Susan Kistler on Working With Photos

If it’s Saturday it must be Susan! My name is Susan Kistler. I am the Executive Director for the American Evaluation Association and I contribute each Saturday’s post to the aea365 blog.

Today, I am going completely practical and broadly applicable. The range of opportunities that call for working with photographs is ever increasing, including incorporating into presentations, reports, webpages, and blogs, creating online profiles, and sharing with friends and family.

Rad Resource: drpic is a free online suite of tools for picture editing. It allows for easy cropping and resizing, rotation, contrast control and touch up. Plus you can add text and frame the picture. In particular, the cropping and resizing tools are sophisticated – as long as you realize that you can view the dimensions of your selections in the upper right hand corner of your page. I initially didn’t realize the dimension information was on the page until after multiple uses and had been guessing.

How does it work? Go to http://drpic.com/ and click on the upload prompt, browse for the photo that you wish to alter, click continue, edit your picture right in your browser, then click “Save to Disk” or “Save to Web.” You’re done! No registering, no paying, no hassles.

Hot Tip: Increasingly, if you work online such as with blogs, you may find that you are asked to post a URL of a picture rather than the picture itself. This basically means that you are adding a pointer to where a picture is available on the web. You can do so by using the “Save to Web” option on drpic – it will post your picture for you (careful, it will be public) and give you a share link to use in such instances.

Rad Resource: Stock photography can be expensive. On flickr, you’ll find literally millions of photographs shared under a Creative Commons license that allows for use in reports, online, and the like – as long as you give appropriate attribution to the photographer. There are a variety of Creative Commons licenses applied to photos – from freely usable with attribution only, to not usable in commercial works, to usable but only without modifications. Learn more about Creative Commons licensing, and access the millions of free pictures available online, at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/.

This contribution is from the aea365 Daily Tips blog, by and for evaluators, from the American Evaluation Association. Please consider contributing – send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org.