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I suppose if these sociopaths cockblock interconsole online gaming, the odds of PSN/XB Live/PC gaming is still years away?

It would be so glorious for games like Neverwinter and Star Trek Online to be played online cross platform. Granted, we would see a lot more whining and "nerf herding" from the console crowd, but that would be part of the fun, eh? :D

My Space Elf and the crew of the RRW Cheshire Goose would enjoy pwning their space butts (at least once I get back into Star Trek when I don't have a ton of other stuff going on out in the real world. ;)

Kessillia and Crew

Apologies for Shutterfly. I recently fired PhotoBucket and can't upload any more there since that put me way over quota.

And apologies for Kessy being in her swimwear for the group photo. She has been parked on Risa since the end of the Summer Event this year, and can't be arsed to get changed yet or leave. ;)

100% agreed.

Instagram doesn't make things. (I'm a programmer ... a website is not a 'thing'). And it doesn't do research anywhere near the level that Kodak used to.

Instagram *might* be a replacement for Kodak's 20 year old way of distributing photos, or maybe the online services they killed last year ... but they don't make cameras (as that's been eaten by the smart phone companies), film and paper (now mostly digital) or printers.

Instragram would've been one small department within a larger company ... you might compare it to Ofoto.

I was at Edwards AFB yesterday when it landed. I can get to a couple great spots, so I took some great pictures. Here are some of the highlights.

Railcars have been used before. Insulation, airhandling, all the rest will be relatively trivial. Not having the local council ruin your plans will be the tough part.

Moisture will be an issue. You'll need to seal it up and when you do, moisture inside the vehicle will be a problem. You can use a spray foam insulation. For inspiration on how to make confined spaces into a livable space, go tour a yatch.

My brother built a vacation place on Tenakee Springs, Alaska. First thing he did was deliver a shipping container as a quick-and-dirty, bear-proof shelter. The door of it is visible here. Obviously, it is now incorporated into a larger structure.

This PRT stuff won't fly, and besides I already have my PRT shown in the link above!

I don't mind hybrids, but pure electric would be fun, and also don't forget biobutanol, and biogasoline as drop in replacements for dino-juice.

Oy vey. Can we have a "good photo sharing site" thread now so I can find the alternatives?

A friend of mine did a comparison of all the online photo sites. Most of them offer a free trial period (with free prints!), so she gave them all a shot. She submitted the same photo to each site, ordered the prints, and compared the quality. The clear winner was Shutterfly. AFAIK they're the only major photo site that's still independent.

I don't have any of my photos online, so I'm not really qualified to make a recommendation. Just passing on what I heard.

I have a URL for you: http://www.shutterfly.com/

We have been using their service for years. We have uploaded many gigabytes of pictures. There is no charge for, nor any limit on storage. Their prints are very good, and they make it pretty easy to create and share your digital albums. And except for the prints it's all free.

The paper doesn't fade, the inks\film fade the paper at worst yellows.

With photo paper the two are one and the same. There is no "ink." The dye is embedded in paper and revealed by chemical processes using silver halide crystals. Snapfish isn't as transparent as what they use as Shutterfly. But, I would bet Snapfish uses traditional photo processes as well.

Secondly how do you color match/Profile you colors and get them printed accurately?

Shutterfly calibrates to sRGB, so if you are calibrated to sRGB, you should match with them. Here is information about their use of Crystal Archive paper. While Shutterfly is more expensive, knowing how they print is worth the extra money.

The paper doesn't fade, the inks\film fade the paper at worst yellows.

With photo paper the two are one and the same. There is no "ink." The dye is embedded in paper and revealed by chemical processes using silver halide crystals. Snapfish isn't as transparent as what they use as Shutterfly. But, I would bet Snapfish uses traditional photo processes as well.

Secondly how do you color match/Profile you colors and get them printed accurately?

Shutterfly calibrates to sRGB, so if you are calibrated to sRGB, you should match with them. Here is information about their use of Crystal Archive paper. While Shutterfly is more expensive, knowing how they print is worth the extra money.

