Beauty vs virtual Beauty

World Children in NYC

Watch this video: http://tinyurl.com/zc2yu
Lovely, isn't?

Twango

Twango is what flickr should have been, if conceived for sharing photographs with friends, family and the world. Welcome Twango, a free multi media hosting site, offering unlimited storage for videos, photos, audio, and other media. The only limitation is 250Mb/month upload rate, which is a decent amount for social amateurs and casual point and shooters. There are a lot of options for uploading and for sharing. Your photos can be public or private, by sending them to public or private channels (any photo can belong to more than one channel). You can contribute to public channels created by other users if they set you as participant, or create your own channels, public or private, and set them own managed or open for your chosen people upload participation.

You can use a batch uploader from your computer, or send your media files as attachments via email, to specific channel addresses or to your media library. Also, you can add a note within your message for your friends, family, contacts, to invite them to access your media files: photos, videos, whatever. They do not need to be members of Twango, they just click the preview sent to them and automatically jump to the Twango site to enjoy the full version of your files, even if the files are in a private channel, since you invited them to have access (or even you may have invited them to contribute with uploads).

There's more: photos are stored at full resolution and can be downloaded back, or you can send any size versions as direct links to forums, or post them on websites. You can edit photos, rotate them, change the date, check the EXIF data, add keywords, descriptions...! Of course there's the possibility of interaction among users, to leave comments on public channels, and all the other things that are usual in a photo/video/audio sharing community.

This is what flickr could be if was really, but really, sharing-oriented. Ah!, the slide show is very cool too!

Twango: highly recommended.

No intrinsic message

Photography is not a language, it's an art or it's a recording tool. Recorded pieces of reality, images-as-documents, have no intrinsic meaning, it's us humans that attribute meaning to things, to events/facts and to recorded images of them. And, as others have said, those meanings that we attribute are subjective, personal, relative to our culture, experiences, mentality, individually accumulated conditioning. A language can be articulated in precise ways to carry specific messages and there are institutions that guard language's coherency for collective use. Think of dictionaries. There's nothing like that about art, nothing like that about raw facts even if recorded as two-dimensional images. In both cases photography creates objects that are empty of intrinsic message or meaning, other than that attributed by the author and/or by the viewer, which diverge most of the times.

Other people talking about this subject:

Coral Way/92 Ave

Coral Way/92 Ave
Originally uploaded by infinite.light.

no title

Originally uploaded by Eddie Law.

One of my fav photographers.

lisbon meets miami and couple with bags

lisbon meets miami and couple with bags
Originally uploaded by infinite.light.

orchids

orchids
Originally uploaded by infinite.light.

Zooomr free upgrade for bloggers

If you are a blogger and have a free Zooomr account, you can upgrade for free to a Zooomr Pro account just by posting a picture hosted by Zooomr in your blog. Instructions here.

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Photo Storage sites

I have created a wiki to compare the best online photo storage sites where you can upload images you own and show them to other people. This project does not include invisible photo storage sites like ImageShack or AllYouCanUpload, which are simple photo closets where you get direct links to your images in order to display them on your own websites. I am interested in sites that offer a wide range of features for your online photographs.
Please, help me to edit the informations that have not been completed or that are simply wrong. Photostorage.Wetpaint.com

Picasa Web Albums

I expected more from Google. Their desktop pictures organizer, Picasa, is a good product although very limited as image editor; but what can you ask to a freebee! Now Picasa goes online and we all photo freaks dreamed that coming from Google it should be great. Well, it's not.

Google believes that people shoot lower resolution photographs. Hello? Digital cameras start from 5 or 6 Megapixels these days! These means we average digital photo shooters accumulate tons of megabytes of pictures per year, if not per month! We cry for a decent online photo storage and backup service. We imagined this could come from Google. Big surprise: Picasa Web Albums free version comes serving you a ridiculous 250 Mb total space and its paid version is even more stupid: $25/year for nothing but 6 Gb ever! Did I say 6 Gb? This is what I shoot on a couple of summer trips!

