Do you take more photos at Christmas?
I do. With getting together with various parts of the family and spending relaxing time together it just seems the perfect time.
But I’m not really going to talk about taking photos today (though we do have books on that here if you want more help with using your smartphone for photos).
I wanted to mention something about sharing them afterwards – so the rest of the family can see them too.
There are lots of ways to do it – and some make a backup of the photos at the same time, so if something happens to your camera or smartphone or whatever you used, they’re safe.
For example you might use Facebook to share them with your friends – some people will see them, some might not.
Or you might keep a backup on Dropbox or Google Drive – and you could also share them with other people that way.
But one way I’ve used in the past is Flickr. It stores your photos – and your friends and family can easily flick through them – it’s easy to browse like in an actual photo album.
But they’ve just changed their rules and instead of allowing you to store an unlimited number of photos, free, now they’re only going to let you store up to 1000 free.
If you want to store more than that, you’ll have to pay. Not a huge amount, but some.
It might not affect you. After all, you probably don’t want to share more than 1000 photos at once. So once you get to the end of the 1000 limit, you could delete some of the old ones and add new ones.
But it might not be so good as a way to keep them safely backed up as you might well end up with more than 1000 you want kept safe.
Personally, I use Google Photos to keep my photos backed up nowadays. But if you’ve been using Flickr, you might want to start looking for an alternative – anything from Google Photos (like me – especially handy if you use an Android smartphone for taking your photos) to a USB hard drive that you plug into a PC. Up to you.
The good news is that Flickr aren’t going to start deleting any photos over the 1000 photos until February next year, so you have a little time to decide on an alternative.
A quick tip if you have problems with a website
The school the boys go to has recently signed up for a new system for booking school dinners.
I’m really pleased – before, they’d bring a little paper menu home, we’d sit with the boys and tick which options they wanted, then give it to the boys to hand it in on Monday.
Then remind them on Tuesday to actually hand it in. Then again on Wednesday…
Now we can choose it online and not have to worry about whether it got handed in (or lost down the back of a desk instead).
But when we first signed up, we found the site didn’t work as well as expected.
You got little drop-down menus to choose each meal from the options. Simple enough – and Friday’s worked fine. And Thursday’s. And Wednesday’s and Tuesday’s.
But Monday’s simply wouldn’t let you choose anything. You tapped it and nothing happened.
We tried refreshing the page – still nothing.
Alastair didn’t seem too keen on my idea of “Well, you probably don’t need lunch every day” (ahem) so we tried opening it on a different device – that worked fine.
So my tip number one if you’re having problems with a web-page is try opening it on a different device.
It’s not ideal, though… and what if you don’t have another device?
The other trick that often works is opening it in a different web browser, even on the same device. For example, if you normally use Chrome, try Edge or Firefox. If you have an iPad with Safari on, try Chrome.
It doesn’t always work, but it often does and it can be simpler than messing around trying to figure out why it doesn’t work, especially if it’s something you just want to get done and move on.
Worth having up your sleeve as a trick if you need it, anyway!