...I use Shutterfly. They don't have 'buy once a year or we'll delete your stuff' policies, registration is free, and on the off chance I want to order something, their picture quality is great!

They also offer an archive CD service if you need periodic hard copies.

Cheers
AC

...I use Shutterfly. They don't have 'buy once a year or we'll delete your stuff' policies, registration is free, and on the off chance I want to order something, their picture quality is great!

They also offer an archive CD service if you need periodic hard copies.

Cheers
AC

Sure, it's a good idea. And I really don't mind there being more competition in the market, but isn't CafePress already doing this with all sorts of apparel and other easily printable goods? In addition, isn't Stamps.com already doing this with stamps. And aren't there a number of sites that do this with photographs?

Yeah, printing customized materials cheaply is a great service... and combining the best features of all the currently available sites can only benefit us as a whole, but it's not unique and I'd be surprised if it were a big success.

but Ofoto/KEG will delete your pictures unless you order once every six months, or maybe its once a year.

Sure, one $0.29 print is cheap, but what if you forget?

Shutterfly, on the other hand, doesn't have such requirements, and won't delete your pictures.

Try Shutterfly http://www.shutterfly.com/

We use them for all of our prints and love the quality and other things they can do with them (aprons, mousepads, etc.)

They have even printed a few things I couldn't have possibly taken, like very close-up pictures of the sun and the like.

Seriously!

I'm an "semi-profesional" photographer in my part time, and I bounce back and forth between printing my own on my home printer and using a service like Shutterfly.

I can't imagine ever using a retail service like Walmart. Good quality photo printers are just too innexpensive to justify using a retail service. This is hardly limited to "profesionals" either.

Print your prints at home! Everyone! Yes, I mean you!

Geeks have a great opportunity to take ownership of thier prints by printing themselves. Printers are cheap, paper and ink is cheap, and it's not much work at all. A decent photo printer can be had for under a hundred bucks.

Back when developing prints meant expensive equipment and dangerous chemicals we had a ton of excuses to outsource developing, but those days are long gone.

On another note, now speaking as a profesional, clients order prints from Shutterfly directly and never see high quality JPG's. If I ever release JPG's to clients they get branded with "COPYRIGHT" watermarks accross the center of the image.

Rights to digital photos are incredibly simple to protect as long as you never release high quality digital prints.

To all these Profesional photographers sueing Walmart, I really have to ask what in hell they're doing releasing high-rez digital files in the first place. What the hell do they expect? I guard my digital files as I would negatives.

I've never seen a high quality scan that looked remotely like the original, so someone scanning a print and then printing it themselves is not a big concern of mine. Quite frankly if someone is willing to go to all that work for a shitty print, all the power to them. I only ask that they leave my signature off.

_Am

About the panoramic thing, I understand your point, but how much would it have cost to have the non-panoramic print blown up to the same width as the regular print? If a regular print is 4x6 and a panoramic print is 4x10, then you would need to make the regular print almost 7x10 for it to be the same width. A single 4x6 costs about 30 cents, but an 8x10 usually costs ten times as much! Panoramic prints aren't anywhere near as expensive, so it's really just a matter of cost.

my wife uses shutterfly for printing her pictures, and is pretty happy with it. I think as long as you order at least a dozen or so pictures at a time, the price per print (including shipping) is comparable to getting a regular roll of film developed. Plus since it's digital, you only have to pay to get the good pictures developed, instead of all of them.

You can keep albums online there too, but I'm not sure what their limitations are in terms of how many pictures you can store online at a time.

Its actually not a bad idea. A number of 3rd party sites will host your digital images fer free.

I use Shutterfly, they store unlimited images for free and let you share them too

I asked their customer support, they have uber-redundant backups

and they don't claim to 'own' your images either which is nice

Dragon goodness:
http://shim1.shutterfly.com/procsserv/F-ANGjFk1aNW bCbiQYJ0KOdA

My girlfriend just sent me this picture of a funny looking cat.

