Explaining IMVU Photo Stream
There’s a new feat
ure in IMVU called Photo Stream. This new future is at this moment only available for VIP’s and will be within a few weeks launched to the entire community.
Photo Stream allows IMVU members to capture and share their favorite IMVU moments with others! You can share and showcase your own photos and explore the latest fashion trends, décor styles and expressions of creativity by others. This is a way to make new friends who share your style and interests! IMVU also gives you as a bonus, 250 promotional credits for the first photo you share and 250 additional ones for the first “like” you get for t
hat photo.
Use the camera tool to take your photos within your screen and then check the “[v] Share to my stream” option from the Save Photo dialog box. But be careful a couple people have accidentally shared pictures they didn’t mean to. Other people will see these photos in the recommended section of the stream, and could send you a friend invite or visit your IMVU home pages. They can also block and / or report you for inappropriate content if your pictures aren’t appropriate for everyone. So especially in the beginning be careful about any adult pictures here.
There’s a profit which are only for VIP Exclusive members. If you share a photo and someone purchases one or more products showcased in that photo, you earn 5% of the total purchase price for that order. The opportunity to earn these promotional credits is endless and I think this will be popular for developers to show off things.
Better Safe than Sorry.
Sharing is what IMVU is all about in many ways, so it seems very natural to want to share a little about yourself, your life and pictures especially with someone you’re close to. They seem so honest and open with you and you love them. Well unfortunately it’s usually people that you were close to that wind up getting get hurt the most when something happens.
Unfortunately what goes up usually comes back down and can come crashing down very fast too. And what seemed safe to share at the time is suddenly very dangerous. But even if it’s not them, there’s a reason why they say once something is put on the net it never dies.
Photos you took with your cell phone record the location and phone number they were taken with. They get saved in a computer which might back things up online. Then either the computer or the backup could be hacked of just wind up revealing things. Old computers get thrown away but the hard drives aren’t usually erased or the data can still be recovered.
If I can make videos from IMVU without much technical knowledge or experience using just free software you have to assume that any webcam is being recorded. Even if the person you’re sharing it with doesn’t do anything with it, their nosy roommate or upset rl partner is finding your webcam session and suddenly it finds its way to a porn site. Then a potential employer years from now finds it doing a background check. Or a divorce attorney uses it to show you are an unfit parent.
I’m married so I have to be more careful because a phone call or chat log or two could plant enough doubt that I might have to leave (especially with all of the stuff I do on the website). Even if you’re not married there’s probably someone you care about or someone you’re going to care about that you would rather not have see everything you’ve done in here. I’m not saying you can’t but at least weigh the potential benefit of sharing your picture against the potential downside before you open that box. Remember, once you open that box you can’t undo it. Or just because it hasn’t come back to bite you yet, don’t assume it never will.
Taking and organizing Photos and videos in IMVU
Pictures are your memories here and to me it’s important to save and hold on to them. I want to tell you not only how to take pictures but how to manage and organize them because both are important. I average over 100 pictures and video clips a day and usually at least a gigabyte per day. I know that’s a little crazy but I love it and can give you some of what I’ve learned doing this.
There is no trick to getting the perfect picture. The closest thing I have to a trick if you want to call it that, is to take several pics of anything and then I can pick the very best one. And it’s really no harder to name and move 30 pictures at a time than it is two or three.
I take three types of pics (each explained in detail below) . Well one is a video clip not a picture but you organize them the same way. I also use hiressnap and screen captures. Occasionally I use HiRes NoBG but not as much. NoBG is helpful for portrait type pics but that’s all.
HIRES command
The simplest way to start taking good pictures is just to use the command *hiressnap. It will take a good high quality picture and put it on your desktop. It doesn’t take the whole screen if you have a big or wide screen and it doesn’t show the bubbles which sometimes are important. It’s also easy to use and doesn’t require any program.
I use this a lot, and have programmed a key on my keyboard to do it even faster. It has a sister command *hiresnobg which does the same thing but without the background. As I mentioned above this isn’t really as useful to me especially since I don’t actually edit them very much. But it’s good for portrait type pics for your profile or a wall picture. A friend uses them for her webpage and they look nice and professional.
