Over the years I’ve grown facial hair and I’ve shaved facial hair. Never though have I achieved such magnificence.

Via Salon:

Franz Mitterhauser of Austria, Juergen Burkhard of Germany and Herve Diebolt of France, from left, pose for photographers during the European Beard Championships in Leogang, Austria, Saturday. The were prize winners in the category of chin-beard and mutton-chops imperial. More than 150 competitors took part in 17 categories to win prizes for the most attractive, fancy and eccentric beard.

• the amount of crap a six person family collects over 40 years astounds;
• reviewing 40 years of memories is an amazing thing.

My father watches as I sit among photos. “Isn’t there a way to just digitize these,” he finally asks, “and give everyone a way to browse through them?”

I’ll sidestep many things to get to an answer. Among them, scanning and digitizing, external hard drives for back up, naming conventions, tagging strategies, creating physical books, privacy issues and a variety of Web services that make much of that possible.

We’ll look at those particulars another day. Today, as I sit among photos, I offer two services that help you share. The first, I think, is mostly unknown. It’s called Issuu and we can use it to create a flippy book  that behaves more or less like what you see here.

Issuu is basically a PDF reader on steroids. That is, if you upload a PDF to the service, it converts it to Flash and creates something along the lines of what you see above. If you mouse over the center of the of image you’ll be presented with a “full screen” option. This will give you a better sense of what Issuu can do and how it behaves.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I once did called Subway.

Overall layout is handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, if you have a Mac you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I “printed” the book as a PDF, uploaded it and what you see above is the result. Pretty cool.

While having a Mac is very nice you don’t need anything of the sort to accomplish this. PowerPoint lets you create a nicely designed photo show. So too Open Office and Neo Office, free and open source alternatives to the Microsoft suite of office applications. The key is exporting your final creation as a PDF. Issuu takes care of the rest.

The service works on a freemium business model, meaning that you can create what you want for free if you don’t mind ad support. Creating ad free documents will cost you about $19 a month.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content.

The comparison here is a little bit apples and robots though because Flickr only shows images we’ve uploaded. The service doesn’t allow for a predetermined, PDF layout.

This isn’t a bad thing. Instead, it’s simply a neutral observation that unlike Issuu, Flickr slide shows deal strictly with the photos that are uploaded to it.

When choosing between such services, decide how much work you’re willing to do on our own, and how much you’d like done for you.

Results will reflect back upon you either way. Fortunately, both solutions score high on any objective awesome scale and families tend to be generous critics.

Above, the Emir of Kano, Nigera, Ado Bayero (center), surrounded by his traditional palace guards, rides on a horse after prayers to mark the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in Kano, Nigeria on November 27, 2009. via Boston.com

I started playing with Issuu to see what it can and could do. It’s basically a PDF Reader on steroids. If you click the “full screen” icon above, you’ll see what I mean.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I began last September called Subway.

The layout of the images was handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I went to print it as a PDF, saved and uploaded, and what you have above is the result. Pretty cool.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content. It’s a little bit of an apple and robots comparison though because Flickr is just showing us the images. They aren’t laid out like in the PDF.

Now, why actual publications are using Issuu is a bit confusing. It’s not intuitive, doesn’t lead to further content exploration and basically blows aside from the cool factor of having flippy pages.

Or put another way, I think it works well for graphics and images but if you visit Issuu and start exploring, you’ll see a number of magazines that are are print heavy using the platform. Unfortunately, these text heavy publications just don’t work on the platform. It becomes an interface pain in the yahoodle as you zoom in, out and over to read things.

My intuition is that designers are pushing organizations towards it because they can maintain their layouts. But as far as usability goes, this isn’t what we should be focusing on.

Instead, it’s a neat trick to play with our friends and family.