The Library of Congress is doing a pilot program with Flickr, which is called The Commons, and involves having Flickr users go through over 3000 photos from the Library of and tag and make comments. The photos have a unique copyright called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Got some time? Go check out the Library photos, and add some tags,notes, and comments.

• Library of Congress profie page on Flickr.
• http://www.loc.gov/blog/ Library of Congress Blog(not and official LOC Blog)

Tags: Lirbrary of Congress, Flickr, Photography

After reading Techcrunches report about Picnik being live on Flickr , I went to the Flickr blog and read about the newest Flickr feature that enables online photo editing using Picnik’s Photo editing services.

To use the service while using Flickr, you must be signed it to your Flickr account, and then when viewing your photos, click the edit button at the top of one of your photos. You are then taken to Picnik where you see all the editing options that are available to you from a Picnik’s free account.

Its a pretty simple interface that includes such options as cropping, red eye reduction, color adjustments and more. There are plenty of advanced features available as well, but many more features can be obtained by upgrading your free account for a little less than 25 bucks a year. For someone who does not want to make the purchase of Photoshop, this might be an awesome tool to use for editing of photos. I will probably continue to use Photoshop, but I can also see myself using Picnik while using Flickr.

Also, while surfing the net, there is a Firefox addon, that lets you edit graphics online through the use of your right click menu. There is also an extension for IE if that is your browser of choice. Here is the Picnik tools page for a list of available photo editing tools .

In addition to Flickr, Picnik can also be used with Facebook, PhotoBucket, Picasa, and Webshots, and it’s API is available for others to use and develop for other applications.

What do You Think?

This is the first Internet based Photo Editing site that I have used or reviewed for that matter. While doing the review I was exposed to several other sites. Does anyone have any experience with any other photo editing sites? What do you think about PicniK?

Tags: photo editing, online photo editing, Flickr, Picnik, photography

Last week I posted several tips in my Flickr and Photoshop Tip post, which was also my first Graphics/photo Thursday post. I had quite a few good tips from readers in response to the post.

The best being the tip from Dennis of Santorini Views, a blog about the Greek Island of Santorini. Not a good blog for Lizzie and I to be looking at, since we both are itching to travel. Thanks to Dennis’s new Santorini blog, we have added the little Greek island to our travel wish list.

Anyway the Photoshop tip that Dennis left in his comment was seriously much easier to use than the one that I posted. So here it is in step by step.

Using the Measure tool to align to Horizontally or Vertically.

1. select picture by going to file, select open and navigate to the file you have your pictures stored.
2. Right click on the eye dropper in the Photoshop palette toolbar.
3. Choose the Measure Tool, which should be the last option.
4. Left Click and hold on one corner of the object you would like to align horizontally or vertically.
5. Still holding the left button down, drag the cursor to the other corner of the edge of the object. You should see a line on the objects edge.
6. Release the left mouse button.
7. Go to Image at the top of the Photoshop screen. Go down to Rotate Canvas and then choose Arbitrary in the drop down menu.
8. A little box will appear, which will rotate the picture a number of degrees clockwise or counter clockwise. The appropriate box should be automatically chosen. click OK. The Photo should now be rotated so that the object is now aligned horizontally or vertically.
9. I then crop out the desired section of the photo, but photo cropping is another photoshop tip.

Let me know if this tip has been helpful, or let me know of any tips that you use which I could add to my Photoshop tool belt. Thanks again to Dennis of Santoriniviews.com for this Photoshop tip.

So you have a blog and you want to add pictures, what do you do? Depending upon your platform and if your site is hosted on its own server, you may or may not be able to upload pictures directly to your blog. Many blogging platforms require that the pictures you want to use, be hosted somewhere online.

www.flickr.com More of Emperor Anton’s photos

Sure you could host them yourself on a nice little gallery somewhere, or you could do like I and many other bloggers do and use a Web2.0 photo hosting site like Flickr. Flickr is a great site for hosting and sharing of pictures that has lots of cool features such as tagging, commenting, and the ability to organize your photos into sets and collections for paid accounts.

One feature that I just started using, that I think is really cool is the ability to put notes into pictures. Click on the picture of me at CD’s Place and hover the cursor over the pic to see the notes that I have placed. Friends can also add notes to your pics which can be a positive or a negative if you are sentimental about your photos.

Another feature of Flickr that I recently started looking at is the ability to view pictures by camera that the pictures were taken. Since I am in the market for a new camera, this is one of the the places that I am visiting to get ideas about what camera I will be upgrading to. At present I am using what I don’t like about my current camera to guide my consumer research.

I hate that my Kodak EasyShare C643 seems to take forever to take a picture, and frequently misses those once in a lifetime shots due to its slowness, or I manage to take the picture but it is out of focus, blurry or the lighting bites.

Want to use My Pics?

If you would like to use any of my pics on your site, you will need to create a flickr account, which is free to do. Then select the pic, and grab the url. Please make sure you link the pic back to its flickr location or give me credit for the pic in your post. Anything less would be an act of digital Piracy as told by Tamara.

If you would like me to add you as a Flickr contact, please add me, Emperor Anton as a contact. While your at it, check out my Flickr contacts and add them as well if you are so inclined.

Oh, if the url offends, I apologize, it was an early SEO experiment in conjunction with one of my first blogs, which has since been renamed to Site For Sale, but will be renamed Live,Love,and Laugh blog after either the sale of or the domain for My Rectal Thermometer Blog expires in June. If anyone would like to make and offer, leave a comment.