Thing 10: Sharing Photos

Thing 10 is something I do all the time, sharing photos. I post photos frequently to Facebook and Instagram (and sometimes cross-post to both using that feature on Instagram, which I find very convenient), and love adding the filters on Instagram and editing photos slightly to make them more appealing. I also make liberal use of hashtags so that people can find my photos, and also so that I can find my own photos. And I not only know what Throwback Thursday is, I have posted some #tbt photos myself over the last month. Since I'm somewhat of an expert in this area, this blog post will be longer than most thus far.

I regularly post photos to Instagram of my parents' and sister's dogs, who are both long-haired standard dachshunds. They each have their own hashtag: #pippathedachshund and #nicothedachshund (this way, if other family or friends post pictures of the dogs, they can be located easily). I like that there's a really active community of dachshund fans who follow me and my photos of Pippa and Nico, so they get a lot of love from all over the world. And I love seeing other people's photos of their dachshunds, and actively 'heart' and comment on photos when I have the chance.

One trick I've learned is to always use the regular camera app on my iPhone and then use Instagram or another editing app to crop and adjust the photo for the square format of Instagram. Also, if I know I'll be posting to Instagram, I'll sometimes purposely frame the shot (typically vertically) so that I don't lose much of the photo when it's cropped.

I have two apps I like to use for editing for Instagram. They are Squaready and PhotoCollage (or PicJointer). Squaready allows you to take a photo and center it in a frame of color so that you don't lose any of the photo (it just ends up being a bit smaller). It's just like watching a movie in widescreen format on a non-widescreen television, where you end up with black bars at the top and bottom, but in this case, sometimes the 'bars' are on the sides for a vertical photo, and I usually use white since that's the standard background color of Instagram. I used Squaready on this original photo of Pippa:

 

I cropped a bit, centered her in the frame, applied a filter, and didn't 'lose' much of the photo by editing it for Instagram to this:

 

I like PhotoCollage or PicJointer because I can create a mini collage of photos to tell a story. This is a basic example with two images of a snow pile at the end of the library's parking lot, showing the progress of melting this spring:

I will add that I think one of the main keys to successful use of Instagram is to not just follow your friends, but to also follow people who post things you like. And how do you find those things? By appropriately using and searching for hashtags. Hashtags are a huge part of Instagram. Because I like dachshunds and post photos of them, I use the following hashtags (and also search for other photos with the same hashtags): #dachshund #dachshundsofinstagram #doxie #doxiesofinstagram #longhaireddachshund #standarddachshund - you get the idea. If I just posted the above photo of Pippa without any hashtags, there would be no way for someone to find that photo of her. But with the hashtags, I'm giving people an entry point to find that photo and, by way of that photo, my other photos of Pippa and Nico.

Lastly, I'll be honest and admit that I am really wary of Snapchat. When I first heard about it, I immediately thought that it would be used for sexting. I can see the utility of it, but if I want to send a photo to someone, I usually just send it in a message to them. I don't take photos that I wouldn't be comfortable with everyone seeing, and I never got into taking ugly selfies, so I will probably not ever download Snapchat (and Instagram recently added a private inbox for photos, so a similar thing can be accomplished with it).