Thing 17. One Cool New Thing

Picture Trail lets you create 28 different types of slide shows (the one above is called Magnifier) from your pictures. You create the slide show--or Flicks, as they call them--by uploading pictures from your computer or Web site. Once you have your Flick, save it and then you can automatically upload it to various sites including Blogger. Or get the code to use in another service. Picture Trail hosts the pictures and provides image URLs so you can post the photos to blogs, Web sites, MySpace, etc. It offers other typical photo management site features, including the ability to order prints & share albums with others. There are privacy features, too. Explore the Help and the features tabs to learn more.

There is a community feature--with "friends," etc.--which I can happily avoid. And I'm not interested in the "Bling" feature, either, which apparently lets you add sparkle and text to photos, but the slide shows offer new ways to display photos. It is easy to use, with a little experimentation.

While the service is free, you must register and then wade through multiple pages of ads to get to the Flick pages. I like photos on Web pages and since I don't have Photoshop or other skills to do this on my own, I'm willing to put up with the ads, at least once in a while. You decide.

Something of a toy, but it could be useful to add interest to your teacher page--share photos you've taken related to an event or project--or for students to use in a Web page for a project.