Bryant's Photo Class: January 2013

Photobucket
Photobucket is a great source for storing images, and has many features that edit photos and oragnize to fit your needs. Some features include albums, photo tagging, and a mobile site for when you're on the go. Photobucket has also teamed up with many other social media sources so you can share a post made on their site, while also sending it to your Photobucket account. You can upload pictures from your computer, from email, through Windows XP Publisher, via FTP, through a web URL, or your from mobile phone. However, one of their few faults is that without having their Pro account, image file types that are over a certain amount of GB are automatically resized, which can affect theh quality of the uploaded image. Another default is that their system of help and customer support is not as equipped as it should be. But overall, Photobucket is a good source for amateur photographers to store images and to access them with ease.

Flickr
Owned by Yahoo, Flicker is one of the most commonly used photo sharing sites on the Internet, and can be considered the "home" of over 6 billion photos. Not only is membership free, its a very easily accessible site that from beginners to experts can use to organize and edit their photos in one convenient location. Like many other photo sharing sites, Flickr partners with other social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Pintrest, Foursquare, Twitter, and other photo oriented media, allowing users to share posts from one site and can also post to Flickr. Although this site offers many benefits, the free membership limits the amount of GB one users can use for pictures, with weak copyright enforcement your photos can easily be taken, and that many accounts made can be forgotten and is a garbage dump for meaningless pictures that consume need site memory. But with Flickr's modern site design and many options for maintaining your images online, it is a extraordinary source for online photo storage.

Blogspot
Used by over 38 million people, Blogspot aka "Blogger" is one of the oldest of photo-video-media storage sites that can post and store many different types of media, not just photos. Blogspot is not a typically photo storage site, in order to publish your works, it must be in a post, which is considered more of a blog than just displaying them in albums. Blogger has many features in which you can customize the view of your personal, domain site, such as pre-made themes from the theme data base or use your own custom HTML codes to mold your site to fit your personal needs. Bought by Google, Blogger gives you free membership to the site and allows you to have up to 100 different blogs under one account, and has an unlimited amount of media storage, pretty much unlimited posting! One of the cons, however, is that at the top of your webpage blog, a bar containing links to random blogs that may be deem inappropriate or irrelevant to your own, and can not be removed. Another bad feature is that it automatically re-sizes photos, which may affect quality. However, Blogspot is one of the best blog sites out there because of its ease of use and with uniform domain names (____.blogspot.com), this site is great for beginning bloggers as well as serious ones, with access to your own advertisements and customizeable viewing. Overall great site, and would recommend to anyone pursuing blogging or posting media online.

Borders A1 Camera set on FIRE

Shortly before midnight on Saturday near to the Dunglass roundabout at Cocknburnspath in Berwickshire, one of the speed cameras of the Scottish border. The amount of damage to the camera and the region around it is about $22,000. From 2004 to this most recent incident, at least 20 cameras have been set alight. There have been many other incidences of the vandalizism and damage of speed cameras not only in Berwickshire, but other regions of Scotland. The A68 near St. Boswells was stolen, as well as much damage to near by cameras in Earlstonand Oxton. Lothian and Borders Police have appealed to many locals about this incident, but none have provided sufficient information. The motivation of the vandalizer is also unknown, but the Scottish Borders Council's executive member says: "If a camera has been installed at a specific location, it is there for a very good reason - to prevent accidents and deter motorists from speeding." More action is being taken place by Scottish authorities to protect these speed cameras and prevent damages to the remaining borders.