Not too long ago, I wrote about a Live Writer plugin which allows you to insert images directly from Flickr. In that exact same spirit, and functionality, here is a Microsoft Word add-in called Flickr4Word which allows you to do the same.

Flickr4Word draws on the model of Flickr4Writer and brings the Flickr(tm) services to Microsoft Word 2007. When you create a new document in Word, you can now directly access your Flickr(tm) services from Word and insert images into your mail messages.

Note the author’s comment about inserting images directly into your mail messages. This applies if you are using Outlook as your mail client and have Word set as your editor (I’m pretty sure Outlook 2007 always uses Word) which makes this add-in very useful for those with Flickr accounts.

If you have a Flickr account which hosts lots of images, having easy access to use these images for something ‘other’ than viewing online makes the service that much more useful. If one such function you find helpful is inserting your images directly into blog posts, then check out the Flickr4Writer add-on.

This plugin does exactly what you would expect:

Flickr4Writer is a simple plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables a user to browse a Flickr user repository and insert an image from Flickr into a Writer post.

While I do not personally use Flickr, I can see how this would be a very useful addition to any blog software.

Flickr, the ever popular photo sharing service, has had video available for some time but only for Pro (i.e. paid) members. I’ve used it a few times and it’s pretty decent. Granted, they only allow 90-second videos, but for many people that’s just about right.

Recently it was announced that anyone – including the free members – can now upload videos too. The only hitch is that freebie members can’t upload HD. But considering most people don’t do HD video at present, that’s okay.

Being that I’ve actually tried Flickr’s video sharing option myself, this is what I can say about it:

First, the load time is almost always faster compared to other video sharing sites.

Second, the interface is a whole lot cleaner.

Third, the way in which Flickr encodes videos does put emphasis on quality before speed (I personally appreciate this), yet still loads quickly.

Fourth, the Flickr community is above and beyond better than YouTube’s ever could be. And yes, this matters. If you want to be in the company of people more on the adult side, Flickr definitely trounces YouTube in that respect.

Give Flickr video a try, you might like it.

EXIF is the EXchangeable Image File format and is used by digital cameras to store information about the photos you take. Everything and the kitchen sink (figuratively speaking of course) is stored every time you take a photo.

Here are two examples of EXIF data using the Flickr service:

 View EXIF "meta" data

 View EXIF "meta" data

You’ll notice that the two photos differ significantly as far as the EXIF data is concerned. In addition to the time and date, the make/model of digital camera is given along with all available photo information as well. In 2005 (the first photo), I had an Olympus D-535 camera. The second was taken recently with my Fujifilm Finepix A820. Two different cameras, two totally different sets of settings based on environment and what my point-and-shoot digital cam "thought" was best for each shot.

Both photos are also geotagged, meaning they both contain GPS coordinates stating exactly (more or less) where each photo was taken.

To note: No, I don’t have one of those super-duper-pooper expensive digital cameras that records GPS positional information. Rather I manually enter in positional information using Flickr’s map function using point-and-click or entering manual coordinates.

Concerning your privacy

With online photo services like Flickr and Picasa, you can opt whether or not to have this information shown.

Maybe you have a super-secret way of taking photos and don’t want people to know how you took specific shots. Maybe you simply don’t want people to know when you took specific photos.

Hiding the EXIF data is the way to do that.

Concerning the geotagged locations, the vast majority of digital cams are not GPS-enabled (and if yours is, trust me, you would know).

Flickr does have privacy options to only let specific people (i.e. your "friends" list) know where shots were taken if you geotag. Or you can simply not geotag photos at all.

I’m not familiar with Picasa’s way of geotagging privacy but if anyone has info on that, feel free to chime in with a comment on their options.

Also remember: If you e-mail a photo to someone direct from your digital cam, all the EXIF data is present within the file(s). This information can be seen even in the standard Windows Explorer as a column. If you don’t want this information shown for whatever reason, you need to bring the file into an image editor and re-save it to remove the EXIF data.

While it’s true the Desktop Flickr Organizer for Linux can’t be beat as far as backing up your Flickr account is concerned, I was searching for a way to do the same in Windows and yes, I found a way. Continued

Modern day home computing is not as it once was. Not-so long ago it used to be that in order to bring the most potential out of your computer box you had to use proprietary software.

Any app that runs solely on a specific operating system is proprietary. And yes there’s still lots of this stuff out there.

For the past few years I have been slowly transitioning the stuff I do on the web to being as cloud-based as possible. You’ve heard the term "cloud computing" so much that it probably makes you sick to hear it at this point – but you have to do it if you expect to make smooth transitions in the future from computer to computer.

If you don’t start transitioning now it will be very painful and stressful to get it done later.

A plain English description

"OS-less" means to be able to do what you do on a computer without the need for any specific operating system.

Using myself as an example, here’s a few things I do:

For my photos I made the decision to push those all to Flickr. It’s web-based. I can access it on any computer using any OS.

