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.

You may need to rethink your definition of a camera  An iPhone 6s and a Kodak Brownie from 1900 work essentially the same way. You hold it up, compose your shot and push a button to take a photo. One could argue the 21st century has been a revolution for photography. Most of us have a phone in our pockets. There is no longer a cost-per-shot, where every time we click a picture there is an associated cost of film, developing and printing. We now can take thousands of shots on a vacation, where before we may have limited ourselves to 36 -- both a blessing and a curse. And how we share our photos has changed. We no longer have photo albums or slideshows we have to convince people to peruse. We share our photos online. But the camera in our phone is still a point and shoot camera, as was that early Brownie. Until now. There is now a type of camera where you do not compose your shot, because it takes a photograph of everything, a complete 360 degrees around you. It gets everything, in...

Several years ago I scanned my father’s slides of my siblings and me growing up. Dad had put together a nice presentation of photos of our lives, and maybe once a year we’d sit down and enjoy a slide show. I noticed how few photos there were of Dad. He had been the self-appointed family photographer. That is a role that no longer exists. Now, on a family vacation or outing, all family members over the age of 10 seem to have their own camera. How do we keep those photos from being in their own universe, and make them truly family photos? I wrote about one possible solution three years ago, and a How-To blog post I wrote to go with that column remains the No. 1-read post at FamilyTechOnline.com. That solution used Dropbox, that give you so much free space and hope you will buy extra space as needed. Photos take up a lot of room, so my solution most likely had most users needing to purchase Dropbox space. When my son and I planned our Israel trip, I rethought this problem. Google Photos l...

We are awash in photos. Once, families took a roll of 12 pictures on a week-long vacation. Today, some people take 12 photos before breakfast – mostly selfies and shots of their breakfast. Yet, our children may have fewer pictures of us and their own childhoods then we do of our own parents and our childhoods. The digital cameras in our phones are always with us. With no cost for film and the delay of processing, we are able to take multitudes of photos. Burst mode in many camera apps let us take a dozen photos of one single shot to get the one with the best look on the subject’s face or the right moment in an action shot. We send the photos to Facebook to share with friends. The rest reside on our phone, until we replace the phone. Perhaps you use an app such as Google Photos, Amazon, Facebook or others to back-up your photos to the cloud. So how can I say few photographs will be available for the next generation to view? Read the rest at FamilyTechOnline.com

I looked to the left and was surprised to see a fighter jet there. Even more astonishingly, I looked up and found another fighter just above my head, only feet away from my own aircraft. A voice startled me and I looked behind me to realize I wasn’t alone in the plane; there was a pilot behind me. The Family Tech gadget budget is – shall we say – “restrained” so I wasn’t flying my new F-35, but instead my $20 Google Cardboard. Virtual reality, or VR, may finally be poised for the home. VR goggles let you see different views as you turn your head. Imagine you are wearing VR goggles and it appears to you that you are at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles. In front of you is a big silver-colored airplane. If you turn to the right, you see more airplanes. Look up and you see a variety of planes hanging over your head. Look down and you see the floor. While it’s not as good as being there, you get a sense of what it is like to be there. Read the rest at FamilyTechOnline.com