Flickr & YouTube

And now comes my last day attempt to catch up on all of the assignments!

I've used Flickr for years now as a way to host photos in a more professional way than Facebook or Photobucket (another online photo hosting site). The problem with it is that unless you have a paid account, you can only host up to 200 visible photos. The good things are that you can get the photo in three sizes, small, medium and large, which you can't do on other sites, Facebook photos seem to be shrunk, more for family and friends than for something you want to show off to everyone, while Photobucket only preserves the photo at quite large sizes and it takes a while to manually resize it in order to repost it elsewhere on the internet. Flickr is for people who take photography more seriously, who want to share and promote the beautiful images they've captured and who want more than the family photo album feel of Facebook. There are privacy settings you can control on each photo you post to Flickr, whether personal, for other Flickr contacts, or for everyone to see. Nevertheless, I would say if you only want to share pictures of your kids and pets, use Facebook. I've used Flickr in the past as a way to host my photos for blogs, as not all blogging sites host photos for you. I've also joined a few groups on it and found it useful to have an online backup of my best photos when my laptop wasn't working properly.

I occasionally watch videos on YouTube, a few music videos and some book trailers like the one for Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters! I'm sometimes annoyed by how often people are beginning to substitute written content on a blog for some video they've found on YouTube, I'd rather read a well written blog post than watch a video. But I seem to be in the minority on that one and I suppose a variety of media can add interest. YouTube is easy to use, I've even watched a whole Jane Austen miniseries on it when I was living in Lake Louise and not near a library!