social media

High Res. Images for Social Media?

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There have been two major revamps recently of social media platforms and both go the same route, bigger images. Google+ and Flickr have changed their design and especially on Google+ the images can be blown up to really big sizes. But that only looks good when the image is high res and the question is do you want to upload high res images to social media?

Lets only take guests of
photographic safaris, team building photographic safaris en attendees of wildlife photography courses. They all come home with beautiful images and they all want to share them with their friends and family. If they upload their images in high res, anybody who wants to use their images can download them or screen-shot them for further unauthorized use. The quality will be excellent and will be even fine for brochures and other print media. Now you could watermark the images, but you don’t want it to be too dominating on the image. That still gives people the opportunity to download your image and crop the part they want for their purposes.

What to do? I think it’s wise to keep using low-res images. You might not be able to avoid stealing entirely, but at least you can limit the use of the images. And you don’t know anyway, if Google will choose your image to be the huge one on the stream.

Happy snapping and sharing!


Ute Sonnenberg for
www.rohoyachui.com

The Year of Storytelling … for Photos too?

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Direct Marketing News forecasted this year would be “the year of the story” and big brands like Nike, Google and Kimberly-Clark use storytelling as a means of communication and leadership. (via Fast Company).
How do we fit in? Which role play stories in our lives? We write blogs, we
photograph and we make photo books. We all got stories to tell and digital media allows us to share them with the world and anyone who wants to read them. Imagine only a few years ago. Who was writing a blog? Who was making photo books? Digital photography and social media created easy tools and platforms for expression and suddenly stories were told in words and pictures. Storytelling became accessible to anyone. No publisher would decide if a story was good and allowed to be told. The people are now deciding which story they like. It is amazing how many great storytellers are out there, only browse on this platform and you find the most talented people.
What I would wish for an easier storytelling with pictures is an online tool with templates for photo ebooks, you know just like the Apple photo book templates, but then online and postable to all social media platforms and blogs. The photo ebooks would appear then as small flipbooks, just like blog posts and you click on them to leave trough. Or am I just living under a rock and this tool is already there? If yes, please let me know! It would be so much fun to make easily and quickly online photo ebooks, but just as beautiful as the gorgeous Apple photo books.
Or is this just the idea photo storytelling needs?

Keep telling your stories! Happy creating!

Ute Sonnenberg for
www.rohoyachui.com