Now, Google wants me to keep all my photo collections (Picasa Web) under a limit of 6 Gb while milking me $25 a year just for using their hard drive? Hello Google Drive, even Mediamax Streamload gives me 25 Gb for free to upload, display and share photos, videos, audio or documents!!

Picasa Web: nothing to recommend here, unless you are a poor low resolution once in a while photo shooter that knows no better.

Phanfare

Phanfare is a family friendly pictures and videos storage service. They only have paid plans, but you store your original resolution images (can also download back) and space is unlimited. The album templates I have seen are ugly but the slideshow feature looks nice (you can add background music to it). Albums can be set private and you can invite your friends to see them. Three price options: pay $6.95/month, or pay $54.95/year, or pay $299.95 just once for a lifetime account. This is another serious alternative to Flickr, for private users.

Pickle

I was in love with Bubbleshare as the perfect hosting for photography aficionados: it's free, has a lot of features, and you could download your original pictures back to your hard drive. Not anymore. The Bubbleshare team has removed that feature and now you can only download a lower resolution version of whatever you previously uploaded. That's sad. I communicated with them and they told me that they maybe will restore the feature back. Maybe.

Now comes a new brand: Pickle. They offer free and paid plans. Unlimited storage for pictures and videos (most formats are welcome). Monthly upload up to 200 Mb first year, 75 Mb second year onwards (free) or 2 Gb ($19.95/first year, $49.95/year onwards). Max file size: 100 Mb first year, 10 Mb second year onwards. I think it's a good alternative to Flickr, if you want having the option to keep any albums (boxes) private (you can't make private sets with Flickr, only individual pictures). After the first year special promotion, boxes are limited to 7 for free account users. They come with a very interesting pack of features, most of them helping you share your boxes through rich formated email messages, or even for using a custom email address as alternative upload method. The good thing is that your original images can be downloaded back to your drive and you can bestow permission to other users to do it as well. That's better than what Bubbleshare does, but only for the paid accounts.

floverview

If you have a flickr account, this piece of webware is quite nice.

It will display your profile, your tags, the latest pictures you have uploaded, a random collection from all your photographs, your contacts, your groups and your favorites.

all you can upload

Webshots, a well known photography hosting and stock photo e-store, has just launched a free virtual storage service for owned pictures. All you can upload will remain in their servers, at original size if you prefer or resized at your taste. You get the codes to paste your pictures around the world wide web, that is, forums, e-shops, conventional websites, blogs, etc. Anywhere you need to paste one or many of your pictures, allyoucanupload is your way to go. There's no bandwidth, picture size or number of pictures limit, just upload as much as you need. No registration required, but print or save the codes provided in your notepad, or you will not find your uploaded pictures anymore. If you prefer a conventional album based storage, sign up with the source website: Webshots.

ImageLog

ImageLog es como un Tabblo a la española, es decir, un alojador gratuito de fotografías que te permite crear "logs" o páginas que muestran un montón de fotos tuyas juntas, ocupando diferentes espacios de tamaño personalizable para cada imagen y con fondos de color también modificables. La web no ofrece información acerca de la cantidad de fotos alojable gratuitamente, ni si conserva las fotos a tamaño original. ImageLog es más bien una forma original de mostrar a otros tus fotografías. Además se pueden subir al servidor por correo electrónico y por teléfono móvil.

Tabblo

A new and interesting free hosting service for your pictures. At the moment Tabblo offers hosting for an unlimited number of photographs, stored @ original size. The main feature is that you can arrange your photos in "tabblos", i.e. very customizable pages with your selection of colors, fonts and texts. Tabblos are like albums but better, more creative and fun. You can share any of them with your friends, or keep them private. I see Tabblo as a very beautiful alternative to other free photo-hosting services like Bubbleshare.

i felt it was ceramic

i felt it was ceramic
Originally uploaded by antimethod.

photo by cole rise

Mc a lo nuestro

Mc a lo nuestro
Originally uploaded by Sandemente.

flickr favorites

Peugeot avec Rolleiflex 2.8F

Peugeot avec Rolleiflex 2.8F
Originally uploaded by Hypnotic Aubergine.

From my flickr favorites.