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We think a lot about speed, and an independent company monitors dotPhoto’s load speed. Among photo companies, which as a group have fairly “heavy” pages because of the graphics, dotPhoto is in the top 5% for speed.  dotPhoto senses your connection speed and sometimes changes the way we serve up data;  for instance, if you have a dial-up connection, we’ll serve smaller images to the dotPhoto Show so that they get there faster. If your broadband connection speed is very slow, you may see the same behavior when watching dotPhoto Shows.

If your overall access seems slow, you might want to test your connection speed, which you can do at the free “Speakeasy” link below.  dotPhoto servers are in Sunnyvale, California, so the San Francisco server is the best choice to test.

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Upon completion of the test, you see a screen like this:

On my home cable connection, I’m getting 595 Kbps on download and 347 Kbps on upload to the San Francisco test server.  Verizon’s new fiber optic FIOS service claims up to 10 Mbps download (their web site says 5, but their operator says 10MB) and 2 Mbps for $29.95 per month for the first year, which would be a savings for me, so I may try it out. FIOS is not available everywhere, but you can learn more by clicking here for FIOS link.

Certain times of day are slower for cable users and especially for DSL users.  For instance, right after dinner can be slower because everyone is doing homework, shopping or reading home email. Unforeseen events can also slow down the entire Internet.  I remember being frustrated in my attempt to connect one evening only to discover that much of the world was trying to connect to the Mars Rover.

You can also speed up dotPhoto by changing your album displays to a list display, and by reducing the number of thumbnails that you display in an album.  Since most of us look mainly at our most recent photos, these are easy changes to live with

Changing your album display to a list display

On the album page, click on this icon.  You can change back to thumbnails by clicking the same spot again:

Reducing the number of thumbnails displayed in albums

A congressman recently explained the Internet as “a series of tubes,” which has been a source of amusement for late-night comics. It’s true, though, that the tubes get slower when they have more data to push through — and that’s what happens to an album page when more thumbnails are displayed. You can see as few as 3 photos per row on 3 rows or 9 images per page, and as many as 6 photos per row and 12 rows or 72 images per page. You’ll see 9 photos much faster than 72, which can take a moment or two load. 

To reduce the number of thumbnails displayed, click on “Display Settings” and then set the numbers of images per row and rows per pages that are comfortable for you:

Photo crystals are as permanent as anything you can you make with a photo.
The crystals are very dense and heavy with the largest weighing easily as much as a brick. If you ever wanted to put a photo in a time capsule, a photo crystal would be the technique because the image is preserved inside the crystal – not etched into the surface.  Unlike paper, sculpture or just about any other image preservation technique I can imagine, photo crystals encase the image inside the medium.

How I tried to break a photo crystal
We don’t recommend this, but, as a test for this blog, I dropped the small photo crystal from successively higher heights onto the thin office carpet that covers our concrete slab. I started by pushing it off my desk – not an unlikely event in the life of a photo crystal.  No marks or breaks.  Then waist height, face height, and holding it over my head.  I tried each of these in several “drop” positions with no damage, and surmise that you would have to hit a photo crystal hard with a hammer to break it, or drop it directly onto a cement floor – both less likely events.

Photo crystals can be used for special occasions and also as customized, memorable awards.
Each crystal is packaged in a luxurious blue box with a magnetic clasp and a royal blue cloth interior.  The weight in your hand makes the item feel, well, weighty.  Somehow, the permanence and heft of photo crystals makes them seem important. 

They’re pure.
Light playing off and through a photo crystal adds another dimension of beauty that has fascinated people throughout history.  These crystals have beveled edges that make them a pleasure to handle and display.  You can set them up with your own lighting, or purchase a battery-powered pedestal (3 AAAs) that bathes your crystal with light from beneath with four light emitting diodes.

Since it’s hard to represent this kind of product online, I put together this little dotPhoto Show with images of crystals captured on my office window sill. 

Click here to watch a dotPhoto Show about photo crystals.

Click here to purchase photo crystals.

You can find interesting sounds and music on the Internet, edit songs for length, add sounds together and upload the resulting MP3s to your dotPhoto Shows to add colorful, evocative music.  Here’s how… 

Changing music in a dotPhoto Show
If you are the owner of a dotPhoto Show, you can click on “Edit” at the top of the screen, and then choose “Music” from the button bar.  (Guests will not see the Edit option.) You can sample and select music in 22 categories, or upload your own music by clicking on the “Upload Music” button:

Finding MP3 files
Alta Vista has a good search routine that finds interesting MP3 files.  You may be pleasantly surprised by the breadth of audio files available to add character to your show.

Click here to search for MP3 files at Alta Vista 

Perhaps the best yearbook ever made would be one that involves everyone in your school collaboratively capturing images and choosing the very best images at the end of the year. Digital technologies make this a real possibility, but putting together a great yearbook still requires planning.