For my e-mail I decided to switch over to Hotmail (or to be more specific, Windows Live Admin Center). Previous to that I used self-hosted IMAP and before that plain ol’ POP. I can get to my mail from anywhere on any computer using any OS in any web browser – and it’s all there. It’s backed up and readily accessible.

For important documents that I need to hang on to (and even the not-so important ones), I push those over to Google Docs. This acts as my backup that is just as accessible as my mail is. Once again it’s accessible on any computer/OS.

Are you still in the stone age?

If you’re still using apps that are OS-proprietary and local to your computer only, you run the risk of losing all the data you have without warning. Let’s say for the moment you’re really good at backing things up routinely. What if your hard drive fails and the backup doesn’t work? What then? You basically curse and swear, then realize you lost it all and start from zero.

Nobody wants that to happen.

And what happens when you buy a new computer? Do you really want to go thru the process of reinstalling all your apps all over again, configuring them and wasting hours of time when all you want to do is just get going?

Of course you don’t.

Is it possible to go completely OS-less?

Not at present. However you can move over a significant chunk of what you do to cloud territory now. The more you move out there, the better.

Get your docs, photos and e-mail out in the cloud

No matter how much of an old fuddy-duddy you are (as in the type who positively refuses to try anything different), bear in mind the transition is stupidly easy to do for docs, photos and mail.

Docs

Google Docs is still your best bet. Get an account and upload them. Don’t worry, they’re all private uploads unless you specifically enable a share-out option (which is off by default).

Photos

If you use Flickr, get Windows Live Photo Gallery (Windows), Flickr Desktop Organizer (Linux) or Flickr Uploadr (Windows, Mac). Get a Flickr account and start uploading.

If you use Picasa, the Picasa client is well known to be super-awesome and super-easy to use. Works in Windows, Mac or Linux. Uploads stuff easily. It’s a no-brainer.

E-Mail

This is the one people fear the most – especially those who use POP and are under the impression it would be absolutely impossible to move hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of mails to another account.

Your two best bets are Gmail and Hotmail – and yes you can move all your mail over to either.

The short version of how to do it:

All modern e-mail clients support multiple e-mail accounts.

With Gmail, you can set up the new account alongside the old POP account in Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail or any number of other clients that support IMAP.

With Hotmail, you use the Windows Live Mail client. It will easily import all your old mail from Outlook or Outlook Express. Then you set up your Hotmail account alongside your POP account.

No matter which method you choose, once you have the multiple accounts set up you just drag and drop the mail from the old to the new. All the timestamps are saved and nothing is lost. Everything is moved over including the sent mail, attachments and so on. Furthermore the mail is instantly accessible on the web as well as in the client at that point via hotmail.com or gmail.com depending on which you chose.

Once done you no longer have to rely on your computer to send, retrieve and store your mail. All of it is in the cloud, backed up and accessible at any time. You can also still use the mail client if you feel like it. You can get to your mail either way when you push it to the cloud.

The long version of how to do it:

I go into grotesque detail on how to do this and it would take way too long to explain here – so watch for another article on it soon!

I am telling you now – start transitioning to the cloud

Said honestly, don’t put this off. You’ve got your docs, you’ve got your mail and if you take photos, those are most likely local to your computer box as well. Push this stuff out to the cloud (that being the internet).

You can continue (obviously) to perform local backups, but when (not if) the time comes that you get a new computer, the painful process of moving everything over will be so much less painful when you realize you can just open up a browser and get to everything – instantly.

Yes it’s true that there will be things you simply can’t push to the cloud (yet), but for the stuff you can get out there – do it.

Do it if for no other reason to have a secondary or tertiary free backup. The price is nice and all it costs is a small amount of your time.

This is the first time I’ve found something Linux can do that Windows (or OS X for that matter) cannot, that being to backup a large Flickr account.

I’ll explain.

My paid Flickr account has 1000+ photos in it. I use it routinely, realized it was frickin’ huge and felt the need to back it up.

The only semi-decent tool available is flickredit. But there’s one huge problem with it. If you have a ton of photos it simply won’t work. Sure, if you want to do periodic backups of say 500 photos or less it will do just fine. But over that mark it will just stop in the middle of a backup. You’ll have to start it all over again and do it piecemeal style (such as 50 at a time, etc.)

Very, very irritating. And slow.

Linux on the other hand has this thing called flickrfs. It mounts your Flickr account as a drive so-to-speak. However it is very "linuxy" and the installation may scare off some (read: command line crapola).

The alternative? Use Desktop Flickr Organizer. From what I understand it uses flickrfs and there’s absolutely zero command line crapola to deal with. This is directly available from Add/Remove in Ubuntu and looks like this when you go to get it:

When installed it’s available here:

When you run it, it looks like this:

Said honestly, if you use Flickr, you will love DFO. I’ve never seen its equal. It uploads, it organizes, it sorts, it tags, it does sets (and creation), it has search and most importantly – it downloads with no problems whatsoever.

