Facebook. Twitter. Picasa. Flickr. Blog. What else did I miss?

If you're anything like me, you have a variety of sites where to post your images. I post some images for friends on Facebook, then throw a few to the family over on Picasa, and then every once in a while tweet a couple more onto my personal blog to reach former colleagues (and provide fodder for the stalkers).

I recently stumbled across a site called Posterous which makes it easy to post your images online - to multiple sources - all via email. Simply email text, images, audio and video and route to the sites of your choosing. 

Over the next few weeks I'll do some testing with Digimarc for Images and share my results here.

Last week Kevin and I attended 6Sight in Monterey, California (I know, I know, tough duty...) One of the featured speakers was photographer Rick Smolan. If you aren’t familiar with his work, check out the "A Day in the Life" and "24/7" series of books, which combine creative storytelling and state-of-the-art technology.

The "Obama Time Capsule" is his latest project where he brings together incredible images and shots from over 100 of the nation’s top photographers with our own personal experience of this historical election. Each book is unique and personalized to the buyer.

Check it out at:  www.theobamatimecapsule.com

Here’s a few quick digital image trends and tidbits live from the 6Sight conference in Monterey, California.

• In the United States, the total number of camera phones is expected to overtake the number of laptop personal computers next year
• Yesterday NTT Docomo introduced 19 new camera phone models in Japan, all with 8 megapixel cameras. Come on AT&T can you at least release one in the United States? 
  
• 14% of all handsets sold in the United States do not have a camera
• Biggest impact on cellular networks as far as data carrying capacity… wait for it… Pandora Radio

More to come later. For updated news visit 6Sight’s blog.  

The question has come up many times: Can a Digimarc digital watermark persist within a PDF?

The answer is yes. When creating your PDF, you have many options under your control in regards to scaling and compression. As long as you adjust your settings appropriately, the watermark will persist. Ideally, you could choose not to downsample and not to use compression, and your image will remain as is.

In need of some inspiration? Doug Auld might be able to do the trick. Doug is a photographer, poet, writer and artist. His work at Paint-Tings is described as a "gift of life that moves the soul, tantalizes the spirit, captures memories and creates emotions for a lifetime."

Paint-Tings uses Digimarc for Images for copyright communication and tracking.

So Kevin's last post with the link to that scary family photo site reminded me of one of my favorite guilty pleasures: The Photoshop Disasters blog. Having worked with art directors and designers for years I enjoy seeing just how bad Photoshop work can be. These ads must have just ran out of time, or maybe they just reached a point where the art direct didn't give a… well we've all been there, but here's a big "WOW "to letting these get published.

While digging up the link and having a quick perusal I ran across the Ralph Lauren goofy model shots with oddly distorted bodies. I forgot to check out the images when I heard about them last month and missed one of the best blog headlines - and subsequent comment discussion - ever on Boing Boing. Then there's the follow up from Ralph's people that Photoshop Disasters, Boing Boing and others had infringed on their ad content by reposting it, resulting in a few blogs actually removing the advertisements. This MSNBC video on Boing Boing explains a lot of this craziness better than I can.

I suspect ad folks at Ralph Lauren are pretty smart and they might have been seeing if they could generate a little extra publicity, plus seeing if they could use copyright laws to intimate bloggers. Or maybe they were just explaining their faux pas… maybe.

Personally, I'm glad those models don't actually look like the surreal Steve Madden doll head ads.

Do you post your family pictures to publicly available sites like Flickr, or do you create private photo albums?

I do both. And thanks to the Digimarc Search Service I can automatically track my digitally watermarked images on millions of sites across the public internet. 

Why track your images? If your images show up on another site, you should know about it to uncover misuse or licensing opportunities. And in my case, the last thing I want my wife to find out is that our images are appearing on sites like Akward Family Photos. Just because I wore a pink shirt and "MC Hammer Pants" doesn't mean everyone needs to know about it.

The first five people to email me can try out a new professional offering that includes the Digimarc Search Service. You can reach me via kevin.shields(at)digimarc(dot).com.