Picasa Tip: Outdoor-Indoor Collage

When you think of a collage, most people think of a bunch of photos strewn about on a page. I want to use Picasa's background feature to make you think of other ideas. Here's a collage I did of our motorhome. Click on it for a larger version - then click your Back button to return.


Seems to me this would be great for pictures of a house for sale - as one example. So, how did I do it? First, you select the two pictures, then click on the collage button at the bottom. Choose Picture Pile as the top level setting. Under Background options, select Use Image. You can also use the tabs above the collage itself to select an image and Set As Background.


Now, you probably have the background photo also in the foreground. Just select it and click on the Remove button at the top. The remaining image looks best, I think, with a white border to set it apart. Just click on it and click the Picture border option in the middle.

You're done, Create your collage.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

• Quick Collage


• Collage Tip – Framing a Picture

 

Picasa Tip: Flipping Photos

Someone recently told me that he had some old slides scanned and some of them came out backwards. Think of a photo like:



It's kind of useless like that! He asked me if Picasa could flip the photo so it would read correctly. I thought a minute about how a click of the clockwise arrow would rotate a picture 180 degrees, but I couldn't think of how Picasa could actually flip a picture so that mirrored text would read correctly.

Fast forward a couple days, and we're here at a big RV rally giving our Picasa seminar with over 500 people!! One attendee, Frank Geister, came up to me later and said, "Let me show you something cool I've discovered about Picasa and collages ...." It was a cool tip, and I might share that with you in a future post, but what really excited me was in our continued conversation he mentioned a keyboard shortcut for 'Flipping' a photo. I asked him to demonstrate that one!

All you do is click on the picture (either single click, or double-click) and hold down the Ctrl, Shift and hit the H key ... Ctrl-Shift-H ... is the command to Flip Horizontal (Command Shift H on Mac). Here's the result:



And, check out the list of all the keyboard shortcuts for Picasa.

THANKS Frank! I wish I knew who it was that asked me the question in the first place :-( Maybe he'll read this post!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

 

 

Picasa Tip: Fill-in Preprinted Forms

One of our Geeks on Tour members recently posted a question in our forum about scanning a preprinted form.  A past Picasa tip explains how you can scan things just using your scanner and Picasa - no scanner software to learn.  This member needed to scan a preprinted form and she was disappointed that she couldn't bring it into Word and fill in the blanks.

I started explaining to her that you can't scan a form and then fill it in unless you were using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and that would be a lot more work.  She would either have to handwrite in the blanks, or find an old typewriter somewhere.

Then I got to thinking ... 'If it was just one fill in the blank, I'd try doing it with Picasa's text tool!' (Member Tutorial Video: Adding Text to Pictures)

So, for the fun of it, I scanned a form I had from a doctor's office and tried using Picasa to fill out the first blank.  Here's the blank form after scanning it and viewing with Picasa:



It was pretty easy to use the text tool, size and position today's date to fill in the first blank.  I assumed that you could only use Picasa's text tool once per picture.  I was ecstatically wrong!

Just click apply after filling in each blank and you can then click the text tool and start over for the next blank.

OMG that was soo easy!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

 

 

Picasa Tip: How folders get Dated

Every folder of your photos that you see in Picasa has a date attached to it:

Where does that date come from?

When you import pictures using Picasa, the folder it creates will be dated according to the earliest date of the photos it contains. So, if your photos have the following dates:

Folders are Dated by the earliest photo
The folder above will be dated 4/30/2006. Notice in this example that most of the photos were from August. If you're looking for this folder to be sorted with others taken in August, you won't find it because it will be lower in your list, along with others from April.

I have one folder of pictures taken in June of 2008 that I thought had been completely lost. I was afraid I had mistakenly deleted them all! I finally found them at the bottom of my list because the folder was dated 1/1/2000. Huh?! Come to find out there was one photo in the group that I had taken with another camera. That camera had, apparently, never had it's date set - so the photo was saved as having been taken on the default camera date of 1/1/2000.

You can change the date on the folder
Once you find a folder with a wrong date, it's easy to fix. Just double-click on the folder's name, and you'll get a screen where you can type in any date you want:



 

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch these tutorial videos and learn a lot more about Folders in Picasa.Not a member?  Join now.

• Folders and Folder Collection


• Folder Manager


• Library View


• Tree Folder Structure


• Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.