austinpreneur

How I use iPhoto to publish to Facebook

I have a pretty good routine down now for uploading and sharing my photos and videos on my Mac and in the cloud. Good because I'm able to do it frequently (a few times a week) and don't spend too much time on it (usually about 15 minutes). This system is actually based on a similar method for managing music songs and playlists that I use for iTunes.

I manage them in iPhoto, edit them in iMovie, and share them online via Facebook, Flickr and YouTube and also through devices such as my iPhone, screensavers and digital picture frames. I'm able to upload a lot of content with minimal time.

Here is what I do after returning from a trip or event where I took pictures and video.

First, I organize the photos:

1. Connect USB cable to camera, videocamera, and iPhone. iPhoto automatically launches and goes directly to the Import screen.
2. Click Import in iPhoto to copy photos from camera to computer
3. Hygiene - delete bad photos and duplicate photos in iPhoto
4. Tagging - Add tags to photos in iPhoto
5. Ratings - Rate all photos 3 stars in iPhoto
6. Ratings - Upgrade individual photos to 4 or 5 stars in iPhoto
7. Events - Break into Events if needed and name events in iPhoto
8. Smart Albums - Update MobileMe galleries by dragging and dropping new photos from Smart Albums in iPhoto

Next, I publish them to various physical devices and online:

1. Screensaver on my computer
2. iPhone Photo Albums
3. Digital Picture Frames
4. Facebook Photos - Publish new photos to Facebook from iPhoto, then update permissions from Facebook website
5. Flickr Photos - Publish new photos to Flickr if appropriate
6. iMovie Editing - Edit videos in iMovie if necessary (usually not)
7. Facebook Video - Drag videos to the desktop and then upload individually to Facebook and YouTube

Usually this entire process takes about 15 minutes. If its after a big trip with 1000 photos and a bunch of video then maybe an hour or two.

Do I have to use a Mac?

This is one of those places where the Mac really shines. No one has made it so simple to manage your photos, videos and music and the software is all completely free with every Mac. Everything is integrated and mostly automatic. You plug in the camera and it launches iPhoto and goes right to the Import screen. My screensaver automatically gets the latest pictures and so does my iPhone when it syncs. Everything is automatic. Everything is easy.

Tagging

I'm pretty religious about tagging my photos and videos. I have about 20 tags that I use to keep things straight. Most photos get 2 or 3 tags.

A few tags may eventually be replaced by iPhoto facial recognition - I've played with it a bunch but I haven't integrated it into my process yet. I also need to work geolocation tagging into this process.

The most common tags that I use now are:

• Family Members *
• Josh *
• Baer **
• Family **
• Friends **
• Business
• OtherInbox
• Capital Factory
• Ignite Austin
• Home 
• Holiday
• Travel
• Cars
• Dogs
• Documents (pictures of awards, certificates, etc.)

* could be replaced by facial recognition
** could be replaced by facial recognition if it had groups

I can use the same criteria to do one-off searches and I have found it to be very easy to find specific pictures I'm looking for. Usually I can just narrow it down to 2 or 3 tags and then scan chronologically to find it.

Ratings

iPhoto has a five star rating system. My default rating is 3 stars. After deleting bad photos that are out of focus and duplicate shots, I "select all" and set the ratings to 3 stars. Then I look through them for any that I want to upgrade to 4 stars or 5 stars.

• 5 stars - the very best pictures
• 4 stars - better than average, but not the very best
• 3 stars - default rating for pictures that are worth keeping
• 2 stars - below average, but kept for completeness (usually pictures from an event)
• 1 star - never show in albums, probably some special case, not usually normal pictures

By rating every photo, I can create Smart Albums (below) that contain my "best" pictures from the past few months. Or I can combine with Tags to search for the "best pictures of Cars".

 

 
 

Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like "saved searches." I combine Tagging and Ratings to create Smart Albums that update their content automatically. I then connect these Smart Albums to screensavers, my iPhone, and the albums that I publish to Facebook.

My most frequently used Smart Albums are:

• Kids Best - tagged Kids and rated 5 stars
• Kids Recent - taken in the past 3 months, tagged Kids and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Best - taken in the past 3 months and rated 4 or 5 stars
• 3 Months Recent - taken in the past 3 months and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
• Family Best - tagged Family and rated 4 or 5 stars
• Travel Best - tagged Travel and rated 5 stars
• Amy & Josh - tagged Amy and Josh and rated 5 stars

How do I decide how many stars? Mostly be trial an error. I start with 4 and 5 stars and if that is too many then I just go with 5 stars. If its not enough then I go to 3, 4 and 5 stars.

 

 

iMovie Editing

iMovie is a simple video editing application that comes pre-installed on most Macs. It's really easy to make professional looking videos with it. You can easily cut and paste clips together, overlay slides from a presentation, add titles and effects, and more.

It is integrated with iPhoto - so as long as I upload my photos and movies into iPhoto (which is what happens by default when I plug a camera into my Mac) then iMovie can automatically see all of those media assets and I can drag and drop them into movies I'm editing.

