The Dark Side Of Lightt & Days

June 12, 2013 Edit: Today "Days" came out with an update that allows you to connect to Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter. The problem now is that when viewing the photos on a browser, there's a giant time stamp covering the whole photo, obscuring much of the content of the photo! Oh and the time stamp is wrong.

There's been a host of stories the past couple of weeks about Snapchat- the photo sharing app that gives your friends 10 seconds to view your photo before it's deleted.  The reason why Snapchat's been in the news though is because the photos aren't actually deleted. And even if they were, it's easy to save them.  And in fact there are sites that are popping up wholly dedicated to capturing those moments you thought were gone forever. I thought this was timely, but I'll come back to that.

Just wait... we'll get to you in a moment my friend.

The way that I shared classroom photos this year was to take them on my iPad, use the photo stream to have them magically appear on my laptop, and then finally upload the photos to my weebly class website. This is a lot simpler than uploading the photos from a digital camera, but I want to find an even easier way. In fact I'm spending a lot of time and energy to find a way that will save me time and energy.  I'm not considering Istagram because it doesn't really encourage lots of pics to be uploaded at a time and because filters are stupid.  I haven't considered Flickr because I thought that surely there'd be something new out that I could use and Flickr has been around since the 90s. 

So I tried this Lightt app first.

"beautiful" in the sense that everything is spastic and jerky

Lightt is a photo sharing app that doesn't take photos- it takes animated gifs. You can't control the gif speed, so even their featured highlights from their collection of users look like the planet is experiencing a collective muscle spasm.
Oh! But there is an option to directly link to Tumblr! This is great because I can open a Tumblr account that directly links to my class blog. Then with a click of a button, everything will automatically be uploaded and saved.
Here are the steps to link your Lightt gifs to Tumblr:
1) In the "Settings" click on "Social Networks"
2) Click on the blue 'Connect' button next to Tumblr.
3) Wait for Tumblr to open in your browser.
4) Click on the green 'Allow' button when Tumblr asks, "Grant this application read and write access to your Tumblr account?
5) Watch Lightt crash before it posts anything.

Now you can be indignant Kirk.

Next, My friend turned me on to Days, a photo sharing app that believes that quantity is the best way to show the quality of a day. 

Days has a lot of good features. Photos taken within 10 seconds of each other form an animated gif and if you don't like that you can split up the photos before posting them. Also photos taken within a day are grouped together, you can't filter or mess with the photos- you can only delete photos, and it promises to link up with Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook. Except that it doesn't. I would love to link this to a Tumblr account and have that be my platform for sharing photos, but it doesn't work. 

Dang it Tumblr! Don't make me use Instagram!

Days is a fairly new app so maybe they'll fix that over the summer, but what is more annoying than not being able to connect to the services it says you can connect to, and the reason I brought up Snapchat in the beginning of this post is that once you post a new group of photos to your "Days" account, you can't get rid of it. Maybe you can, but I haven't figured out how. So I guess it's better than Snapchat in that they're not pretending to delete your photos, but it really does everything it can to add on to the permanent tattoo that is your online life.

So that's how I'll end this unfinished quest to make my life more lazy with a TED talk that reminds us to be wary of the permanent tattoo of the Internet: