Derek Hildreth’s Blog

A Tour: The New Photo Galleries

Hello Family and Friends,

First of all, update your bookmarks to include http://www.23hq.com/SendDerek as our new photography organization and sharing site located at 23hq.com.

I would like to take a moment to give you a tour of how I am now presenting, sharing, and organizing my photos as mentioned earlier here .  Starting today, I will no longer be administering or using PicasaWeb as my photo organizing.  After using the features that it has and fiddling with it for more than a year, I have decided that it is less powerful than what I need.  So, I will be moving all of my pictures, starting from January of 2008, into 23hq .  Let me show you some of the features that convinced me to boot PicasaWeb out and switch to 23hq.

A video:

http://www.vimeo.com/1135217

In words:

Unlimited Disk Space

Feature: 23hq does not have any sort of disk space limits (other than the 30 photos per month limit on the free account).

Benefit: I can now upload all of my photos in the original, full resolution instead of resizing them to save space.

Download Entire Albums

Feature: When viewing an album, there is a link that says "Download as .zip".

Benefit: Between being able to upload full resolution images, and having an umlimited number of albums to use, my family and friends can now download all of the images of an album in a single click.  You can even choose if you want the original size or a scaled down version of the images.

Embedded Flash Slideshows

Feature: When viewing an album, there is a link that says "Share on a webpage".

Benefit: Now when I post them into my blog, there will be a slideshow that will start to play, not just a static image and link to the album.  It’s just more fun to view pictures this way.

A "Photostream"

Feature: Visitors to my page at http://www.23hq.com/SendDerek will be greeting with a photostream of my latest uploads.

Benefit: Instead of only seeing one image out of a series of several albums in a page, you can now see all of my photos in one page.  You can choose to view them in albums as well, but this way, you can enjoy seeing even more photos (or browse through them if you wish).

A Thumbnailed Calendar

Feature: The calendar on my page at http://www.23hq.com/SendDerek/a/calendar will show you a thumbnail of a particular picture that happened on that particular day.

Benefit: It’s easy to see what was happening in our lives on any day of the month where there is a picture to be found.  It’s asthetically pleasing as well.

Easily Explore Tags

Feature: A tags tab is located at the top of the 23hq homepage that displays tags from pictures uploaded.

Benefit: If you’re looking for a particular subject or point of interest in my photos, you can simply use the tag tab to look for them.  For example, clicking on "Qeristyn" will bring up all the photos with Qeirstyn in them.

Expandable

The free service provided at 23hq is outstanding and in my opinion much better than smugmug, flickr, and picassaweb.  It’s made even better if you purchase the 23 Plus package for about $30 per year.  It’s nice to know that I can upgrade to a more features in the future if I need them.

So, I hope you will welcome these new changes as much as I did and really take advantage of them.  I will be posting the very first new album very shortly, so stay tuned.  Also, I will try and get some screenshots of all these features so that there is no confusion as to where to find them.

Thanks!

Love,

Derek, Heather, and Qeirstyn Hildreth