Flickr Make it Easier to Share Images

You see an image on Flickr and you want to share it with a friend or a family member. Now you have to copy and paste the link into an email or some other form of getting that link to them, right… Not any more.

Flickr have introduced easy photo sharing right from the source of the image. Now my only problem was that after hearing about the feature and wanting to check it out but I’d be damned if I could find the feature. After a bit of looking around in a few menus  and having no luck I went back to the image page and looked more thoroughly. I spotted the option in the bottom right of the page in small print. “Send to a Friend”

Not sure why Flickr has made this feature so hard to find. Or is that that I am not observant enough? Features like this should be easy to find and use. No problem with the ease of use, in fact 10/10. They get a 2/10 for easy to find, in my opinion. Maybe they are trying to save on the bandwidth or something. Beats me.

Clicking that link throws you to a page with the option to send the image via email or to another Flickr member. There is a default message that you can add to or just send as is. The default message is fine in my book. I sent one to myself. The cool thing about this feature is that the recipient gets the message and the image in their inbox with an additional link to the page on Flickr that it comes from. What this means is that they can save the image locally. To save a photo on Flickr from the web page you have to have an account and be logged in. Now you don’t, provided someone with an account send it to you.

Nice feature and I think I might actually upgrade my account to a pro account as this is great for family and friends and I am going to use it a lot. I am actually trying to update my Flickr page more often, to keep the family in the loop a bit better. Some of our family are a couple of 1000 kay away and I know they will appreciate it. Thanks Flickr!

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Make Typing URL’s Easier and Be More Productive

So this might be old but I don’t care, I had never heard of it. This hack works in Firefox, IE and Opera and more than likely others as well.

1. Take the name of a website and type it into the address bar
2. Hold control and hit Enter
3. The missing parts of the address are filled in for you

If you happen to need a .org or a .net:

.org = Control + Shift + Enter

.net = Shift + Enter

This does depend on your browser, some experimentation  might be required.

That is if you type a lot of addresses, I am as lazy as crap. I actually type stuff into Google and click the result… how lazy is that! Should start doing this though.

Source: Daily Cup of Tech

WebShots Unusable Due to Popularity?

I was doing a post for The Global Geek Podcast Blog and I needed a screenshot of the webpage that I was talking about. So I thought I am feeling lazy, I will just shoot over to WebShots who offer a free website screenshot service. But I fear that popularity is killing it (for “free” users at any rate).

Webshots is a great service. They offer free and paid accounts with various plans. When I first came across WebShots it made getting what you needed fast, easy and convenient. You could have your image in seconds. I went to WebShots and put in the site that I wanted a screenshot of, hit enter. I get transferred to the next step, in which (usually) your screen shot is displayed. You then get to choose from a few sizes and you can either save the image and host it yourself or use the code snippet to use it from WebShots. However, this time I find that I get transferred to a que which at the top of the page says:

Screenshot is in job queue. There is a total of 68494 jobs, and 23596 ahead of you.

I can tell you that it has not moved much since I started writing this. While I appreciate a good service especially a free one. This service has now become unusable for the quick and easy screenshot for the blog approach. What has stuffed it? Popularity. The developers are laughing but for me, unless I wish to pay for the service then I can’t use it at all. I am not paying. Screenshots are easy, but it is nice to get the shots that WebShots produced as they had no browser in them! Now I will have to edit out the browser and OS toolbar. Not hard but a bit time consuming.

Sure the paid service gives you priority over free users. However, for the little that I use this type of thing the $25 US for a basic service; per month is a bit steep. Especially since I would not be using their embedding service. I prefer to host my own images where I can. In addition if there are as many paying users as free then it will be just as bad, even if there are half as many!

So there goes another great free service down the tubes because it was and is so good. One thing that really irritated me was that I am probably waiting for porn, as the couple of webshots that appeared while I was waiting were of porn sites! Some things are just nice to keep to yourself, it would have been nice if WebShots was not quite so good as it is. RIP Webshots pro.

I just remembered another service, no not telling.