Travel & Tourism Technology Trends

Usually I’m a little more focused on travel industry and innovation related commentary, but today I wanted to share my point of view as a travel consumer using technology.  I’ve been playing with a variety of tools for both the iPhone and PC for handling photos.  Why phots? Because photos, in my opinion, are major source of travel inspiration and sharing.  Photos are how we share our travel experiences with our friends and family.  The challenge I faced, as a traveler, is how do I take and share photos in the most convenient manner possible while still providing good quality photos using a small handheld device.  My solution after about four months of tinkering and testing is a combination that I think is effecient, cost effective, easily transported, and ideally suited for someone on the road.

Netbook = Asus EEE PC

I’ve written about the EEE PC being one of my essential tools as a road warrior.  Since finding a way to install a trimmed down version of Windows XP on it, I have fallen in love with it all over again.  My little EEE PC (first generation) now boasts 2GB of RAM and a 4GB SD Card for program files.  I have everything on the EEE PC that I have on my everyday laptop, including Photoshop Elements.  The only downside to the netbook is it’s limited screen size, but you soon get used to it.  To make my life easier, I purchased an wireless mouse, a small form factor USB hub, and an external hard drive.  All combined, it still fits very comfortably into my man purse (yeah, you heard me).

Photo Editor = Photoshop Elements

For the average photographer, Photoshop Elements is an excellent application for manipulating your shots.  I’ve been using Photoshop on the PC since version 2.0, yes that’s right, even before Photoshop supported layers and when, if you wanted drop shadows, you had to add the Alien Skin plug-ins.  I can tell you that Photoshop Elements has everything you would need to manipulate your photos and produce some really cool pictures.  PSE even supports RAW files in the event your digital camera takes photos in RAW.  The most exciting part for me was being able to install it on my netbook.  When my EEE PC only support Linux, I had no way of installing PSE on the device and so I had to wait til I got home after my trips to edit the photos.  The additional benefit of PSE is that it has tight integration with Photoshop.com, which is Adobe’s answer to web based photo editing and photosharing.

Photo Sharing = Photoshop.com

Normally I would be all over Flickr.com for Photo sharing, but I have to say that Photoshop.com is really my prefered way to go.  The reason for this is because Photoshop.com is really designed to be a web based photo editing studio that plays well with other photo sharing sites.  It’s kind of like metasearch for photo sharing.  You can connect to your Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa accounts directly into Photoshop.com and edit the photos on-line.  As far as convenience goes, the aggregation of all the photos into a single interface makes for a much simpler user experience.  The Flash interface is very tight and is so similar to the PSE interface that you might forget that you’re actually online.  The only draw back is that I could not get the site to work on my Firefox 3 on my Linux based netbook.  Once I loaded Windows XP, I had no problems running the site.  I’m guessing it was the lack of Flash 10 support on the Linux distro.  Anyway, the ability to manipulate the photos on-line is a big plus.  The other plus is the integration with PSE which allows  you to back-up and synchronizing the photos on your PC directly with your Photoshop.com account.

Mobile Photo Uploading = Shozu

Now that you’ve taken those amazing photos, you need to upload them somewhere so you can share them with your friends.  I recommend you use Shozu, which is a photo uploading app for the iPhone that allows you to connect to and upload your photos to multiple social media sites including Facebook, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Photoshop.com, and TwitPic.  The most effecient way I have found to use Shozu is to upload your photo through Flickr for sharing and then pull them into Photoshop.com using the Flickr integration.  This gives you the benefit of Flickr’s excellent sharing and community components and Photoshop.com’s superior editing and interface.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, this fashionably masculine carry-all is available from Mountain Equipment Co-op for $19.00 CAD, an equally fashionable price.