What Do You Do with All Your Digital Photos?
Assuming you took our suggestions for digitizing your old photos, the question becomes what do you do with them? Digital photos easily scarf up multiple gigs of storage while remaining indefinitely un-viewed and un-printed.
Few of us have trouble taking digital photos, but we have few ways of viewing them aside from occasional glances on photo-sharing sites like Facebook, Picassa and Flickr.
A new site called Familiar offers one way to get your photos off your hard-drive and into your line of vision, as well as providing a social forum forum for photo sharing.
What you do is sign up with a number of friends and family (guess you could do it with strangers, Chat Roulette-style). Familiar’s software allows you to share your photo albums or Facebook, Picassa, SmugMug and Flickr photostreams with people in your Familiar circle. The combined photos are then displayed as your screensaver of your computer monitor, iPad or Kindle Fire. You can even send photos instantly from your iPhone or Android.
While most computers can turn you screensaver into a slideshow, they don’t have the social aspect, which provides some novelty and a way of keeping in visual touch with you friends and family.
Of course, your computer has to be powered on, and computers don’t always make the best picture frames. That said, most of us keep our computers on standby much of the time and because Familiar is free and uses existing hardware, a zero-investment, imperfect picture frame is far better than none.
If you have other suggestions for viewing digital photos, let us know.