Using Your Digital Photo Frame As a Motivational Tool

The advances in photography have now reached the stage where its a whole lot easier for many more people to capture, share and store fantastic looking snaps of all their precious moments in life. You can easily manipulate any image you take before printing it off and there is no need to pay for poor quality photographs, which was the case not so long ago.

And now with the advent of the digital photo frame, displaying your digital photos to their best effect has never been easier, nor have the results ever looked better. It's all very well to take thousands of digital images - some of which may be kept on your camera for an eternity, while the rest languish on your desktop computer's hard drive, rarely - if ever, to be seen again. And for those that are actually given life and printed - either at home or work with the trusty Canon digi printer or via an online order at Kodak or one of its many competitors - these are looked at when first received but what happens next? Left in a drawer along with all the others?

It's all changing now though with the digital photo frame. Your photos can now be uploaded directly from your camera, from your computer or from some other form of electronic storage device. And it's easy too - no time to setup, no fiddling about with lots of settings. It's all fairly much a plug-and-play setup, so you don't have to have a university education to figure out what's to be done just to get your photos from one place to the other.

How can the digital photo frame be used as a motivational tool however?

First, where might you want to use it to inspire? At home of course. Imagine getting out of bed in the morning and feeling the need for some inspiration, just to get the creative juices flowing. How about the idea of having a digital photo frame in your bedroom that has a slideshow of some of the most inspirational type photographs that you either took yourself, or you found on the internet and downloaded to your photo frame. You can add in some of your favorite music too - many digital photo frames have this facility.

Or, how about at the office? You need some motivation to get going in the morning so it makes sense to have your own digital frame filled with highly motivational images and captions. You can insert both images and words and make a slideshow of these. A great booster to add to your productive capabilities.

Or, it may simply be that you want to make some new years resolutions or a single resolution and you need a constant reminder about it too. Make up a slide show of images and captions to keep up the motivation to stay on the right track. This will help serve as motivation to push you in the right direction whenever you feel the desire to stray back to the old ways.

There are countless other ways that a digital photo frame can be used as a tool for inspiration, either on the personal or the professional level - it's really a case of using your imagination - use vivid colored images, and/or words that really sink home to make you think deeply each and every time you read them. This way you're getting the best use of your digital photo frame as a motivational tool.

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Photo Birth Announcement Time Savers - 6 Fast, Easy Tips

Many new parents are choosing birth announcements with photos to share the good news of their blessed event. But photo birth announcements don't have to be time consuming.  They don't have to be one more complicated thing to do when your baby arrives. In fact, there are surprising stress-free ways to quickly and easily send out photo birth announcements.  

Before the baby is born:

1.  Make a list.  Write down everyone who will receive your photo birth announcements.  You can start with your Christmas or Hanukkah card list, and then add to it.  Do you want to send one to your doctor?  Are there old friends or colleagues you haven't heard from for a long time?  This may be just the opportunity to reconnect.  Make sure all your addresses are current.  Now you have an idea of how many birth announcements you'll need.  Be sure to get a few extra for anyone you might have forgotten and the family scrapbook.

2.  Browse online. There is such a variety of photo birth announcements in every color, theme, size and price imaginable on the internet.  This is the time to find exactly what you want.  If you wait until after the baby arrives, you may feel pressured to settle, just so you can get the announcements out.  But if you do your shopping now, you can find the perfect photo cards for your baby.  If you have enough time, you might even want to request some samples of your favorite designs, so you can examine them in person before ordering.  

3.  Decide on the design and the wording you want.  Although you won't know all the statistics yet, like birth date and weight, you can figure out the rest of the words.  Do you want to include a quote, a poem or some clever play on words?  Some companies are very flexible in what text you can use to personalize your photo birth announcements.

4. Preorder your envelopes.  This is a real time-saver.  Once you have selected your photo birth announcement, you can order the envelopes that match the announcement ahead of time.  Some companies will want you to reserve and pay for your birth announcements in advance, and then will ship your envelopes.  Other companies will "sell" you the amount of envelopes you require and include a coupon that refunds the cost of the envelopes when you are ready to order your announcements. Even if a company does not list this option on their website, most of them will offer this service.  It is well worth taking this extra step.   Then, you can address your envelopes, put stamps on them and have them ready to go.

5. Take lots of photos.  Yes, before the baby is born.  The time to learn all the bells and whistles of your digital camera is before you need to take great pictures.  Practice getting the right shot, so that when your angel arrives, you'll be ready to take awesome photos.

After the baby arrives.

