option. One nice thing about cellphone cameras is
that you can send the photos to your blog or Flickr
gallery directly. (Unless you have a plan that allows
unlimited data transfer, you should check to see
how expensive it is to email photos.)
To upload photos by email to a Flickr account, visit
flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail, where you’ll find
a special email address you can use. Use the subject
line of the email to give the photo a title, and write a
description of the photo in the body of the email.
How can I arrange my photos
visually by the location where they A
were taken?
Platial combines blogging, tagging, and online maps.
A website called Platial ( platial.com) lets you stick
virtual pushpins into a satellite photo map, and then
write about the spot in its corresponding “
PlaceBlog.” The ultimate goal is to give every square inch
of the planet its very own PlaceBlog. What kind of
places get pinned and blogged on Platial? Restaurants, for one. Many of the restaurants in major
cities have multiple reviews, as well as stories about
what happened to the bloggers who ate there. In
addition to leaving written descriptions of a place,
you can add photos from your computer or the
web, and even upload videos. You can also create
your own maps — of your favorite dance clubs, B
for instance — and publish them to your personal
website using Platial’s MapKit functionality.
How can I edit and retouch my
photos online?
Use Snipshot to make quick adjustments to snapshots and other digital images.
Photoshop is overkill for people who just want
to enhance, resize, and adjust their digital photos.
Lately, I’ve been using a nice little web-based photo
editor called Snipshot ( snipshot.com) to upload
digital photos and tweak them to my heart’s content.
One of the nice features of Snipshot is its ability
to import images from Flickr (or any other website)
using a bookmarklet. Once you drag the bookmarklet into your browser’s bookmark bar, you can go to
any web page, click the bookmarklet, then choose
the photo you want to edit in Snipshot.
the size ratio of the original image (Figure A).
• Crop. Drag the crop window around the image,
and resize it by clicking and dragging a red square.
Once you’re happy with the crop, press enter or
double-click the image (Figure B).
• Enhance. Bring out the color of an image with a
single click. If you aren’t pleased with the result,
click “Undo.”
• Adjust. Change the size, brightness, contrast,
saturation, hue, and sharpness of the image.
• Rotate. Click to rotate the image 90 degrees
clockwise.
• Save. You can save the photo in a variety of
formats, or upload it to your Flickr account
with one click.
Here’s what you can do in Snipshot:
• Resize. Click one of the red squares and drag
your mouse. Select a corner square to preserve
Excerpted from Rule the Web (St. Martin's Press,
2007) by Mark Frauenfelder. Visit ruletheweb.net
for more tips and tricks.
Mark Frauenfelder is editor-in-chief of MAKE.
Make: 131