Facebook

For photos, I usually let iPhoto organize them into Events and end up wanting to publish Events as Albums on Facebook. After all of the hygiene, tagging, and rating, I'm usually left with exactly the group of photos I might want to share. So I just name the Event the same name I would want the Album to be named in Facebook and then click the Facebook icon in the bottom right of the iPhoto window.

 

 

If you want to share your photos with Everyone or with Just Friends, its easy. You just click go and you're done. I think that somehow it even matches up the facial recognition and will automatically tag photos with your friends.

If you want to share the album privately on Facebook with only certain people, it gets a little tricky. iPhoto only gives you the option to share your album with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Just Friends. Most of the photos that I share are only shared with certain Facebook Friend Lists and not with Everyone. So I have to publish from iPhoto to Just Friends and then immediately go to the web page and reset the privacy controls from the web after the first photo is uploaded. Even still, I've had a few times where some friends on Facebook have seen pictures (I know because they commented on them) that they weren't supposed to see (fortunately nothing embarrassing, just cute family pictures).

 

 

This only works for uploading photos to your own personal account. Once they are in your account, you can easily post them to a Facebook event. However, if you want to post pictures to a Facebook Page for your company, you need to export the photos to a folder and then use the Facebook photo upload process from the web page.

For videos, it's similar to Facebook pages. You have to upload the video files directly using the Facebook web page. I usually end up dragging and dropping the video from iPhoto onto the desktop so that its easy to find when I'm uploading it to Facebook.

Flickr

I don't really publish many photos to Flickr but it works with iPhoto a lot like Facebook.

YouTube

Publishing movies isn't quite as simple with YouTube. The maximum time is 10 minutes, so long movies require extra editing to chop them up into 10 minute chunks and upload them each separately. This is a big pain in the ass and is making me seriously consider switching the bulk of my video to Vimeo because it has fewer limitations.

iPhone

My iPhone automatically syncs the Smart Albums to my iPhone, so it always has the best and most recent pictures on it. You configure that from within iTunes.

Screensavers

You can choose a Smart Album as a screensaver on a Mac, so I usually have the "3 Months Best" album with the Ken Burns effect on my screen. Its counter-intuitive to me at first, but I find that I prefer seeing the most recent pictures all the time, not the best old ones over and over.

Just go to the Screen Saver in the System Preferences and your iPhoto Albums and Events will appear in the list. Sometimes it takes a minute for them to appear.

 

 

Digital Picture Frames

I have a Philips digital picture frame on my desk. Unfortunately the only way to transfer pictures is by connecting it to a computer via USB or using SD memory cards. This means manually dragging and dropping images from iPhoto to the SD card and physically moving around the cards or cables every time you want to sync them. I'd really like to find a good digital picture frame that would stream the photos off of iPhoto (the problem with Facebook is that the pictures are so low quality).

What about you?

How do you manage your photos? Any tips on how to make my process smoother or more automated? Have you worked facial recognition and geo-location into your process? Please comment.

Quick links to your company Facebook page and Twitter search

For most of my companies that I work with I've created quick links to our Facebook page as well as a Twitter search for our company. This makes it really easy to promote the pages by word of mouth (literally) or on Twitter where every character counts.

For example, if you want to go to OtherInbox's Facebook page, you can just type in facebook.otherinbox.com (or even shorter, facebook.oib.com). That link is a redirect that sends you to our Facebook fan page for OtherInbox.

To see what people are saying about OtherInbox right now, go to twitter.otherinbox.com. That link is a redirect that sends you to a pre-defined search on search.twitter.com.

Here's how to set it up for yourself.

Go to your Facebook fan page. The URL will probably look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

I don't know why Facebook does this because its unnecessary and really ugly, but you probably want to clean it up first. Look for the "/pages/" that appears the farthest to the right (it could be in there twice). Delete everything to the left of it other than "www.facebook.com".

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now this is the nice URL to your Facebook fan page: 

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now all you do is set up a web redirect for a certain web page or domain name to go that URL. I like to use custom domain names because I think they are easy to remember: facebook.oib.com. However, you could also do oib.com/facebook just as easily. I use Register.com's RComExpress service to host my domains and they have a great feature where you can set up a subdomain and enter a page for it to redirect to and they take care of the rest. 

Next, I do the same thing for Twitter search and twitter.otherinbox.com. First I go to search.twitter.com and manually type in the search that finds the content that I want to show. 

For OtherInbox that is:

otherinbox OR "other inbox" OR #OIB OR oib.com OR "mr. spam" OR mrspam OR "mr spam"

which results in the URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=otherinbox+OR+%22other+inbox%22+OR+%23OIB+OR+oib.com

+OR+%22mr.+spam%22+OR+mrspam+OR+%22mr%20spam%22

When I tried to put that URL into Register.com's redirect it didn't like some of the characters, so I put it into TinyURL first and put the resulting TinyURL into Register.com's redirect. But that worked fine.

It doesn't take long to set up, and I find it quite handy. I hope you do too!

Road Runner is putting ads in your DNS

As a sign of the times, my cable modem Internet service from Time Warner's Road Runner now is serving a Yahoo search page instead of generating a proper DNS error when you mistype a web page URL. If you're on Road Runner, try clicking on this link as an example. 

