DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

I've been asked how come I -geek that I am- don't have a digital camera many a time. To which I dutifully replied: "What for?." With my nifty little Konica Revio APS (Advantix) camera I can take sharp pictures, have them developed with Kodak's awesome PerfectTouch processing AND have them available online at PictureCenter. I may have to rethink that in light of some new developments.

First of all, I've been most impressed with Picasa, a free photo organizing tool from Google that passes the Aunt Tillie test or, in my case the Max test. (Max is my stepdad.) Picasa, by virtue of its adopted family, also works well with blogger, hence the ability to easily post photos to a weblog using the Picasa's slick Hello sharing tool. Which allows me to do things like this. Jeremy notes, however, that if you use any operating system other than Windows, however, Picasa just isn't for you. Which brings me to flickr, which creates a community of photo sharing people. I'm pleased that flickr gives you granular access to security. Don't want weirdos getting pictures of me or my family for nefarious purposes now, do we? However, flickr seems geared towards sharing lo-res pictures online, and not towards the higher quality photos we've come to expect from developed film. More on that as I continue to investigate...

How did I get to this point? It all really began with my frustrating experience with CVS.com's online photo center. I've been having my films developed with Kodak processing at CVS for years, and have amassed quite a digital library on their site. As of August 1st, however, CVS stopped offering PictureCenter. I really liked PictureCenter because I could order my prints and pick them up at my nearby CVS for pennies, no shipping changes included. Now I haven't lost access to my PictureCenter archives mind you, I just can't add to the archive with any new rolls of film or -and this is the big bummer- migrate the archive to a bona-fide Kodak.com account. Since the CVS site is obviously a co-branded Kodak site, this last point really ticked me off. As it stands, I'm still using the Kodak PictureCenter, I just have to bring my film in to develop at a local film & camera store instead. My holy grail is to have complete access to all my photo archives in high quality in one location with unlimited bandwidth and storage. So far, I haven't seen any compelling alternative to local storage using Picasa, although I'm told Yahoo Photos is quite good.

HEH: Insanity Test.