Photography @ the Times...

[lsanderson]

There's a ton o' stuff on pictures in the Circuits section of today's NY Times...

Photo Sharing Even the Folks Can Handle

RECEPTIVENESS to new technologies often seems related to age. For example, more 13-year-olds than 63-year-olds understand phrases like “Waz ^?” and “N2MH.” (In case you’re over 13, those expressions are cellphonese for, “What’s up?” and “Not too much here.”)

So it was with pride that I watched my parents “get” the magic of digital photography after our family reunion last summer. On the final night, I treated them to a laptop slide show of our week together. They dug it.

So much, in fact, that my mom asked if I could make her some prints.

I smiled confidently. Here, I thought, was an opportunity to lead my folks even further into the modern realm. The Web is crawling with sites that are designed for sharing photos and ordering prints of them.

I posted mine on Flickr.com, the biggest of them all. I told Mom to peruse the pictures and click Order Prints for each one she wanted on paper.

Unfortunately, Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog boxes to order one print of one photo. My mom wound up spending hours on what should have been a 10-minute job. More