Building Community: Photo Sharing Sites

Paul Prins — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:24:13 +0000

Photo Sharing sites abound on the Internet. The majority of them interweave a combination of user uploaded photos with a community aspect (mainly through groups and comments on photos). These sites allow you to create an account, most for free, and then allocate all of your shared photographs into one location.

There is little people love more than photos (and photos of themselves). These sites allow for great access of your members to full galleries. After retreats, mission trips, confirmation services, and any other event you can think of. With so many people loving photography this provides a way for them to serve as a ‘Church Photographer’ and you create a valuable new role in your church.

Within your churches account you can upload all your photos and place them into sets/groups for specific events. This allows way more pictures to be posted and archived than makes sense to do on your churches public website.

Below is a list of sites you can use to host these photos most for free I believe. We personally recommend Flickr and they are probably the most popular among those listed below. It is very easy to use, they have a free option (and a pro account for $25/yr allows 2 gigs of uploads/mo, and shows all your photos all the time, instead of only the 200 most recent with the free account). Sort your images into set, and then group the sets into collections for quick access. These photos can also be downloaded at full resolution if someone wanted to print a copy for themselves (this is an option for each account/image).

Facebook also has a photo feature but I wouldn’t encourage using it for this purpose. These galleries are not accessible publicly (for most people over 30 who don’t have accounts), there is no access to the full resolution image, and by uploading images to facebook they become the property of facebook (see their terms of service).

Building Community

Most of these sites allow you to create some sort of photo sharing group. By doing this you can encourage members of your church to post and share their photos in the group. This allows everyone one simple place to go and view photos from events and trips your church goes on.

Imagine having a group of students on a mission trip after hurricane Katrina doing cleanup and posting photos mid-trip online for everyone back home. All they would need is an hour in a wi-fi hot-spot (like many coffee shops or hotels) and they can upload photos.

List of Photo Sharing Sites

How do we stay relevant in the Info Age?

Paul Prins — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:19:23 +0000

The western world is undergoing a dramatic shift as we leave the era spurred on by the industrial revolution and we enter into a world spurred on by the microchip. Just as with every previous shift in eras we don’t leave behind the previous technologies, only adapt their uses and move into newer technologies.

This raises the question, How do we, as the church, stay relevant in the info age?

I understand some people have strong theological opposition to the Internet and the progression of technology. If that’s you, the rest of this post will just upset you. If not, keep reading.

First we have to embrace technology, and quickly. The church has gotten into the habit of letting technological things blow past us until its obvious we need to get on board with them.

So what does this embracing look like?

Dynamic Organization websites (with databases and interactivity)
Fully utilization of digital delivery whenever possible (Content Re-purposing!)
Creating digital, gospel based, content people under 30 want to experience
Digital Transparency of leadership (through personal websites/blogs/etc.)

The list could keep going but for the sake of brevity these are the big three ways the Church is extremely lacking overall in the info age.

Lets re-cap on `the Church` for a second. The Church is the largest organization in the world (though with many fractions within its structure). The Christian faith is the most widely accepted faith in the world. OK, got that?

Now why does the Church with these incredible numbers have such a pathetic presence in the Information

Age? Priorities…

Shifting our priorities

As Christians, and even more-so as Church leaders, we have an obligation to steward our resources. So lets be smart about how we use our money and people.

The goal set for for us at the end of the gospels is to proclaim the good news to everyone. With technology this can be easier than ever with the Internet. The world is funding programs like OLPC which has delivered 725,000 laptops to children the world over (list in next paragraph). Intel also is in the market with their classmate PC and just sold 500,000 laptops to Portugal yesterday.

If we want to reach out to countries like Uruguay, Peru, Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Mexico what better way then to capture the imagination and hearts of the youth these Million+ laptops will reach. They will all have Internet access, and the laptops hope to close the technological divide.

To do this we have to invest in technologies and content (Content is King!) to reach the world.

Why can’t we do virtual discipleship with children in countries and cities we can seldom reach with physical people?

To do this

We have to do it well, this means investing some serious money, efforts in doing this. I believe that there needs to be another movement like the Wesleyan bible translators for the Information age. Their goal will be to make the Gospel accessible and appealing to Internet viewers.

Ironic thing here is that to pull this off, we’ll need those ‘weird’ creative people the Church has been so good at pushing away.

What role do you think the internet should play with the Church? Or Church with the internet?

Photo: Can’t Touch this by Foxtongue