Sharing Second Life Pictures

Linden Lab announced today the availability of a Project Viewer with an enhanced snapshot feature that allows users to share pictures directly from Second Life to the Flickr photo service and the Twitter microblog service. The shared images can be formatted much like snapshots shared to disk or to MySecondLife.com (MySL), but with some differences.

All three third party service share panes. Yes, you can do it.

• All pictures shared on Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter can use a new filters option. Examples of these can be found on my Flickr stream  in the SL Filter Tests set. Filters cannot be applied to other snapshots.
• If a picture is shared via one of these third party services, the Share pane closes and must be re-opened for each additional shared image. This is not the case with images shared to MySL saved to your Inventory or computer's hard drive.
• Available image formats will vary. All options allow the Current Window to be shared, but only [640 x 480]. [1024 x 768], and [800 x 600] size images can be shared to Flickr or Twitter. Facebook image size options include [1200 x 630], too.
• The Upload to Flickr pane will remember tags from previous photos and your filter choice plus the image size, but not the image title or description. Not being a Facebook member nor a Tweeter, I don't know if these share panes behave the same way or not.

As a Flickr user I certainly welcome this new option but I'm sorely tempted to try using the JIRA to recommend some changes, particularly about keeping the Upload to Flickr pane open between shots. And I love the idea of user-created filters (see here) that can be shared with other users. I'll never be smart enough to learn the programming necessary to do it unless the process to "hardwire" the code in is changed to something akin to Windlight adjustments, but it is exciting nonetheless.

Now, can Instagram or Vine be far away? What about Foursquare check-ins?