Online Photos

I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away
- Paul Simon lyrics to Kodachrome

US News asks, "Is It Safe to Post Photos Online? It's a wonderful thing to share photos online but those photos can also be stolen and misused. Imagine your face used in an online dating service by someone not blessed with your good looks. Will friends believe you when you say, "But that's not me!"  Or your photo used by an advertiser without permission.

1. Check your online privacy settings.
Never allow everyone access to your photos. Restrict them to friends only.


2. Make sure you know who your friends are.
I have over 200 connections on LinkedIn. Are all these people really my friends? Do I trust every one of them? Consider de-friending anyone you don't trust 100%.

3. Disable the GPS technology before taking photos with a smartphone.
Even regular cameras are starting to apply GPS data to digital photos. When you post a photo with GPS data embedded, anyone can know where the photo was taken. Fun perhaps for a vacation photo but risky if the photo was taken at home.

4. Watch out for lower-tech ways of sharing too much personal information.
Your child's T-shirt could contain a school logo. Blur out your car license plate in any photos you post.

5. Don't post embarrassing photos.
Once posted, items on the internet may never die. Even dead websites can be brought back to life with http://wayback.archive.org/web/ or Google cache. Photo facial recognition is getting more and more powerful so in a few years it may be trivial for anyone to find online naked baby photos that match an adult face.

6. No means no.
If a friend or relative posts photos of your child and you don't want them to, ask them to take them down. If they refuse, some sites allow you to flag a photo as objectionable and taken down at your request.

7. Use a watermark.
Watermarks can be visible or invisible and will help prove that you own a photo if it's stolen and makes millions of dollars selling coffee. A watermark is an image or text that is mixed into the image itself.

Bottom Line

Share with friends but protect your photos.

Things to do before a house fire

Mae West

"A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire, women will like him."
-Mae West

From the Consumerist.com a house fire victim lists

9 Things We Wished We Did Before Our House Burned Down

1. Subscribe to an online data backup service.They had an external back-up drive but it sat right next their laptop and both burned up. We use Windows Live Mesh which gives 5 GB of storage on the Internet.

2. Keep passports in a safe deposit box
Passports are handy if you need to prove your identity and you've lost your wallet or purse.

3. Take pictures of each room initially and update them as improvements are made (store them offsite - like Flickr)
The photos will come in handy when inventorying what you lost.

4. Take pictures and keep hyperlinks of all expensive purchases, including jewelry. Scan receipts[for expensive purchases] and store offline.
You'll want this for insurance recovery.

5. Hire an architect (my dad in our case) or use floorplanner.com to document each floor layout along with precise wall/ceiling measurements, each outlet, light switch, crown molding, other trim, type of flooring, any unique items to structure of property
Not sure why. So you can rebuild an exact duplicate of your house?

6. Put phones in a consistent place each night
When you need to call 911 you want to know where the phone is!

7. Get fire ladders for any second floor bedrooms
Safety first. And drill yearly. A fire is a bad time to learn the window is painted shut.

8. Scan each photo, again keeping them offsite, or on an online data backup service
We opted NOT to back up music files, those are replaceable. We do back-up all digital photos.
9. Do not be frugal with homeowner's insurance. Spend the extra $50 per year for the most coverage.

Bottom Line

This is good advice and the time to do it is now. You hope never to have a home fire but it is frighteningly common. U.S. fire departments responded to nearly 1.6 million fire calls in 2007 that resulted in thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of injuries, and billions of dollars in property loss.
At 40 percent, cooking is the leading cause of residential structure fires. Heating causes another 14 percent.

Misleading Food Packaging

"It happens every time, they all become blueberries."
- Willy Wonka

When I buy a cookbook (which is very rare now-a-days with recipes on the Internet) I want a book with lots of food photographs. I react to the photo with either, yum, I must cook that, or , nah, not interested. Naturally marketers of foods exploit this. They put the best possible picture on the box or label to make your mouth water. I blogged about this at http://perpetualpreparedness.blogspot.com/2009/08/food-photography.html

I was reminded of this with NPR's story about fake blueberries, . The muffin mix box may show a muffin with plump, healthy, blueberries but the label lists blueberry flavored crunchlets. What is a blueberry crunchlet? They typically consist of various sugars and starches coated with food dye to make them look like blueberries.

When Kellog was asked, they responded that everything is "labeled in compliance with applicable laws and regulations."  No mention of course about faking out customers with misleading product photos.

Bottom Line

With product photos, what you see is never what you get. At worst the photo is fake; at best it's an idealized version of the product.

Family Photographs

“He made me suddenly realize that photographs could reach eternity through the moment.”- Henri Cartier-Bresson (French Photographer)

On Saturday, my church held a "Family History Fair" providing the public with information on Genealogy. I volunteered to put together a handout on preserving family photos. Here is what I learned:

Do's and Don'ts for preserving family photos

• Fully identify and label all photos so people won’t be forgotten.Use soft pencils like 6B or special ink. Never use ballpoint pens.Do not use rubber cement, glue, magnetic pages, or adhesive tape in albums.


• Old albums are like diaries; don’t take them apart. The exception is magnetic Vinyl album pages emit harmful fumes that damage photos. (Vinyl smells oily and the pages are sticky.) Use only Mylar or plastic labeled “for archival storage”.


• Keep photos away from areas that may become hot, damp or bright. Heat, moisture & light are bad for photos and may encourage mildew growth.


• Keep photos clean. Oils from fingers can damage the film.
  


• If you want to display a photo or include it in a child’s scrapbook, use a copy and keep the original safely preserved. When framing a photograph, keep an air space between the photograph and the glass.


• Copy home movie film and original videos, and use these copies to absorb most of the viewing wear and tear.


• As insurance against catastrophic loss, store your negatives far away from your prints. Send copies of favorite photographs to friends and family.
  
• Even the best color film will fade within 50 years. Black and White photos may last at most 150 years.


• Digital copies of your special memories won’t fade but computer hard disks will crash. CD discs can fail after just 10 years. Upload images to the Internet for long-term storage. Be mindful of copyright laws on professional images.

Bottom Line

The top recommendation is to label all your photos. One site argued, why save pictures of total stangers? I have that problem with old photos from a hundred years ago. No one knows who is pictured. Is it a relative or an old neighbor? Sometimes the caption is less than helpful, "Uncle Joe" or "Mom's friend".

Don't let your family become forgotten or lost through time.