For a while now I have been trying to find a replacement for the late-lamented Pummelvision which would create videos from lots of photos (as opposed to not very many such as Animoto). I liked using Pummelvision for creating a video of my Flickr challenge photos. With various references to Flipagram in the last few weeks from people using it for highlights of 2013 I was hoping that I might have found a solution.
Flipagram is a micro video app for iPhone and android created by Cheerful Inc in Los Angeles, CA. I loaded the app easily from the app store and then created a short video from 14 photos on my camera roll. I used a piece of their music and was also able to upload it to my Youtube channel and share to other social media. You can change the sequences of photos and crop them before creating the video but can't edit after that. The photos were chosen randomly so there is no significance in their choice or sequence.
I wasn't quite sure how many photos could be included, though once I had uploaded mine to Youtube I found several quite a bit larger. My 14 photos ended up in 16 seconds. I also noticed that some friends were using collages so that was another way to expand possibilities. However, the Flipagram FAQ on their website state that "You must select at least two images and there is no maximum limit". Wonderful! Incidently, it is very hard to find the FAQ where all the useful info is stored. I found it eventually by a Google search and it appears to be in a link to Tumblr..
So at last an unlimited micro video site that I might be able to use for my Flickr challenges! But, Flipagram can be used for photos on Instagram, Facebook and your camera roll. I have a few photos on Facebook and use Instagram intermittently, but I store all my edited photos on Flickr. Alas, I can't access them for Flipagram.
I have communicated with Flipagram and they tell me links to other sites such as Flickr is a work in progress. I do hope the work progresses well. All those photos on Flickr provide a brilliant market.
I created another video, again rather randomly, of 35 moments and uploaded it to Youtube. This curiously was shorter than the other and ended up as 15 seconds. Again, there is potential:
I am not really much into video creation, I must say. I have been using Youtube for years and I really love the use it has for archival material. It is great to preserve and disseminate film footage and sound archives. These play a very special role in family and local history, and any sort of history really.
I have had a Youtube channel for a few years, but I have usually used it for videos that I have made using photos. Sites such as Animoto and the late lamented Pummelvision have been ones I have used to document things, such as my year in photos, my uncle's life when he died, a trip to Shanghai and others. Yes, cats have definitely featured. But that's the web.This is my Shanghai video:
I can see a real use for this in family and local history to document a series of photos about a particular place or person. This is a very brief one I did when my uncle died, but I would like to experiment with doing some local or family history focused ones.
While doing this Thing I signed up for Vine and was amazed at the very large number of my friends who were on it. I was also interested to see that one of the trending topics was cats. I am a great Henri and Simon's cat fan so this was heartening to me. I haven't loaded anything to Vine yet. I think this has a lot to do with my real aversion to jerky handheld video. For the library profession, I think it is important that we don't produce amateurish stuff that gives a bad impression. I am sure that many members of the profession do have these skills - just not me.
And I did do a Vizify twitter video of my account today. That showed me who my golden followers are. You can see it here.
I was very pleased to have finished my 366 photographs for the Flickr Photo a Day 2012 Challenge. But as I stated a couple of posts ago I am very keen to create a video of the 366 photos like I did in 2012 with the late lamented Pummelvision. So, rather than moaning about it any longer, yesterday I decided that I would explore possibilities.
After a bit of research I ended up with what seemed to be three contenders.The first was Animoto which I have used in the past in its free version which was going to be far too short for 366 images. Animoto in its free form was actually Thing Number 39 years ago and that is how I came across it.
There are also Plus and Pro paid versions and so I thought that that maybe the Plus version for $5 a month or $30 a year would be the goer. I pottered around in the site for a while checking the functionality and made another freebie of my Loupe.com collages which I successfully uploaded to Youtube. You can see it here.
Of course, then I looked into the fine print of the technical detail and discovered that the maximum number of images was 300! Boo! That was not going to be very good for a year of 366 days (or even 365).
The second was Windows Live Movie Maker. I didn't get very far with this one, though I think fiddling with it seemed to change my Firefox settings and resulted in no video access. That is a whole other story. The reason I didn't pursue it was that it only accesses photos on your PC or camera and not from other sites such as Flickr as I wanted. This may be a great tool but it is not what I want.
The third one was another paid site, Stupeflix. It also looked hopeful so I started making a video by loading up photos from Flickr. Although I could find no information anywhere on the site about the maximum number of images, my initial load stopped at 50 and although I was able to load more incrementally it could not deal with 366.
So does anyone have any other bright ideas? Am I missing the obvious? It seems to me that the solution is to do divide the year into two and do two videos using the Animoto Plus account. At least my Flickr Friday Photos 2012 will only be a maximum of 159 photos!