6. Take lots of photos.  And then take even more photos.  Don't worry about how good they are, (you've already practiced!). Just click away.  Then leisurely look through them, choose the best ones, and upload or email them to the company you've chosen to create your photo birth announcements.  Let them know all your statistics and personalization, and wait for them to arrive.  The only thing left to do is stuff the envelopes!

Just imagine how delighted everyone will be who receives your baby's photo birth announcement.  And to think, no one will ever suspect that you did so much ahead of time or that it was this easy!

Linda Kling is the owner of www.photo-party-favors.com, which offers personalized photo favors and custom invitations. Visit her website for more information on photo birth announcements, featuring multiple photos of your baby.

Stay Connected With Online Photo Sharing

Memories play a vital role and they will never fade away. They play a confusing role in everybody's life. Old sweet memories bring tears, laugh, smiles, joy and much more emotions. A picture is worth thousand words. It is true in most of the cases. Being a good digital camera owner, one can diligently record all the events. There may have been several photos and video taken on a special occasion. Until few years back, it was not possible to share on a massive scale with friends and family members living at a distant place. The digital era is here and one can share all the photos and video with the click of a mouse how ever large it may be. Online photo sharing services will keep the people connected sharing each other's memory.

Flickr, Smugmug, Ofoto, dotPhoto, Google Web Albums are some of the portals which enable you to share the photos on web. Certain services will let the user to take print outs. Users have to select the services rightly according to the needs. If the objective is just to share the photos, then any service is good. Some of the common features offered by the online photo sharing portals are:

·        Users can have free account with restrictions to upload limited number of photos

·        Storage is limited with free account

·        Sorting photo options according to category is possible

·        Sharing the albums with friends

·        Adding captions and footer messages

·        Enables slide show of the photos

Those were the days to wait for a longer period of time to see the photos of loved persons staying away. The technology has given us great advancement and enables online photo sharing with which photos can be sent across the globe in a matter of seconds. Most companies allow the users to take print copies and they can order it online. They can just go to the nearby shop to collect the printed copies. How cool is this service? Photos speak volume about the past and the good thing is that the persons may change in the photo but not the photo. It stands for truth and originality.

It is now very easy to create photo album [http://www.glimbus.com] of your own. You just need to sign up for image sharing [http://www.glimbus.com/signup] on the website owned by the writer of this article and start sharing your photos with friends, family and some online colleagues you have.

Scavenger Hunts - How to Find Fun Ideas For a Photo Scavenger Hunt

Photo scavenger hunts can be a great way to get party-goers actively involved in having fun. If you are planning a party for teens or adults, there are many possibilities for coming up with some neat ideas for photos you will have your scavenger hunt participants taking.

If you've never participated in a photo scavenger hunt before, let me explain how it works. Unlike most scavenger hunts where you bring back physical things that you've had to find, with a photo hunt, you just have to bring back a picture. Nowadays, most people will have a digital camera, even if it is just on their phone, so it makes the game easy for everyone to play.

This can change the traditional scavenger hunt game quite a bit. For example, you don't have to send your groups out to photograph different objects they need to find. You can instead have them photograph themselves doing different tasks.

For a bit of retro fun, set each group up with a single Polaroid camera. Since Polaroid film is a bit expensive, you can make thriftiness part of the game, and it will also help keep the game short and fun. Make one of the rules that only a single packet of Polaroid film can be used by each group. So that would be 10 totals photo.

Planning the Photo Scavenger Hunt List

This is where the fun comes in. You should feel free to mix things up a bit. Make a list of tasks that can be done indoors and then some that can be done outdoors. Be sure to pick a couple of challenging locations too. And naturally, most of the stuff on your list should probably be a bit silly. Or if you are having a bachelorette party, you could try for a little risque.

If you find yourself stumped for ideas, think about the kinds of games you played as a kid that were physical and that would probably be pretty funny (and possibly embarrassing!) to do as an adult.

Here's a short list:

Charades
Statues
Pillow Fights
Light as a Feather

Then you task your party-goers with specific instructions based on these games. They go out and play them and bring back photographic proof! For example, have them prove that the party levitation trick (Light as a feather) actually works. Or tell everyone to go out and play Statues as specific types of statues (comic book characters, American presidents, etc). Or have everyone come up with a phrase for charades and then each person has to be photographed doing a different word in the phrase.

I think now you probably have a good idea of what kinds of silly things you can come up with for your friends to do on a photo scavenger hunt, but you can always get more great ideas from my compilation of scavenger hunt lists. There should be enough there to really help get your own creativity flowing.

Jennifer Connolly is a freelance writer who loves to plan parties when she's not busy working.

