What’s Your Preference?

amazing_ved · #1 (**permalink**) 10-30-2011, 02:03 PM

So you have just returned from an exciting vacation/trip. You have taken about a thousand photos or so and are excited to share it with your friends on Facebook. Good idea. Well done so far. You have downloaded all photos on a folder in your computer and now you choose all of those thousand pictures from your trip folder and start uploading. Stop right there!

Unless you’re a professional photographer chances are about 40% of your pictures are not worth keeping let alone worth sharing. I'm using that percentage based on my own experience seeing other's albums. They’re either too dark, overexposed, too much camera shake etc. Don’t fret. There's hope. Now there’s nothing I know of that could fix a really bad photo but let this post be a guide for your future tours/vacation so that you don’t lose precious memories because of bad camera skills. Before posting these pictures you’ve got to ask yourself some basic questions. One of them being do you want to bombard your friends with thousand pictures, are they really going to look at each of them? In today’s fast paced world nobody has time to look at your thousand pic trip. They’ll leave your album right after 15-17th picture. And may be leave a comment or two.

Here are a few pointers that I have tried to compile before you start sharing pictures from your trip. Doesn’t matter if you’re sharing these on facebook, your blog or via web albums. Hope these help.

1. Only the Best - Post only the pictures that are crisp, sharp and clear in details. The viewer should be able to make out what is it that you’re trying to convey through the picture. To do that you need your best shot from that moment. So share only your best pictures. No blur, no dark faces, no ghosts (unless intentional) in your pics.

2. Keept it Short - When you’re sharing your album via a web album like picasa or flickr you have the liberty to upload and share more. But if you’re sharing pictures via facebook or google plus try to keep the picture count in your album to 25 max. Giving yourself this target will only improve the quality of your pictures in the album because you’ll only choose the best.

3. Rotate - Unless you intentionally want to strain your friends’ neck by making them having to rotate their heads instead of rotating that picture, you must make sure your
horizontal pictures are horizontal and verticals are verital. If you don’t know how to do that, simply go into the folder where the picture is located on your PC. Right click on the picture and select rotate clock/anticlockwise. You’re done!

4. Size Matters - If you’re shooting with the modern day cameras, chances are each picture is about 3MB in size minimum. That will not only slow down your speed while uploading but eat up space on your hard drive. If hard disk space isn’t a problem you can save an original copy and upload a reduced size version. Even if you’re uploading a 20MB raw file the picture is still going to look nothing more than a 800×600 resolution picture. I always reduce the size of my images when uploading for sharing purposes. Reducing the size of the picture means fast uploads as well.

5. Relevance and Story - When sharing for your blog you don’t want to share the picture of a monkey eating banana while right under that you’re telling everyone how yummy the butter chicken was at the local dhaba/restaurant. When sharing pictures you’re actually sharing your stories and experience. Post the most relevant photo about your trip and little note below it with a little summary of what that moment was about.

I hope you will find these tips helpful and practical. This is in no way to discourage you from taking pictures and enjoy your trip. Take as many photos you like. But the idea is to make them count. We’d love to hear your experiences after reading and applying these tips on your next trip. If you have any more to add, please do so in the comments below!

About the author: Ved Upadhyay also runs travel blog Travel Bonkers and his personal photography blog ved upadhyay

pamwoods · #2 (**permalink**) 11-03-2011, 12:40 PM

Hi, great tips you've shared. Actually, I begin to create a facebook account and fanpage. Finally, I got an idea on how to share pictures from my trip. Exciting thing!