Do not send large attachments over email.

Again, do not send large attachments over email.

Nothing is worse then trying to download a really important email, but being stuck waiting for a hand full of large, mostly less-important messages to download. Ofoto, Shutterfly, and others offer free image hosting, allowing your friends & family the chance to view pictures at their leisure -- and often order hard copies as a bonus. Not everybody has broadband access, and us "Technology Haves" should be teaching the "have nots" to 1) not send huge f'in emails and 2) don't blindly open every attachment you get.

In conclusion, do not send large attachments over email.

Um, why do you want mom and dad to setup their own solution when there are already a million free ones out there? You could probably get away with just signing them up for a service like giftaloud, and if they really need it they could use shutterfly or yahoo for their images.

think ol' Bill looks eerily like Cigarette Smoking Man from X-Files

Nah, I think he kinda looks like Anne Robinson from The Weakest Link ...

You ARE the weakest link! Goodbye!.

For those of you too lazy to cut and paste the address, here is a link.

pictures only

Shutterfly works great with Netscape 7, although I haven't tried uploading files through the browser. I use their Linux file-upload program instead.

Shutterfly works great with Netscape 7, although I haven't tried uploading files through the browser. I use their Linux file-upload program instead.

Shutterfly - great if you plan to use Internet Explorer to communicate with the site, they have an ActiveX plug-in, where you can select multiple files to upload. Warning though, you will not be able to download your photos in original resolution once you upload them. The only way to get back a high-res photo is to buy a CD from Shutterfly.

Epson Photo Center - one of the few services where you can download exactly the same resolution as you uploaded, so great for storing large pictures. Except that they require Web forms for the photos to be uploaded, and the Web forms they have accept a single photo at a time (maximum of 10-20 per page, if I recall). Might spend your whole evening clicking and selecting, when downloading 1000 new images off your flash card.

Ofoto - nothing too thrilling, pretty much the same offering as Shuttefly without the ActiveX plug in for multiple uploads. Has connections with Amazon, so it's possible to get some promotinal free photos with them if you buy some related items at Amazon. I got 25 free photos with the software I bought at Amazon site.

Yahoo! Photos - 30 megs is a bummer, but if you use other Yahoo! services regularly, might find the site easier to navigate and play with. Although all other guys mentioned above allow unlimited (well, supposedly) hosting and sharing.

I use Shutterfly.com to print and share my digital photos. 4x6 prints are less than $0.50 each. Here's a link to some crummy photos I've taken with my new Canon Power Shot S200.

Apparently you do download it yourself (their client software does so, anyway, and burns it to your CD-R drive).

I'd do this if they had a "pre-paid" model. I use a service called Shutterfly that makes prints from my digital images and sends them to me. If you buy onesy-twosy, you pay $0.49 per 4x6 print, but if you prepay $99, you can get 340 prints at $0.29 apiece. Order prints one or 100 at a time, doesn't matter. You pay postage per shipment, but that isn't part of the equasion with the burn-it-yourself CD model.

If this CD service worked the same way, giving tracks for $0.99 if you want to "try" it but down to around $0.20-$0.30/track if you prepay $100 or so, I think they'd have a winner.

I think most people don't subscribe because they don't know what it's like to have fast internet integrated into their lives--and their houses and hardware aren't set up to have it be integrated:

It's got to be a total package that extols the value of sharing data (text, voice, pix, video), not just receiving it, and that also provides mobility with your "device(s)" at least while in your house. Who regularly creates digital files that s/he wants to share through the web? That person needs broadband.

I can't understand why all the web-based digital photo reprinters aren't cross selling broadband, not to mention the digital video hardware vendors. Actually, Circuit City is a big Broadband reseller.

To integate the web into your life, you need mobility, not a fixed PC in one room of your house. For your kids to do their homework while lying on the floor, for you to read the news while at the kitchen table, etc., you don't just need broadband, you need a wireless hub at your house, and one or more devices to go with it. You may need a server and a network.