Network Solutions tried this a few years ago and got so much bad press that the canned the program within a short period of time.

While I was initially frustrated by this, I was happy and impressed to see the opt-out link at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the opt-out brought me to a page that allowed me to turn this off and go back to the standard (and proper) behavior.

If you use Road Runner, I recommend you click on this link and opt-out now.

Clicking on the opt-out link takes you to this preferences page:

After opting-out, your error page should look like this:

Speed tip if you use Gmail over IMAP

If you use Gmail over IMAP, then you want to know about a new feature Google just released as part of Gmail Labs. It lets you make the "All Mail" folder invisible to IMAP so that your email client doesn't try to download every message twice.

Gmail is different from other IMAP implementations in that each "folder" corresponds to a Gmail "label". Because each message can have more than label in Gmail, each message can appear in more than one folder in IMAP. Gmail also has an "All Mail" view that shows all of the messages at once - the Inbox, Sent, Archived, Labels, etc. This is handy when you're in Gmail and want to search across everything, but its not really needed in an IMAP client because most IMAP clients do their own indexing of messages and make it easy to search across all of them without having them in a folder.

The problem with the All Mail folder over IMAP is that it means you're downloading every message twice. And because your IMAP client thinks that a message that appears in 2 different folders is actually 2 different messages, any local searches that you do will return 2 results for every message - once in the folder you expect and once in the All Mail folder.

I have a lot of email - its measured in gigabytes - and so keeping around 2 copies of every messages is a pretty big deal. It takes up a lot of disk space, slows down my Internet because its downloading 2x as much, slows down my computer because my email program needs more memory to run. I highly recommend you turn off your All Mail folder!

To do this, go to Settings -> Labs and then turn on the Advanced IMAP feature. Next go to Settings -> Labels and uncheck All Mail. It's that simple!

p.s. hat tip to Ian Ragsdale for pointing this out to me after I complained about it screwing up my IMAP client!

Come hear about OtherInbox at Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour next Thursday

Next Thursday, September 11 I'll be presenting OtherInbox at the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour at the Austin Music Hall. Register for the event and be one of the first to hear about OtherInbox!

YouNoodle startup valuation predictor says OtherInbox will be worth $73M

Want to know how much your startup will be worth in 3 years? YouNoodle.com will tell you. Based primarily on information about the founders and investors, YouNoodle tries to predict the valuation of startups after 3 years.

I filled it out for OtherInbox, and YouNoodle says we'll be worth $73 million after 3 years. Like with most projections, it's probably not that accurate (I'm sure we'll be worth much more than that!) but it's still an interesting exercise.

Find out what keywords your competitors are bidding on at SpyFu

Search marketing takes place in an auction format, and its always a big advantage in an auction to have more information than the people you are bidding against. SpyFu (note the url is http://www.fuspy.com/) lets you see what keywords your competitor are bidding on and approximately how much they are spending. You can look up a domain name to research a particular company, or you can look up a keyword to research the going rate and who else is bidding on it.

I'm sure its not perfectly accurate, but its better than nothing!

FundingSleuth.com sends email alerts when companies raise money

First Round Capital released a cool new tool for entrepreneurs and investors called FundingSleuth.com. It lets you enter in companies to watch and automatically sends an email alert if that company files a sale of securities with the SEC.

If you work for a funded company, you should sign up and watch your employer. If you are an entrepreneur, you should watch your own company so that you know when your fundraising becomes public information. If you're an investor, you should watch your portfolio so that you know about other fundraising. If you're just really interested in a particular startup, you might want to monitor their fundraising.

Thanks for this cool, free tool!

Come learn Ruby on Rails on August 2nd

If you've been hearing about Ruby on Rails and wondering what all the fuss is about, come spend a Saturday learning Ruby on Rails with a group of experienced Rails developers as your guide. The program will outline the major pieces of Rails and dellve into the practial aspects of building web applications with the framework. Hands-on work on your own laptop will be encouraged during the work session.

Major topics will include:

• Some Ruby Basics
  
• Broad Rails Overview
  
• Building a Rails Application From the Ground Up
  
• Active Record Models and Database Migrations
  
• Views, Controllers, and Helpers: A Guided Tour
  
• Application Deployment with Capistrano 2
  
• App Lab

We'll be hosting the event on August 2nd from 10am to 5pm at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. Space is limited so reserve your spot today!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday July 22nd

On Tuesday, July 22nd we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Lightning Talks!
For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework
Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Is this website down or is it just my Internet connection?

Ever wonder if the reason you can't get to a website is a problem on your end or a problem at the website? Here is a handy tool you can use to test!

Cloud solution for cross-browser testing - crossbrowsertesting.com

Jeff Hotz just sent me a link to CrossBrowserTesting.com that allows you to easily test your web application on any combination of operating system and web browser. We are developing OtherInbox on Macs, and although I have a PC laptop sitting around for testing I don't have every different combination of XP, Vista, IE, Firefox, etc.

This lets me log in for 5 minutes and try something out to reproduce a bug or just do proactive testing. It's actually free to try out for 5 minutes at a time and you can pay for priority access.