This was my Halloween fun tonight. DG went to a party on the other side of town; Sticks played for the Senior Citizen’s dance this afternoon and then retired to his room to do homework or play Pirate games — I’m not sure which.
All of the kids in the neighborhood took off for the east side of town where the big houses and good candy are. The pumpkin flickered its fractured welcome/go away message and 2 kids knocked. Other than that, it was just us, The Pug, and Dancing with the Stars. (Mario WILL win — he’s a drummer and a kickass dancer)
So I started thinking about how to put together my photos in some interesting ways, perhaps to create a book of 2006 best, or just to share a little differently than I have in the past, and I decided to try Tabblo, a recent discovery from Doc Searls. Here’s my Halloween Tabblo, uploaded to Flickr.
Tabblo is basically a way of taking your images and using them to tell stories, create postcards, prints and scrapbook pages. It mashes up nicely with Flickr, and will send the result back to Flickr, too. There is, of course, community and tagging on the Tabblo site, but I didn’t really have time to explore that.
The interface is relatively fast, but I had a bit of difficulty getting things arranged exactly the way I wanted them. There are tons of preset layouts and templates which are nice, especially for someone like me who doesn’t really get as much joy out of creating the frame my photos are in as much as taking them. Even so, I found myself surprised and a little frustrated when I dragged a couple of photos to different places and ended up with a resized photo in that space…I would’ve liked a bit more freedom with that.
In fairness to Tabblo I’m not much of a tutorial type, preferring to dive in and either completely screw things up or succeed. There is a nice link right on the first page to a tutorial, which surely would have stopped me from scratching my head more than once. On the other hand, I was able to undo anything I didn’t like and start over, which is one way to learn…even if it is the hard way.
I want to play with this more. As you’ll see from this post and the next, I’m toying with ways to use my photos as gifts or for fun things, maybe as gifts for Christmas, maybe just as a way to do more with my photos than upload them and blog them. Tabblo is definitely a unique start toward finding new uses for my photos.
One thing that I thought was very cool was the ability to make postcards from my Tabblos — one thought I had was to create some different postcard sets as gifts for my mom, who likes things like that. It’s free to join and create Tabblos (and store your uploaded photos), and there are links to different products made from them to buy.
It’s fun. I want to play some more on another rare quiet night. Hopefully before it gets much closer to Christmas. 
Technorati Tags: Tabblo, Flickr, photos, mashup, postcards, halloween