We sympathize with planning problem – just last night we held a party to commemorate a new Exclaim web site – http://www.adobeshowcase.com/ – and, as we were thanking everyone with bottles of photo-labeled wine and photo-engraved crystals, we looked around and realized that no one had a camera. I had even left my cell phone in the car.

So much for the perfect world, but you can enlist students and staff at your school in the beginning of the year so that your yearbook task at the end will be more productive and enjoyable.

Organize early
Assemble a committee (or multiple committees!) to design the yearbook and submit ideas. Committees are great for yacking about ideas and generating enthusiasm, which is exactly what you want at the beginning of the yearbook process. The main goal at your first yearbook committee meeting is to encourage everyone to think about the yearbook throughout the year. Your design ideas will probably change completely by year end, and, if your committee is like most committees, only the true believers will remain by then. However, your first meeting will kick off the process of taking pictures to document your year

You have one over-riding goal: make sure people are taking pictures at every event so you have plenty of representative and high-quality images to choose from later. Camera phones and the popularity of small digital cameras will help your students take multiple images of everything. Don’t underestimate camera phones either: the new two and three megapixel phones take excellent, printable photos, and VGA and 1.3 megapixel images can be used for small illustrations or in photo collages to describe an event or tell a story.

What to depict
A yearbook is all about people. When you flip through it years from now, you’ll want to remember people as they were. You will peer at those pictures and look for clues about the real nature of the people you used to see every day. With that in mind, focus on the people and look for genuine, natural images.

Don’t worry about “quality.”
This may surprise your students. Most people don’t really enjoy looking at posed, perfectly-framed shots of students smiling on queue. Those images lack authentic emotion and don’t tell us much about the people depicted. Instead, go for quantity: you will find among a sequence of images one or two good, interesting photos. You can always crop and manipulate the image later, too.

Everyone
Assign a member of every team, club and class to be the official photographer for that organization. (That’s one more thing they can put on their college resume: “Team Photographer.”) Their job is not only to get pictures of that activity, but to get a photo of everyone who participated. At the end of the year, you want to make sure that you don’t leave anyone out. Sure, you’ll have their official photo, but a great yearbook will also have pictures of people doing interesting things.

Obscure facts
What would people find interesting about your school or the people in it? Do you have a student who lives another life outside of school as a concert pianist? Do you have students who volunteer at something that is not related to the school? Was your school founded by gypsies? Get pictures! Your readers will enjoy learning things that they didn’t know about your school. Start the Obscure Committee!

Surprising Images and Candid Shots
Human interest first. Encourage an eye for the unusual. Candid shots are best and most interesting. I like surprised shots where the subject is looking directly into the camera – a face looking directly out from the page, a face that is candid and not composed for the perfect picture, is arresting and interesting. We make contact through our eyes.

Action
Show movement: dancers dancing, runners running, teachers gesticulating. Even portraits can be made more interesting with motion. At the end of a portrait session, photographer Philippe Halsman would often ask distinguished people for one special picture: would they jump for him? Many did, and the images were often more interesting that the official portraits…

Jumping Duke and Duchess of Windsor 

Jumping Nixon      Jumping Marilyn Monroe

Core values
What are your school’s core values? Do you have a motto? Are you a military academy or religious school? Does your school simply reflect the values of your community? Try to depict and capture these values. The nature of your institution may change over the years, and you will want to remember its character while you were there.

Landmarks
Every school has landmarks, but your school’s truly important geography may not be where you imagine it. Sure, you want a picture of the main building, but you might also want to depict the water tower, the basement, the teacher’s lounge, a favorite pinball machine – the places that people frequent and might really want to remember. Encourage your Landmark Committee to get the out-of-the-way places as well as your Tower of Learning.

The Seasons
People and landscapes change over the year. Tell that story with sequences of different haircuts and of landscapes in wind, rain, snow and sunshine. Establish interim dates to get your committees together to remind them that a whole new season and a new series of activities is about to begin. 

Cyberlife
Since students today may spending as much time with keyboards as books, a few screen shots of emails, IM conversation and the school web site and online activities would be representative today.

Gathering Images on dotPhoto
You can give your committees a communal place to put their photos on dotPhoto by establishing albums for each activity, and then turning on “guest uploads” in each album. This will enable committee members to upload to the album, but they will not be able to edit or delete images. Of course, there can be abuse of this privilege because anyone can upload images, but you will still control every aspect of the account, and you can delete images or remove this privilege if things get out of hand.

To turn on guest uploads for any album, go to the album settings screen, and click on “Allow Guest Uploads.”

Alternatively, you can create multiple accounts for groups, and download images from those accounts when you want them. This would also enable camera phones to upload directly to each dotPhoto account. (dotPhoto does not currently allow multiple camera phones to upload to a single account.)

