I take pictures to keep memories fresh, but I know that I use them just as much to share the story of my travels. Online photosharing services make the second task an easy chore, so long as you know the right one to use. Here’s a rundown of one’s I’ve encountered and my thoughts on them.

Flickr:
I use and love Flickr to share my travel photos. A couple of days ago my love was re-affirmed and Flickr loved me back a little bit in the form of a note from vtravelled that they were using a picture I took in La Plange on their site. And to me, that’s really what I want most out of a photo hosting service, the ability to share even with people I may not know. The biggest fault with Flickr is that you can’t resize the images to any dimensions you would like for embedding, you’re stuck with their standard sizes.

SmugMug / Photoshelter:
Gary from Everything Everywhere, one of the most constant travel bloggers/photographers, has recently left Flickr to a powerful platform -SmugMug. SmugMug, and other similar services, cater to people pushing the limits of armature photography. They cost a bit more money, but you get all sorts of features like watermarks and resizing images to embed them. I don’t really want to invest in the fancy option, and I think I would miss the Flickr community.

Picasa:
I used Picasa when I first started this blog, and didn’t like it one bit. I found navigating among pictures to be a slow and cumbersome process, and the way the pictures load takes longer than Flickr and they look bad as they slowly load.

Photobucket / Snapfish / Shutterfly:
When I was first roaming around the world I tried all these different photo sharing sites. They all felt like MySpace to me – poorly designed and inexplicably popular. They all cater to people who want to make prints, which I rarely have interest in doing.

Facebook:
Facebook is the most popular way to share photos, and it’s also the most social. It’s so popular and natural that it almost feels like a no-brainer, I would assume that everyone uses it to share pictures.
While it isn’t useful as a photo hosting service, being able to tag the people with whom you’ve shared the journey. I upload fewer pictures to Facebook than I do Flickr, and normally they are ones with people in them or funny images from my phone uploaded right at the moment they were taken.

Despite knowing a couple of good folks living around Amsterdam, I failed to have a meal with a local while I was there. I did, however, find something just as relaxing that made me feel like a local myself: a bicycle.

My hotel was about 8km walk from the stadium where I needed to be for work, and logistics didn’t look good. Public transportation would take over an hour as I would have to head into the city then transfer, and it was too far to walk with the equipment I needed to take back and forth from the hotel for work. It looked like I would be taking some expensive cabs That is, until I saw a rack of rent-a-bikes outside the hotel. In a sew minutes I was cruising along some of the best bike paths that I have ever seen. I wound through the woods and over the Amstel, a very pleasant ride without a car in sight.

Seeing how well the infrastructure catered to my bicycle commute, I couldn’t help but think that the hold adage of “when in Rome…” The local infrastructure catered perfectly to my needs, I just had to act like a local.

I got a chuckle from this German tourism advert in a London taxi. Seems an odd way to celebrate 20 years of a wall coming down. Would you make an ad saying “come visit post-apartheid South Africa” or “post-communist Poland”?

While I had a few meals with locals as I cruised through Berlin, my favourite meals that I shared during my two stops in Germany were beers with my volunteers.

The shows in Berlin and Gelsenkirchen were two weeks apart, but the experience was remarkably similar. It rained heavily the day before the show, cleared up and was fairly nice on show day, and the crowds, as one roadie put it, “know how to hang out”. After both shows there were solid crowds of people mingling about and having a last beer before heading home, and when our work was done at both shows, some of the volunteers who had worked a hard day stayed around a while to have a beer.

I suppose I wanted to seek out meals with locals as a break from the tour, and despite the fact that I was still at the stadium with people who had been working at the concert, both nights felt like more of a break than the meals in Barcelona, Milan, and Paris. The group was relaxed and just happy to be spending a couple of non-structured moments with each other. So prost to all the Germans I shared a cold one with, hope to see you next time I roll through.

Cross posted from The ONE Blog

I have a catch phrase that’s served me well along the U2 tour: “It’s not gonna rain.” Thus far with that phrase and the collective will power of tens of thousands of fans, we’ve managed to keep the rain off of us despite what the forecast said. I suppose I should have been saying, “It’s not gonna rain, and there won’t be gale force winds.” But I didn’t, and so that was our weather for the first day in Gothenburg, Sweden. You can get a sense of the conditions from the picture above from when we were unloading in the morning.

But the rough and rugged ONE volunteers braved the wind and the rain, and still managed to sign up hundreds of new ONE members. I was as impressed as I was cold – I’d packed for a summer concert tour and lacked the proper insulation for the 17C windy soggy day.

Everything changed for the second day in Gothenburg. The skies cleared, the wind stopped, and we were in serious business. We doubled the number of people we signed up, and after the concert still had the energy to share a few laughs and a some Swedish gummy candies – Gott & blandat, which I highly recommend if salt liquorice sounds good to you.

It’s now onward back to Germany, where I’m meeting up with a couple members of the German team for a show in Gelsenkirchen. With any luck it’s not going to rain (again).