One of the things that I blogged about last year in the #blog12daysxmas challenge was the Flickr challenges that I was setting myself for the coming year, i.e. 2012. So how have I gone with them? I signed myself up to contribute to two different challenges and in some cases was participating for more than one Flickr user.
The first challenge that I was part of was the 2012 Photo a Day Challenge that is administered by @sarahgb in the UK. I participated in her 2011 PAD Challenge and was keen to do this one. Of course, being a leap year it meant that I needed to do 366 photos this year. Today I posted my 365th photo so I am nearly there! I have really loved doing this every day. I have found that it really made to look at things around me quite differently and has also provided a good summary of the year 2012 for me to look back on. Last year on @pollyalida's suggestion, I made my 2011PAD photos into a Pummelvision video which I loaded on Youtube. Here is it:
I would love to do the same for 2012 but unfortunately Pummelvision is no more so I will be looking for other options in the New Year. So if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
I certainly loved doing the Flickr PAD in 2011 and 2012. So I am planning on doing it again in 2013. Maybe some of my #blog12daysxmas colleagues would like to join up? It is a great exercise. My friend Sarah is bowing out this year after three years worth of PAD and has handed the mantle over to me to continue. I have set up a Flickr 2013 Photo a Day Challenge at www.flickr.com/groups/2013pad/ so just head over there and join up for the fun. I was amazed when I did a search how many photo a day groups there are on Flickr! But this is my one:) It has my Loupe dove (again inspired by @pollyalida) as the avatar.
For the last year I have been submitting photos to the Flickr group #2011 PAD or photo a day. There have been about 50 of us doing this: I say about 50 as people have come and gone over the year and started in midstream. These have mainly been UK library people with three or four of us from Australia, well Melbourne really.
This was quite a challenge for me that I got into because of my online friends @sarahgb in Wales and @csmramsden in Melbourne. I found it quite hard to get into the habit of remembering to take a photo and remembering to upload it. My tactic for the days I missed ended up being to look at which of my Flickr photos had been viewed by someone on the missing day. That led to some quite interesting inclusions and I often pondered and ponder why anyone had been looking at them. You can see my set here with its 365 photos. That was a learning too: number the photos!
I had been using Flickr for quite a while - since I learned and posted about it in this blog when I was doing 23things all those years back - but I found I learned so much about the possibilities of Flickr by doing this challenge. Previously I really hadn't explored groups and now am amazed at what is on there. I didn't know how to load directly to Twitter and Facebook. Duh! I was copying and pasting the url. Or into groups. I initially went to the group to do it and finally the penny dropped and I realized that I could do it from the image. I am sure there is so much more there to learn.
So yesterday was the end of the challenge and I wondered how I could review my life in photos in 2011. Fortunately my Twitter friend @jobeaz had finished another 365 project herself and had been experimenting with various ways to present them when our US friend @pollyalida stepped in and suggested Pummelvision. So I thought I would give it a go too as my other favorite, Animoto, wasn't going to let me do 365 images - well, at least not in the free version.
Pummelvision was simple and easy to use. Once I had opened the url, it asked me where my photos were to be fetched from (Flickr) and where I wanted the resulting video to be posted (Youtube). I had to do permissions for both of them, decide on one of two music options, indicate which photos I wanted included and their order, provide an email address, and press go! It took a while for the video to be made so don't be disheartened at that. Then the url appeared on the Pummelvision site and I was also sent an email with the url.
Here is the resulting video. You will find some things a little out of order as I discovered yesterday that some photos hadn't been added to the set but just to the group and vice versa. That is a big learning for next year when hopefully I will keep better track.
Well, what do you think? I was surprised yesterday to discover that only 11/365 photos related to books and blogged about it over on Hecuba Reads. It has been fascinating to look back at themes of flowers, streetscapes, buildings, landscapes, friends, family and colleagues, food and cooking, family and local history and above all my photogenic kitteh, Polyxena.
We had decided to do a different challenge in 2012: Friday Photos 2012 which will involve themed photos. I was excited to join up that challenge and we have joined up the City of Boroondara Library Service as well. So please join in if you wish. We will have fun getting to know each other through our photos.
But yesterday I was feeling rather wistful about not doing the PAD any more, particularly as I felt I had just started to get into it. I found myself telling Xena that she would not have as many photos for people to admire in 2012! However, fortunately a few others felt the same and in the middle of the night here (1/1) and on New Year's eve in Wales @sarahgb set up the new group at the eleventh hour! I have already posted my first 2012PAD and guess who is in it?
