ShareYourLove.com site has great pictures and raises money for good causes

Whether you love Paris in the Springtime (don’t know, I’ve only been there in winter), bagels and lox in New York (the only ones I’ve ever actually loved) or the cute way your dog looks at you when she’s hungry, if you have a photo (i.e. one you own) the people at ShareYourLove.com want you to visit and, as the name implies, share.

What is Share Your Love about?

This is a genuine feelgood project. I know four of the five principals personally and they are definitely Good Guys. I’ve had the benefit of a detailed briefing on the project but I’ll spare you that. The core concept is, as spelled out on the site:

ShareYourLove.com is about celebrating what we love to help some of the poorest people in the world.

Let’s face it, most of us are lucky and we have a lot to be thankful for. If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you have food, water and shelter covered. Many of our global neighbors aren’t so lucky and they need our help.

We are raising money for WaterAid with every image view. We chose water as our cause because having clean water on demand is a luxury most of us take for granted but 884 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. (WHO/UNICEF)

Today I uploaded this picture of local fishermen launching their boat to take their net out into the bay. It took only a couple of minutes to edit – including typing, then dragging and dropping, some words – and save.

The site is really easy to use. Uploading, cropping your picture and inserting some words plus adding some notes to go with the picture are all dead easy. The tools are all there and require no special expertise to use. And it is great to get little messages saying someone likes your picture.

I confess to having a challenge about “writing” on my pictures, but when one of the principals asked me was I going to add a caption, I went in and added captions. It’s not obligatory, but seems to be the way people are doing things.

Speaking of sharing love, I love that Dave, Rob, Matt, Lee and Steve have put in lots of hours without any promise of personal reward other than a warm innner glow, contributing a load of what would otherwise be some costly Webdev/programming and advertising/promotion.

This post is to support what they are doing – which provides fun for them and others who participate and provides support for good causes like their current support for WaterAid.

So ladies and gentlemen start your uploading engines, have fun and do good. It’s free to join.

What’s not to love?

Bloggers who want to include pictures in their blog posts, without breaching anyone’s copyright and without having to pay for the privilege of using them should take a look at the PicApp service I discovered today, via a Twitter post by Krishna De. They will need to feel ok about having advertisements embedded with the pictures.

PicApp is an online service which offers the opportunity to “enhance your blog with the same photos used by the pros, without paying a cent” and is claimed to have been designed with bloggers very much in mind.

I’ve always included pictures in some blog posts and I’ve known for a while that it made sense to include more. Then last November I had an extra prompt when I attended Avinash Kaushik’s workshop at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. Avinash is a (or should that be “the”?) master of web analytics and applies what he knows to his own blog. So when he said in a BlogWorld Expo 07 workshop session that he spends a lot of time looking for the right photo for a blog post, I took note. In fact, my handwritten note at the time reads: Pictures – he takes hours to find the right pictures. Hours. Hmmm. This is a man who has no difficulty pumping out words, in the most engaging and informative style, and he takes hours to find the right pictures.

I learnt long ago that one of the secrets of success is to emulate success. Which is why, since that workshop, I’ve been making more of an effort to find and include pictures with blog posts. One of the challenges there is that a lot of pictures I would like to use are subject to copyright.

I know there are pictures on Flickr which are easy to use by virtue of their being published under a Creative Commons license. Finding the one I want has not been easy – in face, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s been a sheer waste of time!

iStockPhoto is a service I have found useful. It’s free to join and has a mixture of freely usable and “premium” graded pictures for which payment of a fee is required.

Back to PicApp.

The embed code you get from the PicApp site includes an advertising element, which won’t work for those of us who don’t make a practice of having ads included with pics in our blog posts. So I doubt I’ll be making use of the service.

But in the interest of research I decided to sign up and give it a test run. Signup was quick and hassle-free.

I used the search terms “home office” and “work from home”.

The display was good and quick. A lot of what came up were very posed photos such as you would find in any batch of stock photos. There were also some fine portraits, which seemed all to be from Getty Pictures.

I generally use LiveWriter to compose my posts. That was problematic with PicApp, as there were huge gaps after a picture, making it very difficult to add more text after the picture or add another picture. Editing in WordPress had its own challenge, because although the preview screen worked better than the LiveWriter preview, the editing window is so small that it proved too hard to interpose text between the pictures I had chosen.

So I’ve decided with some reluctance to include just one of the pictures I chose. This one is captioned Woman sitting on floor in lounge room with laptop, laughing. I think she is actually sitting on a lounge, not actually on the floor, and I suspect she is laughing because:

she knows that trying to use a laptop sitting directly on the lounge (or on the floor) will probably cause the laptop to overheat and shut down (try it)
she knows that working from home is actually work and is probably not done sitting on the floor, with or without laptop.