Wrestling with photos for Web sites, blogs, WIKIs, or email is tough.  There is a free site that converts photos to html, resizes, changes the background, and makes the quality a bit better.  AND IT’S FREE! Textimage.com is the brainchild of a guy in Stockholm, who is studying Japanese.  He created this site in his spare time.  It seems quite easy to use.  Some images in this month’s Volunteer Today were improved by using this program.   http://www.text-image.com/

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Capture Volunteer Events in Online Photo Site

      Flickr – Is one of the oldest of the online photo “album” sites.  And by all measures the most popular.  Here are their goals:

“1. We want to help people make their content available to the people who matter to them.
        

To do this, we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users' home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven't thought of yet. Flickr is an easy way to get photos or video from one person to another in whatever way they want.

2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos and video.
        

Once you make the switch to digital, it is all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos you take or videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. Albums, the principal way people go about organizing things today, are great -- until you get to 20 or 30 or 50 of them. They worked in the days of getting rolls of film developed, but the "album" metaphor is in desperate need of a Florida condo and full retirement.”

         How does this apply in a volunteer context?  Take an event.  Annual volunteer appreciation lunch, a work day for episodic volunteers to paint the building, an employee volunteer group working at a food bank, the annual meeting, a fund raising event, name the activity and there is surely someone with a camera.  By setting up a Flickr account, advertising how to get wired into it with volunteers, paid staff, clients, members, or friends of the organization, there is a permanent record of an activity.  It takes one willing volunteer to post and organize pictures.

         The Flickr photos can also be a recruiting tool.  Use one of the social networking sites to post pictures of happy volunteers. More and more people are finding volunteer opportunities online.  Use a link from recruiting sites directly to Flickr.  Nothing better than seeing people actually doing the work.  This site is free and relatively easy to use.

http://www.flickr.com/about/

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