10 Fun Photo Christmas Card Ideas For Your Family Holiday Greeting

What are you going to do to make this year's photo Christmas cards really stand out?  You don't have to fall back on the same old ideas this holiday.  Here are ten suggestions to help you make this season's family greeting the best one yet.

1. Try a different spin on a traditional theme.  This fall take a picture of the kids with a pumpkin snowman.  Just stack three pumpkins, graduating in size with the biggest on the bottom and their stems removed.  Paint a face on the top pumpkin, carve a small hole to hold the carrot nose, then put a Santa hat or wool cap on top and add a scarf.  If you live near the beach, you can make a sand snowman instead.

2. Transform an ordinary photo Christmas card into a religious one by adding your favorite Bible verse. Look for a company that will let you create your own personalized message, instead of just sticking with the text shown on the sample.

3. Nothing is cuter than a holiday greeting that contains a photo of an adorable animal in a seasonal setting.  The easiest way to achieve this look yourself is to take a picture of your sleeping dog or cat on top a sheet of wrapping paper or under the tree.  Add the caption, "peace on earth" and wait for the "aaaahs".

4. Create a four seasons look with a multi photo Christmas card that has space for four photos.  Then choose pictures of your kids from the past year during the winter, spring, summer and fall. Personalize it with the words, "thinking of you at Christmas...and all year, too!"

5. Is your little one a budding artist?  He or she can help you to create a really unique holiday greeting.  Ask him to draw a picture of the family with crayons. Then, it's your turn to cut out the faces of each family member from snapshots and glue them to the top of the crayon bodies. Take a close up photo of the masterpiece for this year's card.

6. Are you famous for your holiday baking? If you're always being asked for the recipe for one of your seasonal goodies, you can turn that into a fun photo Christmas card.  Write out the directions on a pretty recipe card, then clip a family photo onto the card, perhaps of the kids baking cookies. Be careful not to cover any of the instructions with that picture. You might want to add the words, "wishing you a sweet Christmas".

7. For impact, try black and white with a touch of color.  Your favorite photo with the kids in Santa hats can be changed into an artistic black and white picture with just the Santa hats in red.  Most online photo Christmas card companies will do this for you at no extra charge.

8. Make a statement.  What makes your family tick?  Are you a bunch of beach bums, taking advantage of sun and surf every possible moment in the summer?  Then include photos in your holiday greeting of the kids playing in the waves and building sand castles.  Are you all sports enthusiasts? Then feature action shots of your children playing for their team.  Are you involved in animal rescue, active in politics, big on barbecues, busy selling homemade jewelry at craft shows, passionate about your faith? Find a way to work it into your pictures.  This year, instead of a posed portrait, give people a glimpse into your family dynamics.

9. Send a holiday greeting that takes a trip down memory lane.  For this idea, you will need to select Christmas cards that feature multiple photos.  Choose your current favorite family picture and then add one or more photos of the kids when they were younger for a then and now effect. You might want to ask the card company to change the older photos to black and white or make the current picture larger than the rest. Don't forget to add captions underneath indicating the year the photographs were taken.

10. If you're still looking for a fresh idea for this year's Christmas greeting, then it's time to browse. Start searching through the huge variety of designs in photo holiday cards online until you find one in particular that inspires you.  Maybe it's a candy cane motif and you'll think of posing the kids with comically oversized candy canes.  Or you'll fall in love with one that has a pale blue background with snowflakes, which might lead you to dress the family in shades of blue.  Many times, it's easier to pick out the card first, which will set the tone for the pictures you want to include.

This year you can have an amazing photo Christmas card that gets rave reviews from friends and relatives.  All it takes is a little inspiration and thought to make this season's greeting a one of a kind expression of your family.

Linda Kling, as the owner of http://www.photo-party-favors.com, has offered ideas to people planning celebrations since 1992. She recommends these unique photo Christmas cards. Visit her website for free printable Christmas gift tags, recipes, more.

Now That I've Got My Photos On My Computer

In an earlier article on this site "What to do with all those digital pictures?", we talked about our system of using the marvels of digital photography to take thousands of shots.

We created folders in "our pictures" directory on our computer, one for each month of the year, and simply off-loaded the camera's media into the appropriate month folder as it became full.

This process provided a historical time reference for any photos stored on the computer. In a year or two we could still correlate a specific photo to the month and year in which it was taken. A helpful process for those of us who's memory is starting to get a little wonky!

Now, what to do with all these photos?

Make digital slideshows with them, that's what.

Our "DVD" case is full of home made slideshows created from paper and digital photographs.

Some slideshows contain all the pictures from a complete calendar year, with the months of that year as the chapters for that show.

