Over the last few weeks I’ve watched my social media feeds be filled up with photo and video montages of the year that was. What once was only done by companies and big organizations is now available to every who uses social media, with a few clicks of the mouse the year that was is summed up in images and or video. It’s a cool feature, but it relies on you sharing your year with your social networks. It also has the problem that just because you shared it doesn’t mean you want to have it thrown in your face again.
When I saw the first people posting their year in review I went to my Facebook to see what a great year I had, only to be greeted by a disappointing trip through the year in photos. My first thought was how could this be, I mean I post a picture every day, how can that be all that Facebook felt was worth remembering. Of course then it hit me, I don’t share my photos on Facebook, I share them on my blog and share my blog to Facebook. Meaning Facebook doesn’t see my photos, just my posts, and it didn’t include posts in the year in review. Then just a couple of days later my phone buzzed, I had a new Auto awesome, it was Google’s turn to try to sum up my year. So I knew they would do better than Facebook, I use the Google plus images to back up all my photos, so I knew Google had access to a lot of images from the year. And it did a great job, sure it included some images that I wouldn’t want to share publicly, mostly from school trips and birthday parties, but it felt like it did a good job of capturing the year. Last year I took the time to tweak it and created something that I was proud to share, 2013 The Movie.
So where does that leave me, I want to share the year that was, but I don’t think I can trust an automated procedure to capture my year. I could do what I did last year and tweak Google’s creation, but I want something different this year. So I turned to my blog, to the 365 days of photos that I’ve captured. The only question was should I build a blog post, or a slide show or what. I decided to try something new. I fired up Microsoft’s new presentation software Office Sway and put together something that I thought captured the year. You can see an embed version below, or view it on full screen here.
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Really nice Mike, thank you for sharing