“This is my favorite present ever.” Alice’s Wonder Pets paper dolls

We had my parents over the other night for a pizza party and they came bearing some sweet gifts. For me, a gorgeous Hiroshi Ohchi print for Hello Holiday’s new office (Sidebar: We’re moving in next Saturday and I can’t wait to show photos. It’s already looking so cute in my mind’s eye….), and for Alice they brought what she describes as her “favorite present ever”: A Wonder Pets activity book full of paper dolls.

So now we not only have Wonder Pets songs all day, Wonder Pets shows on Netflix before nap time, but now we also have Wonder Pets paper dolls for play time. She loves them, she’s never been so effusive and reverent playing with any other toy. She especially likes making them hold hands.

I also wanted to share my process for editing photos. It’s just a quick, efficient little routine I’ve developed and I’d love it if it saved any other non-professional photographers some time, too. Keep in mind that I do this on a PC.

Download photos. Open folder. Preview images.

I scroll through the images and write the number of each file I want to edit on a piece of scrap paper. These are mainly just the photos I want to post–in focus, good composition, whatever. I don’t want to make too much work for myself.

I open Picmonkey.com. It’s a great web-based photo editor created by former employees of Picnik, the ill-fated editor that used to be built into Flickr. Picmonkey saves me a ton of time and I love the design of the application–it’s cute and fun to use and the dev team is super engaged and light-hearted.

I drag the first photo file from in my photo folder to the “Edit a Photo” box on the left side of the screen on Picmonkey.com.

My process is typically “auto adjust,” then I mess with saturation and apply some kind of cross-process filter. Sometimes I crop my photos differently.

I save each file to my desktop once it’s edited.

Once I’m finished editing each photo I want to keep from each folder, I batch-upload every photo from the editing session to Flickr using Flickr Uploadr, a desktop application. I change all the photo titles and descriptions there and set the privacy. If I don’t mind stuff getting shared, I make it public. If I think it’s not that great of a photo objectively, I make it private. I fill the description fields with keywords that I can use to find each photo again if I do a search in Flickr.

Flickr makes it easy to grab photos and share them in posts, on Facebook, Twitter, and it’s easy to search and categorize photos. I keep everything in there going almost five years back.

The end!

As the Wonder Pets (and Alice) would say, “What’s gonna work? Teamwork!” I’m not a professional photographer and I don’t even particularly enjoy the editing process, but this efficient and easy method has helped me out a lot with pretty good results, I think. Hope these tips can help you out!

xx
meg