Others are slideshows of specific events; family gatherings, a trip to Upper Canada Village in Ontario, Canada; you get the idea.

Not only does having slideshows provide hours of entertainment for gatherings at our home, having the slideshows on Cd's provides a back up should any of the original digital or paper pictures be lost.

So, how do you make slideshows?

For those folks that haven't the time, or the inclination to learn some software the easiest route is to contact a provider of digital slideshow services. Their professional experience will ensure an excellent outcome for your shows.

If you are more adventurous, and would like to tackle making slideshows yourself, here are a some tips.

If it's paper photos you want converted into digital, or it's existing digital photos you want converted to slideshow, first select all of the photos in question.

On the back of paper photos, number them from one and up, in the order you want them to appear on your slideshow. Decide if you want on-screen captions for some or all the photos. If so, write the text for that caption on the back of those you wish.

If you are converting paper photographs into digital format, which is necessary for making a slideshow, you will need access to a scanner. If that becomes a bit daunting, reconsider using a service provider. They will be able to handle the scanning of your photographs for you. They can then provide you with an electronic album of your photos, or create the slideshow for you, or both.

For digital pics, select all of the digital photos you want for a particular show, and copy them into a folder you have created for the purpose. Once you have the copies in there, rename them from one and up, in the order you want them presented on your show.

Create a word .doc with the text for each caption beside the corresponding number of your photo should you wish captions visible as the slides are shown.

Do you wish any chapter headings, a cover shot for the slideshow? Make a note of these.

What about music? Select the music you would like as background for your slideshow. Try to get music long enough (or a number of pieces of music that are long enough) to last the length of your show.

Each slide in your show should play for about 6-8 seconds. That's ample time to see the shot and to read the caption without the picture becoming boring. Therefore, if your slideshow has 30 pictures in it, your music selection should be around 3 1/2 minutes.

Please note that if your slideshow is for other than personal use, you cannot use copyrighted music, which is pretty much all the popular music of the day. If your slideshow is for business use, consider finding public domain, copyright free music for your show. It's available if you Google those search terms.

Before you begin building your slideshow, decide if you want voice-over narration instead of word text. Or maybe you want both? Your call.

Limit each of your slideshows to about 3-5 minutes so that viewers don't get trapped into watching for huge lengths of time. Unless they have a vested interest in the show (for example, they were with you on the trip to that luxury resort) most folks won't hold the same interest in your photos as you do.

So how do we convert paper photos or digital photographs into a marvelous screen slideshow that you'll be proud to display for guests or at the next company function?

That's for the next article; "Making a slideshow".

As always, questions about the process are welcome. Feel free to contact us through our website.

Mr. Wade has parlayed a passion for computers, the internet, and digital photography into diverse activities including his own web site that discusses web site building, creating digital slide shows, and crafting Ebooks. He can be contacted via that site: http://www.solid-gold-websites.com

Titillate Your Kids Minds with Word Games

If you think your children play to many computer games - try this trick. Get them to play word games known to both develop kids mentally while improving their spelling. It works!

Spelvin

http://www.deprice.com/spelvin.htm

Spell as many words as you can with 7 letters. Use the Hold buttons and then pull Spin to refresh the tiles you wish weren't there. Play Spelvin as you scramble for words and gamble with Juice to spin for better letters.

Word Mojo Gold

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Prepare yourself for an exciting new word game that takes spelling and creating chains of words to new levels of fun. Simply create intersecting words over the random colored tiles to acquire 3 or more Mega Mojo Letters and you'll advance to the Mega Mojo round. Exceed your target score each round and you've got major Mojo!

Flip Words

http://www.deprice.com/flipwords.htm

You'll flip over our new word game: Flip Words. Click on letters to make words and solve familiar phrases. The first letter of each word you make will be revealed in the phrase you're trying to solve. Once you recognize the phrase, you can submit your guess or try to reveal all the letters for a special bonus. You'll never run out of phrases because you can create your own and automatically download new phrases created by others. You can even save your game and resume it later!

Jig Words

http://www.deprice.com/jigwords.htm

Click on letters to spell words and reveal fun photos! There are two modes to play: "Jig Words" mode challenges you to find all the possible words and includes exciting "Word Duel" bonus rounds. "Letter Racing" mode places you in competition with 3 other players to see who can make words the fastest! As you make words, you're also revealing hundreds of fun photos and you can even add your favorite photos right into the game. Plus, you can create photo packs and easily share them with your friends and family!

David D. Deprice has long been facinated with word games. He has been following them for years and is proud to boast one of the largest collection of word and spelling games available at http://www.deprice.com/games.htm