This bundled solution of two way participative services and mobility is the marketing solution. But, it's got to be so easy you can bring it home and plug it in. It's got to be secure out of the box. It's got be spun in a way that convinces you your life is better now that you have it.

See Quicktopic, Shutterfly, MP3.com, Vonage, and more.

I'll sell you this one:

Picture of my CM-100

works great.

ShutterFly.com (linked in the News.com story) does user agent detection because it requires a browser with hooks into the OS (uploads, etc.). It's not warning-off certain browsers because page markup will break, but rather because the service won't work as advertised without browser access to the local file system -- and ShutterFly will have already taken your money before you find that out.

'Course ShutterFly.com's pages don't validate to their stated HTML 3.2 Final doctype either, so ...

Standards-compliant markup and liquid design are easy if you make them a priority. Their greatest enemy is pixel-perfect layouts, which are rarely necessary. Forget pixels, code relative, and be free.

In the US, OPhoto and ShutterFly are a couple.

There is also some Linux software to manage your own photo albums, if you have a web site available:

• iGal
• WebMagick
• My personal favorite, Gallery, which I use on my own photo site.

I also have a HP PhotoSmart 100 printer, so my as far as photos go, I have reached nerdvana. :)

These services burn your digital image on to ordinary film paper - the same stuff they use to make your prints from negatives in the lab. How do they do this? Instead of exposing the print paper to a darkroom enlarger with your negative in it, they scan the paper with a cathode ray tube (yea same technology as your monitor) and the results are actually better than a negative transfer because there isn't a second lens in the darkroom to distort and soften your image from the negative, the image goes from colored electrons to the paper directly.

as for reccomendations, I've had good service with all three, Ofoto and Shutterfly use Kodak professional and/or Kodak digital imaging paper (ofoto is owned by Kodak) and Photoaccess uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, and also offers a beautiful matte finish paper that I use when I'm selling prints.

As for online photo display for the web, I would heartily reccomend Gallery, which is a set of PHP scripts. I have modified this software to allow print sales of my photographs. Photoaccess and all the other companies have online sharing of albums themselves, but their interfaces are mostly terrible and the preview images are way too small and lossy. (they have to go small to handle the traffic, I don't blame them) so I have my own web galleries, but I print through them.

---Mike

Zing.com

Does anyone have comments on these two services? I just bought a digital camera and was wonder which to use. I like Zing's online storage and photo albums....very sweet stuff. Price seem similar, except Zing charges $0.50 more for S&H. If this is off topic then mod me down. I'm just looking for feedback on these sites. (BTW, Zing's photoalbum is free for unlimited storage and pictures -- that's not offtopic.)

ÕÕ

A coworker of mine had prints developed from several different print houses. Ofoto and Shutterfly seem to be the best, with a slight edge in color accuracy to Ofoto.

Here are some things I have learned from using various sites:

• Shutterfly ships overseas.
• Cartogra sells Ofoto prints and Yahoo Photos sells Shutterfly prints. Make sure you get your free prints from Cartogra when the free prints at Ofoto run out.
• Yahoo's photo sharing lets you upload and download the full res images, but access controls are only public or Yahoo-id
• Cartogra won't let you download the full image, but they will let you zoom in for detail. Ofoto only lets you see a small preview
• Shutterfly lets you print, frame, & gift wrap photos as convenient, classy gifts
• Shutterfly has an option to not do automatic color correction on your image, but I have not been able to calibrate myself to the results.
• Shutterfly's interface for image editing on the web seems to be the best. You might not think it's important, but when you decide to order a 5x7 and a 4x6 from the same print it's nice to control the cropping yourself. Also, you can mock up matting for those classy photo gifts.

www.ofoto.com

www.cartogra.com

www.shutterfly.com

photos.yahoo.com

Or, conversely, they could partner with processing companies to turn your now altered snapshots into prints. I ran across Shutterfly, where you can upload digital pics and have prints mailed to multiple addresses with captioning printed on the back.

carlos