Monitor your photo collections as the year progresses
If you monitor the images coming in, you will notice natural shortages and certain strengths developing. Make up the shortages, but play to the strengths, too. You’re looking to create an entertaining book.

The Photo Editing Committee
You’ll need a representative group of people to select the best photos and to
edit them. Try giving each committee member one or two pages of design freedom. Why not let the social sub-groups in the school demonstrate their particular design sensibility? Online editing tools at dotPhoto help remove red-eye, crop and clean images.

Captioning
Captions can be fun and interesting. Let your humorists run wild with your final photo selection, then edit them again to add back some real information. As long as the captions are not hurtful, your readers will enjoy looking at the photos and comparing your students’ witticisms.

The written word
Yearbooks are mainly photo books, but words can be inspiring, topical and evocative. Wouldn’t it be fun, for instance, to ask the senior class where they will be in 25 years? Excerpts from a speech by a distinguished guest can be memorable – perhaps you can request an advance copy of the graduation speech. In looking back at my high school yearbook, I enjoy the senior quotes and the words that students chose for themselves. How about choosing the most interesting High School “High Points” and “Low Points”?

Fact checkers
If you’re compiling lots of printed facts, you’ll need to check your facts before going to press. Ensure that the photos match the correct names, and even that student activities reported match actual student participation. Yearbooks tend to become the permanent public record.

Make a yearbook “Show” and share it free to promote your book
Take the best 200 photos and create a dotPhoto Show that you can share online. (These are free to create and share.) You can narrate each photo by attaching a microphone to your PC, and even upload your school song as an MP3. If you create and share these free shows throughout the year, you can keep the enthusiasm going for the yearbook project. At the end of the year, students can buy a DVD to share with their family and friends on television.

Make a List
Unfortunately, most yearbooks start with a list and live by the list, which is why I’ve purposely left it to the end. You need a list to ensure that your yearbook includes all the seniors, the staff, and the school-sponsored activities. However, remember that your yearbook is meant to be fun. The more fun you have – and the more fun that you appear to be having in your yearbook – the more it will be treasured and enjoyed.

Look at Some Other Yearbooks
Take a look at what others have done. To which pages are you instinctively drawn?

High School Yearbooks 1959-2000

If you have further questions or suggestions about creating customized yearbooks, please leave them here!

Five years later, a search of dotPhoto’s public galleries yields thousands of images that tell the story of the World Trade Center from construction to the views from its famous observation decks and to the now familiar, horrible aftermath.  Some images, like the plaza spontaneously decorated in chalk messages of love and the “Tribute Lights” that reached to heaven, are powerful memorials.

9/11/01 through the lens of photojournalist living in Manhattan

“WTC Tragedy”

Photojournalist revisits the WTC site one year later
  (dotPhoto Show)                                          (Slideshow with captions)

Towers being built, August 1971, as seen from the Statue of Liberty.

WTC Tribute Lights
The twin beams of light illuminated the evening sky for a month from 3/11/02 to 4/13/02

WTC and lower Manhattan

“Never Forget: – the aftermath of 9/11/06

Views from the top of the World Trade Center

1055 images from the North Shore News including photos of the observation deck

Shanksville Memorial Site for Flight 93

For more images, search dotPhoto’s global search or check “Current Events” in the gallery.  To contribute your own images, categorize your public photos in Album Settings.

In a crowded field of photobooks,
EuroBook from dotPhoto
easily outshines the competition.

“EuroBook from DotPhoto offers more features and capabilities than most other products on the market. The options in binding and book size combine with the nearly boundless flexibility of design and a easy to use book creator software to allow the home photographer to create excellent photo books. The quality of the materials used in the books is excellent and would match or exceed what you find in a bookstore.”

Free software download:  www.eurobook.us

———————

Last year, I volunteered to help with the yearbook at my daughter’s tiny high school.  Sometime later, the person who usually handled the yearbook retired, and then, a few weeks before the end of the year, two students presented me with a couple of photo CDs.

I searched the web for instructions on making a yearbook. Finding none, I put together this list of ideas that could apply to making any yearbook.

You might also want to refer to Print anything in a dotPhoto book. It explains how you can create any page that includes both text and graphics with your current layout software

Suggestions for creating a yearbook at dotPhoto:

• Get a photo in the 5” square cutout on the front of the book.  This leaves plenty of room for signing autographs and messages around the cover photo.

• Start by editing the photos:  pick the best and discard the rest.  Crop the best images.

• Keep the happy photos – even if they’re not the best photos.  The quality of the expression will be more important that the quality of the image.  Memories are about emotions, and capturing emotions is the goal of a good yearbook.

• Look for interesting sequences to group together:  the same person in sequence can tell an amusing or interesting story.

