Share Your Photos More Deeply

I’m a bit of a panorama photo lover, but the problem with panoramas is sharing those photos with others. Small prints lose details, same as small email attachments, and many free photo sharing sites aren’t geared for panoramics. Well along comes Deep Zoom Technology from Microsoft, to the rescue!

Microsoft recently released Deep Zoom Composer. A desktop application, allowing users to create deep-zoom application that can be uploaded for website viewing. I had a chance to play with Composer, it’s interface is minimal and it’s mostly drag & drop interface allows you to build a deep zoom app pretty quickly.

Check out a shining example of Deep-Zoom being used by the HARD ROCK CAFE.

So let’s say, you like Deep-Zoom, but you don’t have your own website. What can you do? Check out www.deepzoompix.com , with a Windows Live ID, you can upload your high resolution photos or panoramas and share them with the world. All the Deep-zoom work is done on the server. This is really just a technology showcase and the site says they’ll close the service at the end of 2009. So that gives you a few months to share your hi-res photos… For those interested, I’ve uploaded my own panoramas and misc photos. CHECK IT OUT!

Remember, you need the latest Silverlight installed to view these cool pix!

Free Panoramic Software – ICE

I’ll keep this post short & sweet. Microsoft has released a nice FREE piece of software for photographic users. Microsoft ICE. MS ICE is short for “Image Composite Editor”, a fancy term for photostitching software. What’s nice about this, aside from it being free, is that it offers some interesting outputs for your images. Including, the fun, Deep-Zoom. Deep-Zoom, is something similar to Zoomify, but using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. (oh, there’s the catch!) Yes, the freebie has a catch, if you want to use some of the “cooler” features of MS ICE, you’ll be using MS technology to showcase that. You also have the option to export your panorama as an HD-View Image. Again, another Microsoft technology. I find it odd that MS is using 2 different technologies that in the end do something similar. You’ll just have to try out the technologies to see what you prefer.

Photoshop Express

An online version of Photoshop is available for free. Browser based photo editing goodness. No, don't expect fancy layers and masking, but some good image enhancement and cropping tools are available. Enjoy! Photoshop Exress

Flash Photo Albums

There's countless ways to share photos online. But i'm all about freeware, so today I offer up two options using Flash to display photos.

1. Simpleviewer




2. Expose

They are both easy to use, and Simpleviewer comes with a variety of plugins to make it work with other graphics programs like Picassa, and Photoshop.

Both are free, both use flash to display photos, but in very different ways. I've been looking for a free viewer that could compile everything into a single SWF file. I have yet to find one. But if you have no restrictions on your website about folder structure, etc. Check out either one. Hooray for freeware!

If anyone does find a free single SWF compiler, please let me know!

Lightbox 2

Another restless night. But not a complete loss, I've found a great script for web designers who like to post images in a stylish way on their websites. It's called Lightbox!

Click the link to see a sample and details on setup. It's really slick looking. If you're a photoshop user, there's a great tutorial on getting it to work with Photoshop's Web Photo Gallery tool.

For those of you not code savy, there's now a freeware tool that uses Lightbox to generate Web Galleries. Find it here.

Enjoy!

slideshows for blogging..

Using Picasa Web Albums, you can embed a slideshow of images into blogger, just like the example below.

Click on the play button to view the tutorial, if it's not big enough, click on the link "SLIDESHOW NEW PAGE" at the bottom of this post. Remember, you can always stop the slides and manually go forward or backward on the control bar at the bottom of the slideshow.



Or you can have a link that opens a new window to view it fullsize! This only works on Internet Explorer and Firefox based browsers. Doesn't work in Opera for some reason.

SLIDESHOW NEW PAGE