Moving Folders with Picasa

As you collect more and more digital photos, you will love the USB external hard drives available today.  And, as you keep collecting even more and more again, you’ll love that the USB hard drives are getting bigger and bigger.  But how much of a hassle is it going to be to move your files from the old hard drive to the new one?



I just love having *all* my pictures available for browsing.  We’ve taken at least 20,000 during our RV travels over the last 6 years.  And, I have several thousand from the years before RVing.  I can browse thru all 28,000 of them from my Picasa Library.  I keep the last couple years on my laptop, and the rest are on my Passport 250 GB USB hard drive.  That drive is getting full.

Did you know that you can buy a 500 GB USB hard drive for under $100?  Amazing.  So, we got one.  And, I wanted to move all the pictures from the 250 to the new 500.  But, I wanted to be sure I didn’t lose all the album designations I had built.  To do that, I needed to use Picasa to make the moves.

If you use Picasa’s ‘Tree View’, you can see what drive stores the photos. (Tutorial Video: Tree Folder Structure)

 

 



Then you can right click on the folder to be moved and choose ‘Move Folder …’  Choose a folder from the other hard drive and click OK.  Picasa takes care of all the rest.



Picasa can be like a central control room for pictures on all your drives.  I recorded a tutorial video as I accomplished this move.  It’s a little bit advanced, and it’s a little long (8 minutes.)  But, If you are managing thousands of pictures on multiple drives, I think you’ll like it!



 

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.

• Folders and Folder Collection


• Folder Manager


• Backup to External Hard Drive


• Moving Folders Among Multiple Hard Drives


• Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive

Better Pictures

There’s all sorts of reasons why I think that Picasa is the best photo management program for the majority of people taking digital pictures.  Number one is the fact that it handles 90% of all the tasks involved with digital photos – you only need to learn one program instead of 5 different programs for 5 different tasks.  But, a very close second is that it is so easy to make your pictures look better.  I love looking at photos of our travels, but not the photos I snapped.  I like looking at them after they have been improved with Picasa.  And it only takes a couple seconds with each one.

This is the photo I snapped from the window while Jim drove the motorhome down I-95 at 60 mph:



But, this is the photo I enjoy looking at – and it’s how I actually remember seeing the scene.  It’s a real trick to get the camera to capture what the eye is seeing



The first one is ho-hum.  The second one is dreamy.

It literally only took a few seconds to click on:

1. I’m Feeling Lucky(Tutorial Videos: Basic Edits)


2. Straighten (Tutorial Videos: Basic Edits)


3. Sharpen (Tutorial Videos:Picasa’s 12 Effects)


4. Increase saturation (Tutorial Videos:Tuning)


5. Apply a blue graduated tint to the sky (Tutorial Videos:Picasa’s 12 Effects)


6. Crop (Tutorial Videos:Crop Size Options)

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.

• How Picasa Handles Edits


• Adding Text to Pictures


• Editing Tip – Cut thru the Haze


• Using Special Effects for an artsy-fartsy Miami Skyline

Professional Prints

Today’s inkjet printers do a pretty good job of printing photos, but you’ll still get better results from a professional processor.  They’ll be printed on good photo-quality paper with a photographic process that lasts longer than ink.  You can order them from a nearby store and pick them up in an hour, or ask that they be mailed to you.  You can even ask that they be mailed to someone else – and maybe framed as a gift!

Picasa makes it so simple to order prints, and the cost is so cheap (9-10 cents per 4X6), my bet is that you spend more on ink that you will ordering prints online.

Your choice of vendors

All you do is select the photos you want printed, then click the ‘Shop’ button at the bottom of Picasa’s screen.  You will have your pick of several online photo processors.  The links below will take you to their websites so you can compare.  When you click on one of these links after clicking on ‘Shop’ in Picasa – you will need to set up an account and your photos will be uploaded to that store.

Research which vendor you want to use with these links, but use the Picasa screen when you’re ready to order:
Walmart | Lifepics | Fotoflot | Winkflash | PhotoWorks | Photogize | Zazzle | PhotoStamps | Foto.com | Shutterfly | CVS | RitzPics | Kodak Gallery | SnapFish | SnapTotes

Easy as 1-2-3

Here’s how you do it:

1. In Picasa: Select the photos you want to print and click the ‘Shop’ button
   


2. Select your vendor and click the ‘Choose’ button.  You will need to login to your account with that vendor – or create an account if this is your first time.  Your photos will begin uploading at this point.  For prints, you want the highest resolution possible, so this part can take some time.


3. You should now be on the vendor’s site and you need to make your selections, type of paper (glossy or matte) size of print, quantity etc.  You can even order the photos printed on coffee mugs, or mouse pads, or t-shirts!  When you’re done, you check out and pay with a credit card. You can also specify whether to have the pictures mailed to you, or, if there is a nearby location for the store, you can choose to pick them up.

That’s it!

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 3.5 Import Screen

The latest upgrade to Picasa came out on September 23. They're calling it 3.5. The biggest change is in the 'Import Photos' screen. In the prior version, Import was on 2 screens; first you selected what you wanted to import (All, or Selected, Exclude duplicates or not) then the next screen asked where you wanted them - the folder specification. In Picasa 3.5 it's all on one screen. So, you have to specify the target folder before you click 'Import All' or 'Import Selected.' (Tutorial Videos: Import from Camera)

Notice in the screenshot below the Import From, Exclude Duplicates and Progress note are in the upper left. Everything else is at the bottom. Your procedure, therefore, goes from top, to bottom - then left to right.



A couple things to notice:

• Picasa creates a folder name for you with the current date (2009-10-05 above.) You don't have to accept that - and you probably shouldn't. You can delete 2009-10-05 and type anything there that you want. I usually put all pictures in a folder for the month, so I put 200910 in that place. In the older version, it would remember the folder name where I put the last imported batch of pictures - I could just select 200910 from a dropdown list. It doesn't seem to do that anymore, but I can just type it in again and the pictures all go to the same place.


• There is a new option to 'Upload.' This means that you can upload to your web albums at the same time that you import to your pictures on your computer. I would never do that, because I like to look at the pictures and do a little editing before uploading.

 

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.

• Upload Photos to the Web


• Import Pictures from an Android Smartphone