I tried downloading MobaPhoto as described in the engagement. Things didn't exactly work out as it said on the tin. It downloaded and installed, then disappeared. I tried to reinstall it before I could start using it... It asked me to install a custom toolbar, which I was extremely suspicious of. I checked the page again, and realized I'd clicked the wrong download link. The page was cluttered with advertising and I had downloaded... something else. I downloaded the right thing this time, and made a mental note to uninstall the other thing. And do a malware scan... :-/
So.. after all that, I experimented a bit with image size and quality:
Closeups of a cicada:
My dog, Zorro
Pics of some of my snare drums:
Part of my cymbal collection:
Closeups of the surfaces of cymbals
Moba seems to be good for batch editing and resizing of photos for uploading. It does it's job quickly, with a minimum of fuss. However although when resizing I deliberately DID NOT check the "replace original images" box, it went ahead and replaced them anyway, which meant I lost some HQ images that I'll have to re-take photos of later. How considerate of it. Not impressed. Need to remember to create a "resized" folder for the new images to be written to.
Learning tool? It may be useful for when there is a whole batch of photos that need to be posted to a class website of, say an event or an excursion. It's easy enough to select a whole folder of images and then convert them at once, rather than doing them individually. If the images are resized first, it reduces upload time and saves editing time later on. Slideshows are also fun to set up.
If students are building a website or blog to document a particular activity, this would be a useful tool. For example, if they were required to take photographs of the weather over a period of a few weeks, or keep a blog of their creations in visual art, or photograph different types of leaves.
Mobaphoto has the advantage of being portable, and easy to use. It sits on a thumb drive and it does a lot of the standard photo editing procedures that are required. It also can create slideshows. I had a look at this, but didn't have a lot of time to go into it.
The batch processing tools are particularly powerful and useful, especially the re-sizing tool. This is because most phone cameras these days operate at a minimum of 3.2Mp, with the average being around 5Mp. It would be time-consuming to upload large batches of images of this quality. Most free websites or blogs would also have a cap on the amount of storage space available. Reducing the image size allows more content to be uploaded, and ensures that the data cap isn't chewed up by large files.
Still images are within the grasp of most students in the modern classroom. Any student with a reasonably modern mobile phone or iPod Touch has access to a camera of decent quality. The increasing use of sites such as Instagram - an integrated smartphone app, image editor and online gallery - is evidence that still images have a prominent role in the online community.
Taking this a step further, after a student developed some skill with a camera, a series of photographs can be turned into stop-motion animation using a software package such as MonkeyJam.
No comments:
Post a Comment