• Sort the photos into logical groups:  teachers, staff, games, trips.  This will help identify sections that you might want to add, and will also create opportunities to create photo montages.

• Every yearbook has some whimsical photos.  Try adding a few digital effects:  a halo, artistic effect or dramatic lighting can add interest.  Paint Shop Pro is great for this kind of thing.  PSP Free download 30-day trial  
  
  Photo effects from Paint Shop Pro

• Create a page or two about events of the year. Wikipedia is a great source. Your graduates will be reading these pages in 20 years with interest.   Wikipedia 2006 events

• Student photos are easy to lay out.  We chose the 6-per-page layout on dotPhoto so that we’d have room for captions.  You can use the dotPhoto Re-arrange feature to put the photos in order, and then drag-and-drop them into the layout. 
  
  Dropping and dragging student photos into dotPhoto’s 6-per-page layout

• Photo montages add interest.  Start with a blank page and cut and paste the most interesting parts of your best photos. Re-size to fit spaces that you’re trying to fill in.  Don’t worry about creating a perfect page;  the randomness of the montage is engaging. 
  
  Photo montages lend interest

• Add a parting shot on the last page.  Pick one iconic photo or a group of interesting photos to say good-by.  We picked some goofy pictures including a photo of the yearbook committee in glasses. 
  
  “Parting shot” montage on the last page.

Our students were thrilled with their yearbooks.  They were used to getting output from a color copier, which, given prices for color copies, was probably more expensive!  This year, they got a hardcover book with stitched binding that told their story, and will help them remember the friends, teachers and events of this school year.

There are several great benefits of making a yearbook at dotPhoto:

• It can be done quickly.  While professional yearbook companies require months of advance notice, you can create and print a dotPhoto Yearbook in two weeks.

• Since you’re not printing months in advance, you can print more of the year.

• A dotPhoto book is all color.  Most yearbooks are full of mainly black and white pages.

• Typical yearbooks today are $75;  dotPhoto yearbooks start at about $25. 

• Typical yearbooks require commitments of hundreds of books.  At dotPhoto, you can order exactly as many as you need, and order one more anytime you want.

• You can also use the same images to create a dotPhoto Web Site (See My Web Site tab) or a dotPhoto Show about the school year.

How can I associate my dotPhoto Shows with a particular album so that my edited shows are displayed on my dotPhoto Web Site?
Actually, here’s how it’s supposed to work:  you upload your photos, edit a Show in that album, and the edited Show becomes the default Show for that album. You can connect any Show as the default for any album:  go to album settings and choose which Show to associate with the album.

We observe that behavior in our customers.  People pile up digital images and then, every few months, print a bunch of photos.  Here are two secrets for printing at the lowest possible price. 

“Bulk” Printing
Years ago, dotPhoto invented “bulk” printing, which is now sometimes called “prepaid”.  You buy the rights to print a number of prints – usually 4x6s.  Many people ask whether the prints must be the same image:  no, you can print 500 different images or 250 doubles or whatever you want.  You can use some bulk credits now and some later;  you’ve got a year to use them up. 

As I write this, 500 bulk prints are selling for just $49.95 or about 10 cents each, but there are also packages and smaller monthly print plans that are real deals.  To check out current bulk prices, click here. 

The Secret Best Print Deal:  lower cost than loose prints!
The very least expensive way to print photos – and far and away the best – is in a photo book.  At today’s sale price, book prints work out to just 8.83 cents per image and include the book with stitched binding.  Even when the books are not on sale, the price per image is just 11.77 cents each – it’s like getting the best deal on prints plus a free photo album plus having someone put the prints in the album for you! 

Here’s how this works.  In a cloth book, choose the 12-photo-per-page layout.  You also get one larger photo on the title page for a total of 229 photos. 

Incremental pages are even less:  at 99 cents per page with 12 images, the next image is only 8.25 cents.   

For current photo book information and pricing, click here. 

The easiest way to produce a book is to start a new album and copy the photos and albums that you want to print into it.  It’s easy to put together the 229 images you want, order them by capture date and print a book. 

For information on how to print ANYTHING in a dotPhoto book, click here.

• Click on the arrows next to “Add” to access the “Add photos” or “Add videos” function.  (“Add videos” is only available if you are a Pictavision or Video subscriber.

• Click on the “Organize” arrow to access the “Create new album” function. 

You’ll be asked to click on an “Add your new photos” button, and, if this is your first time uploading, dotPhoto will attempt to install the upload tool.  At this point, Microsoft Windows requires that you approve the new tool.  Go toward the top of the screen, click on the yellow line, and follow the instructions to install the DPimageUploader tool.

Once you’re installed the upload tool, follow these three steps:

1. Find the directory where your photos are stored.

2. Choose the photos you want by selecting all or by dragging the ones you want to the lower section.

3. Click on the “Upload” button.

Complete Uploading FAQ