I’ve been working with a few new clients lately that have had questions about resizing images and formatting them for use on the web. Other friends have also asked me about resizing images for use in their profile pictures on sites like Facebook and twitter.

Obviously the picture above wouldn’t make a good profile photo. Almost my entire face is cut off in the image. The reason is the original resolution of the image as it came from my camera.
You see each one of those megapixels, which gives you a higher quality image, means that your original image isn’t quite suited …read more

Booths, displays, celebrities, and oddities! Here are literally tons of photos from the Exhibit Hall of the infinite wonders at Comic-Con 2009…
Be aware that if you click through the “more” link, the page you will get is HUGE with almost 200 photos!

Instead of a booth, this year Syfy (formerly Scifi Channel) branded a local restaurant

One of many promotional pieces for the movie District 9

I came across an interesting graphics application recently from Microsoft Research. It’s called AutoCollage 2008. It meshes a variety of your photos together to create an interesting and custom collage from those photos.
 
AutoCollage is a fairly light (7MB) download and installs easily on your machine. Once installed, you simply open the application and point it to a directory of photos you’d like to collage together. The program searches through the folder and pulls in the specified number of photos you’d like to use in your collage.
It works nicely, very straight-forward and has a variety of options you can use …read more

I’ve really started taking more and more pictures lately. Instead of just keeping them stored locally on my personal computers I’ve started uploading them to a variety of websites. I hadn’t thought much about it but recently read the article "Beware of GPS danger in your photos" by Kim Komando.

The article talks about the potential risk of posting photos to public services when the photo information, or EXIF data may contain geographic location information of where and when the photo was taken. Some cameras can now tag these photos automatically and there are other 3rd party apps and gadgets that …read more

One of the things that continually frustrates me is when people decide they want to share the photos from their recent vacation with you. They send an email to everyone in their address book (in the To:) field and attach as many photos as they can in their e-mail program at the standard resolution provided by their digital camera of choice.
Let’s talk about the size difference of these photos.
In the example image above the attached photo would be almost 2.5MB for a single photo. I’m not sure what the limits are in most email programs or what the restrictions are …read more

I couldn’t guarantee it, but there’s one thing that seems to be getting developed much more rapidly than anything else. Sure Intel and AMD are in a huge race with each other to keep developing faster processors. Game consoles like Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii are always competing with each other to be the next best thing. I think storage space is growing exponentially and with the greatest impact to end-users at an attainable level.
That picture you see (sorry it’s so small) is of an old hard drive. What you can barely see on top of it is …read more

One of the challenges experienced today was to move all the photos around on my family’s PC and aggregate them on a single partitioned drive located on the secondary hard drive in the system. For some reason I could never really get the access to the photos I wanted. I could see them, but couldn’t move copies of them to my local laptop for editing or use as I desired.
After I moved all of the photos and images to the new drive I couldn’t get my local machine mapped to the new drive so I could access the photos as …read more

I just saw this commercial while watching TV tonight. Do you think it’s really this easy? Or, do kids just pick up things related to technology much easier and faster than us older people realize?
Who’s using Windows Live Photo Gallery. What do you think? Is it this easy?

Awhile back I blogged about hearing of the Kinoma mobile browser for media. In that time I’ve used the application to take advantage of finding some YouTube videos and browsing flickr for some images to share with friends and family while on the go.
I’ve been very impressed with the browser overall. It took some getting used to it’s own way of navigation and user-interface, but it absolutely lets you view content that’s nearly impossible to enjoy with the default Internet Explorer browser that’s on my phone by default.
I could be wrong, but I think in the time since I …read more

Image: Screen grab from video on Microsoft Software + Services site
So I’m watching some of the videos that are available on the Microsoft Strategy Software + Services website and I thought I saw something very cool. In the video I noticed the guy was sitting in the airport using a Mac.
Notice he is also using a Zune as his MP3 player.
You see, it is possible to both use a Mac and Windows products and appreciate both for their strengths.