I was able to download my entire Flickr photostream – which is 1000+ photos – on first try and DFO didn’t skip a beat. I was impressed.

Like with any application you use to access Flickr, you have to have your Flickr account "allow" it first. This only takes a few clicks of the mouse and you’re off to the races.

This is one real-life example of something Linux can do that no other OS can. In addition this Linux app is without a shadow of doubt better than any Windows or OS X offering for Flickr photo organization/backup. Normally whenever I see a Linux app it’s usually behind – but not this one. It’s way ahead.

If I want to backup my large Flickr account with no issues, I have to use Linux to get it done. Is this good or bad? Well if you’re a Linux user, not bad a’tall I’d say.

I use Flickr quite a bit and was wondering if there was any way to backup photos from the service using an application of some kind, and it turns out there is.

flickr backup will easily connect to your Flickr account and you can pick’n'choose whatever you want to retrieve. You can backup individual photos or sets. And yes you can mass-select easily.

In this example I’ll show how to backup a set:

Above: These are the sets in my photostream. I checked off the first one and clicked the "Backup Selected" button at the bottom.

The next screen asks me where I’d like to backup my photos to. I can choose to backup direct to the hard drive or CD/DVD. I can even ZIP them up if I want to (very nice).

I chose to backup to the hard drive and clicked the "Start Backup" button at the bottom right.

This is what the backup process looks like.

Once the download is finished, that’s it. Your Flickr photos are backed up. Simple and easy.

The application by the way is free.

Download flickr backup here.

Yahoo is in the digital doghouse lately after they made what many see as a bonehead move and walked away from talks with Microsoft. Stocks crashed on the news and it hasn’t really recovered since the drop. Now we have news that the co-founders of Flickr are leaving the company.

Flickr is and has been one of the bright spots at Yahoo. The photo sharing site is extremely popular and very easy to use. I myself use Flickr for my photos online and I actually have a Pro account which costs me $25/year.

Flickr was founded by Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, a husband and wife team, in 2004. According to Techcrunch, Fake left last week. Butterfield will be leaving on July 12th. Valleywag has posted the resignation letter of Butterfield, which seems like the rantings of an insane metallurgist.

So, the question is this: Is Flickr now threatened by the exodus of it’s co-founders? Is Flickr now at the beck and call of a company which can’t seem to figure out what the hell it is supposed to do? It sure seems that way.

Like many, Flickr is really the only reason I have a Yahoo login. I only hope Yahoo doesn’t go changing anything. If they’re smart, they’ll leave it as is. Otherwise, we could be stuck with crappy design ideas like this one from the old Yahoo Photos site.

The big question this leads to is this: Should you move your photos off of Flickr?

The answer is: NO. Flickr is still the leader in online photo management and it has serious momentum. We will watch to see what Yahoo does with the site. For anyone worried about the recent stock drop and seeing that as a sign that Flickr could eventually unplug, my view is that we are a long ways from that. Yahoo is indeed in a transition period – one which they could either come out the other end in great shape or find themselves folding. Yahoo needs to figure out what the hell their main product is and quit being the schizophrenic Internet company that it is now.

So, I’m not moving my photos – yet.

I am in the midst of writing an article that is going to compare online photo services plus a few freebie photo clients.

It occurred to me that in order to make for a better article, it would be good to ask the audience: Why do you use what you use and what features are important to you?

Your online options

With online photo management you’ve got several choices (and if I missed any please feel free to mention one or more in the comments):

• Picasa
• Flickr (which connects with Yahoo! 360)
• Zooomr
• Windows Live Spaces
• Photobucket
• MySpace
• .Mac/MobileMe

Your client options

I personally find it absolutely necessary to have a locally installed program to manage my photos so I can tag, categorize and upload to the web easily.

For the ones of note, this is what I could immediately find:

• Picasa
• Windows Live Photo Gallery
• iPhoto
• F-Spot (Linux)

Once again, if you know of any that are readily available for download, please feel free to post a comment or two.

Of the ones listed above, the only one I haven’t tried is F-Spot (although it looks really good).

It also just happens to be that F-Spot is the only one that can connect with the most online services (Flickr, Picasa and so on). And yes, this means Linux scores a win once again for its ability to connect with the most stuff.

Windows Live Photo Gallery will connect to Windows Live Spaces and Flickr.

iPhoto only connects to the .Mac service to the best of my knowledge.

Picasa only connects to Google’s Picasa service to the best of my knowledge.

What do you use? Why do you use it?

Is there any particular reason why you would use one online service over another? Do you even use a photo managing program?

At the present time I’m using Windows Live Photo gallery because it appears to be the only Windows client that will connect up with Flickr easily.

But before I fly out that article – your opinion counts. What do you use?