MichaelandChrissy.com

Erik Kastner put together a neat little tool called “Spell With Flickr” that accepts a word through any web browser and returns a set of pictures that spells that word.  The results are pretty awesome, and you have the option to re-select a letter image by clicking on the letter itself.

Aiden:

The script uses the images from a Flickr group called “One Letter“.   Who would have thunk that people take pictures of single letters in the street and then post them to Flickr?  You even have the option to use the images in their original size or square them off for uniformity (these have been squared off).

Gavin:

The tool also allows you options to do the same thing on your own site.  You can download the source code or just copy the relevant HTML code from the results page.  I was able to post Aiden and Gavin’s names by copying and pasting the code provided by the tool.   So check it out, and send random messages to your friends!

I’ve been uploading a photo a day (actually three photos per day) to Flickr for the last 31 days.  It hasn’t become an abominable chore yet, but I have found it difficult to make time for new pictures every day.   It’s also a bit of a pain to edit every photo once they’re sent, since Picnik takes forever and a day to load, but the results are well worth it.  In fact, you can already see how Aiden and Gavin have changed over the last month.  The long term results should be very gratifying.

I learned of a 3D photo gallery tool called FotoViewr from a friend on Twitter.  You just pop in your Flickr handle, select a subset of pictures to display (by set name or by tag word) and then choose a 3D format.  FotoViewr then creates an interactive photo gallery of your last thirty photos.  I really like the “wall” format, shown above, but the “floor” format is also very cool.  There are also links to each photo on Flickr and a full-screen mode (although my monitor resolution is too high to make this work well).

The best part is that you can embed a FotoViewr gallery in any blog post.  This would come in handy if I uploaded lots of pictures to Flickr, but I’m only using it for my 365 projects now.  There’s even a WordPress plugin to show a FotoViewr gallery on your blog sidebar, but it might be too small to see clearly.  I’ve downloaded it and will play with the settings on our blog later.  Expect more FotoViewr galleries from us in the future!

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site. I upload a lot of our family photos in the gallery on our web site, so I had never bought into the Flickr phenomenon before.  However, it turns out that I get a free Pro account because I use AT&T as my internet provider, so it was worth a look. I found that Flickr is also a social media site, allowing users to join photo groups, designate other users as buddies, and comment on interesting photos.

“Project 365” is a gimmick that PhotoJoJo introduced.  To participate, you upload a photo a day for an entire year. Aiden grew up so fast in his first year that I decided to document Gavin’s growth this way.  Aiden will be growing too, so he’s got his own 365 project. For fun, I also joined the “365 Toys” group, and I’m taking a picture of a Transformer a day (in six years, I might have photographed my whole collection if I stick with it). It’s hard to keep to this plan, since it requires taking pictures every day, uploading three of them to Flickr, then adding titles and comments to each one. Too much like work.

All of the Flickr photos are parts of larger photo shoots, but I only upload a single photo per day to Flickr.  I may upload some of the complete sets to our web site gallery, but there are many sets that never make it that far (we’ve got twelve gigabytes of photos of Gavin so far, and he’s only three weeks old).  It will be interesting to look back in a year and see all the changes that our boys have made in that time.  I’ve put a link to our Flickr page on the navigation bar (to the right), so check out our 365 Projects!