HyperSnap for screen shots
There are a few ways to take screenshots but I really like Hypersnap. It’s free to use with a logo on it which you can crop out or inexpensive to register. The advantage of it is that it captures the bubbles which are often necessary to tell the story.
It also captures the whole screen wider than the hires one. I also like that it includes the name bar on the bottom so I have the names handy if I need them. I use the control W command to capture just the window of your screen without the text or your credit info. You can also program this to work with the Print Screen button to make it easy.
Hyper Cam 2 for Video Clips
The third tool I use for taking video clips is a free program called HyperCam2. It’s free and a great tool for taking videos. It loads fast and takes very few resources and gives you a lot of control. Make the capture area something close to 800 x 600 in the center of your window where loading won’t show up.
It’s also nice to click the clothing bottom button so you see the typing in the window. It makes it feel more like a real conversation. Another tip for videos is that this works great with Dragon Naturally Speaking. That’s how I talk and takes videos at the same time (and still have a hand free if I need it).
I’ve also recently learned to use F3 to edit out some of the space between bubbles a little which makes the clips more useable. You’ll want to take multiple small clips too rather than one big one if possible. It gives you more ability to edit things more easily.
I’ll write another post in a little bit about what I use to combine your pics and clips into a video.
Organizing your pics
The HighRes pics go to your desktop by default and I haven’t found any way to change that so I made my desktop the default place for the other programs too. It forces me to rename them more often and quickly which is a good thing. I changed the default location for the other programs to all go to the desktop too so they’re all in one place rather than having different types in different places.
How you name them is important. The first word of the name should be the main or most important person in the pic followed the name of anyone else in it worth mentioning. Then include a word or two about the activity and also the location. I find those are the things you’ll want to search for. For people I have a lot of pics of I include the month number and date to prevent duplicates. I also started using some category words recently. I name the group of friends because sometimes I want to search within that group. I recently started visiting a new group after Brenda’s collaring and if I search on Holm I can see the 250 pics I have of them no matter who is in them.
I used to file the pics in folder by person. But since I got a new computer with windows 7 which is better at searching I don’t bother. I just make one folder per month because that’s easy to do but also helpful since I often know how long ago something was taken.
This is kind of long and involved and you certainly don’t have to do this much to take some nice pics. But hopefully you can pic up a tip or idea that will help. This is the type of thing nobody teaches you and it can be a lot of fun and help you keep that great IMV feeling.
Check every picture on TinEye.com
One time one of my best friends got a picture from a girl friend and when I checked it on TinEye.com I found out that it was a picture of Sharon Stone. The person who sent it was from outside of the US and didn’t know who she was. They had just picked a pretty smiling picture from Google images not realizing it was a famous movie star in America. They also didn’t realize how easy it was to check pictures now. I have actually done this and found fake pictures several times.
The other thing many people don’t think about is what what this means. If someone, especially a partner, will lie about this and send a fake picture you can’t help but wonder what other things are they lying about. I also believe that the strong majority of fake female pics are put up by guys. Guys are more visually oriented and I kind of think that a girl that’s not happy with her looks won’t put anything up. But guys pick good looking pics because they think that’s more important. This doesn’t mean anything individually but on average I think it’s true.
One last note: Don’t try to be the picture police. They will only attack you for pointing it out because when you can’t argue the issue, you attack the messenger. There are only a few people in here that really hate me. Most of them were caught using fake pics. Ironically I don’t care that much, cause I’m good with guys too. Now that isn’t officially the reason why any of them hate me. But it kind of seems like more than a coincidence too. Hopefully you can just pass on this post and not create any issues. Sometimes you have to live and let live.
My new love Tammy
Isn’t new love the best? It makes the whole world seem wonderful and you sunny. I wanted to share a few pics of my wonderful love, Tammy. It’s only a couple days I know but I feel so awesome I just had to share. You know how that goes when you just can’t think of anything else. I love you Tammy.
Kaitlyn's IMVU Tips 