Everything is Connected to Everything

My family recently took a short vacation and as avid photographers (well at least I am) we took lots of pictures. I snapped a few with my camera phone during the trip and using its integration with Facebook uploaded them to a Facebook album. This was great for keeping my Facebook friends up to date on our vacation, but as my daughter pointed out, the quality from my camera phone is not that good (she might have been a bit more blunt in her version).

I also took pictures with my digital SLR but there is no direct integration, at least from my few years old Nikon camera. This wasn't really a big deal as I normally download the pictures from my Nikon to my home network and then fire up Google's Picasa which I use to organize and manage my pictures. Picasa has a nice feature that let's you publish your photos to the web. I then share the link to the web album with my family by posting the link to our family's Yammer site. I sometimes even go "old school" and email the link to people not part of our Yammer group.

After going through my normal process with this group of vacation photos, it felt incomplete as I wanted to share them with my Facebook friends as well. Not sure if any of my Facebook friends really cared one way or the other, but that didn't stop me from wanting to figure out how to do it :). Doing the camera phone upload to Facebook allowed me to tag my photos and easily add captions and receive comments (the good the bad and the occasionally funny).

I first thought of just posting the Picasa link in a Facebook post, but that didn't give me much of the Facebook features like tagging and comments. I then tried to use the Facebook internal photo upload application, but the process was slow and error prone (both in terms of finding the right pictures and uploading them) and was ready to give up and just leave them in Picasa when just for kicks I figured I would google the issue and see if someone had already asked and answered this question.

Did a search on "picasa facebook" and sure enough up popped a Facebook application that adds a Facebook sharing button to Picasa. Installing the application added a Facebook button to the Picasa application which gave me an easy way to select, edit and upload the pictures from Picasa to Facebook. This integration even captures the Picasa captions as Facebook captions making the job as simple as it gets.

The innovation in today's world has always amazed me, but now the integration between the innovations is starting to catch up putting us in a position to say that pretty much everything is connected to everything.