Ideas from Mark Stout

My wife has returned from four months working and studying overseas with almost 200 photos taken on our Ricoh Theta S camera. I was busy uploading them individually to Ricoh's site, when I had to divert my attention to another project I have on Google Photos . I had not thought of uploading a Theta S image to Google Photos.  I tried it and it worked wonderfully. Instead of having to upload each of my wife's photos to Ricoh's site, I was able to upload the entire set to a folder on Google Drive. Being in Google Photos, it easy to share images with others, add descriptions, and let those you share the images with make comments.

If you ever did the free 30 day trial of Adobe's Creative Cloud where you get free access to programs like Photoshop, Premiere and their other great apps, you can do it again. Adobe has hit reset.  Now everyone can do a 30 day free trial.  Even if they did it before.

Is your phone full of great photos?  Want an easy way to move them to the cloud and your PC so you have them backed up, and also to share them? This week's Family Tech describes how.

Thoughts about using the camera in your cellphone was the topic of last Sunday's Family Tech .

With digital photography, all of our photos are in digital form.  Do you have a more important digital asset than your photos? Are you backing them up regularly?  If the worst happens, are you going to lose all those memories? This week's Family Tech column is about backing them up.

I got to think about how much clutter I could have avoided if only today's technology had been available to me all my life.   This week's Family Tech column talks about how I wouldn't be burdened with shelves full of books, boxes of old video tapes, and how I wouldn't have needed to throw out my old college notebooks somewhere along the line.

For years I've used Thumbsplus to organize my digital photos.  When Google first released Picasa, I downloaded it but didn't find anything in it I liked better than Thumbsplus. Two days ago Google upgraded Picasa.  The new version has facial recognition in it.  The geek in me just had to try that out. First it has to make a pass through all your photos on your hard drive and isolate out each face it can find in each photo.  While it is doing that, you can begin telling it who the person is.  Once you identify a face, it finds other photos with that person in it.  If it isn't confident enough in its match, it sets the photo aside and asks you if it really is who it thinks it is. This takes a bit of time; it has been churning away now for over 24 hours and isn't even half done.  I do have thousands of photos going back over ten years though. It is spooky how good it matches up faces.  I identified my son in a photo when he was 18, and it l...