uncovers. I recommend you read her comprehensive post Getty images: not quite free to use .

Welcome Wellcome

Today Wellcome has made available a wonderful collection of images,"thousands of years of visual culture"  with Creative Commons licensing. The image above comes with the following details:

A humorous image of two men wearing revolving top hats with several attachments for optical aids and tobacco etc. Coloured etching. 1830 Published: T. McLean,London (26 Haymarket) :  1 January 1830 
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 2.0, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 

It is wonderful to see the increase in Creative Commons works being made available for all to use and share. Browse and enjoy this newly available selection of images.

Gmail and images

Image size in Gmail

 Modern cameras and phones are capable of producing high resolution images which result in large file sizes. Images attached to gmail retain their original size. Whilst gmail generously allow attachments up to 5 mb this is a burden for the both the sender and receiver and can quickly use up one's allocated storage quota.

Inserting images into the body of the message instead of sending an image as an attachment, provides a quick method for reducing the image size.

1. Click the "Compose Mail" button or reply.

2. Locate the image you want to include from your computer. 

3. Drag the image and drop it into the body of your Gmail message window. You must add the image to the message body; if you use attach file, you will not be able to reduce the image size.

4. Click the image in the email message body to select it. Underneath the image you get to choose small, medium, large or original.

Now where was that huge image I needed to send?

Collaborative searching - Learning with jigsaw

photo © 2008 Liza | more info (via: Wylio)

The issue
A common problem with student assignments is the lack of acknowledgement of image sources used within their documents. I wanted to engage the students "who know all about search" at age 13. This was a successful lesson that begins to address those problems.


Objectives

• Familiarisation with Creative Commons, and recognition of the need for attribution
• Introduce a range of search tools for finding CC images
• Foster collaborative learning

How do you engage 13 year old boys who know all about search? I decided to use a jigsaw activity to expose students to a range of search tools not previously encountered.
After viewing and discussing the video about Creative Commons, students numbered off from 1 to 4 around the room. Each student then had the task of  investigating  one of the following search tools according to the number they had been given. They were tasked with the expectation that they would be able to teach someone else about that tool, along with the advantages and disadvantages of using it.

1. Compfight
2. Flickr CC Advanced
3. Wikimedia Commons
4. Morguefile

After about 5 minutes of individual endeavour, each number 1(2,3,4) gathered with his group to share the information they had found. This way any student who missed basic points, learnt from the others and expertise was developed.
The number 1s then paired with a 2, and the 3s with a 4. Each had to teach the other student about the search tool they had used. Then the 1s met with 3s and 2s with 4s, where they now had to explain both the tools they had seen.
This enabled me to help those students less confident and provide some guiding questions to those who needed further assistance; individual attention for those most needing it. Students were well engaged and willingly shared their learning. Movement around the classroom also helps boys' concentration in a 50 min period.
Have you used this jigsaw method? I'll certainly be using it again.
The Jigsaw classroom

MWSnap and Snipping Tool

During holiday breaks I enjoy finding the tools that make life easier. I've used MWSnap for several years to take screen shots for documents and in house publications.

It is a free download with a comprehensive range of tools that include a colour picker and an on screen ruler. I like the simplicity of the interface and the ease of use, but occasionally it has collapsed and I've had to reload the software. There are plenty of on screen editors embedded in web browsers now but I still prefer this simple tool to save my images.

Screen shot of MWSnap using the Snipping Tool from Windows 7

Recently I've moved to Windows 7 and just found the Snipping Tool from the Accessories menu which has limited functionality but has earned a temporary spot on my task bar just for quick accessibility. It has simplified taking this shot of the MWSnap window without having to use the Print Screen option or employ another third party tool. Only time will tell if it retains its spot on the valuable Task Bar real estate.