Question from a Geeks on Tour member: I made a web album from a recent holiday, gave pics a descriptive title. eg Florence, Petra etc. Now they are out of chronological order. I have used right click to go and request they go back to Ascending Date order, but nothing happens.
Picasa Web Albums has it’s own procedure for sorting pictures in an album. To put a web album into date order, follow these steps:
Open the Web Album in question. Be sure you are logged in to your google account (you should see your gmail address on the top line of the web album.)
Click 'Edit' then Organize and Reorder
You should see an option top-middle to 'Sort photos by ...' click on that drop down arrow and choose date
Click Done (upper left)
You can also drag pictures around in this view. When you click ‘Done’ they will stay in whatever order you left them.
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Picasa makes it very easy to email your photos. It even takes care of resizing the pictures appropriately. All you have to do is select the picture(s) you want to send and click the Email button. If you use this technique you are also guaranteed that your recipient will see the picture as it looks in Picasa – with all your edits applied.
Gmail is the best way to send
You must already have an email program. Picasa doesn’t actually perform the emailing for you – it just prepares the photos for attaching, then opens your email program. All you have to do is address it and click Send. Picasa can use your default email program installed on your computer – like Outlook, or Eudora, or Thunderbird. If you don’t have an email program on your computer, you need to use Gmail.
Gmail is free and easy – and you know it will work well with Picasa since it is also part of the Google family of software. The only objection I hear from users is that they don’t want to use a gmail address. Everyone knows them at another address (e.g. JoeSmith@juno.com) that they’ve used for years and they don’t want to change.
You don’t need to change your email address!
Gmail has a cool feature called ‘Custom From Address.’ So, using Joe Smith’s example above, he can have a Gmail address called JoeSmith123@gmail.com. But he can change the settings in Gmail so that all mail that is sent is From JoeSmith@juno.com. You must of course prove to Gmail that you own the other address, and follow the Custom From Address instructions to set it up. Make sure to assign the ‘Default’ designation to the address that you want to be used most often.
You can set up Gmail to send and/or receive from many different email addresses. I have my account set up to reply to messages using whatever address was used in the original email. So if you send an email to me@xyz.com and I reply, the reply will be From me@xyz.com. If I send a new email, it will be From whatever address I have set up as the Default. Even though I use Gmail for all my email, you will almost never see an email from me@gmail.com.
Juno, AOL, MSN, Earthlink, Yahoo
I get a lot of questions about problems using Picasa to send email with the above accounts. Although I do know that people have been able to configure their Default Email to work successfully with them, it is a lot of trouble, and a subsequent upgrade to Picasa, or the email software, or your browser, can render it useless. I say don’t bother! Just get a free Gmail account and set it up to use your other address as the default ‘From’ address.
Use Picasa Web Albums
Of course, the best solution is not to email pictures at all but to upload them to your Picasa Web Albums instead. Then just email your friends to go look at them there
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.
First, just what is geotagging? It’s attaching the lattitude and longitude coordinates to a picture, a .jpg file, so it can be placed on a map in the location where it was taken. When a photo is geotagged, these coordinates are part of the ‘metadata’ embedded in the file itself, just like the date and time where it was taken.
Picasa displays Geotagged pictures in ‘Places’
In the screenshot of Picasa below, you can tell which pictures have been geotagged by the little red balloon icon in the lower right of the picture. If you open up the ‘Places’ pane, you will see the markers on the map. Click on a marker, and you’ll see the picture.
We all take for granted that the date and time of a photo is stored with the photo. Someday (soon) we will also take for granted that the place of a photo is also automatically stored with the picture.
Manual Geotagging
In previous articles I’ve written about how you can manually geotag a photo. They’ve, made it pretty easy, but it’s still something that takes a bit of time and thought. For me, I’m just too lazy to make the effort. But, if it can be done automatically, now that’s a different story! I’d love to be able to see all my travel pictures pinned to the spot on the map where they were taken. And, now I can as long as I take the picture with my Droid cell phone.
How Droid does Geotagging
I have the Motorola Droid cellphone from Verizon. Other devices have this capability, but Droid is what I know. You see, in addition to being a phone, and a camera, the Droid is also a GPS receiver. It knows exactly where it is, so it can stamp the pictures taken with that information if you turn the setting on.
You’ll find the setting on the camera app. Touch the menu option: then ‘Settings’ and finally ‘Store Location’ and touch ‘Yes.’ From now on, when you take a picture with the Droid, it will include the location. When you import that onto your computer and view it with Picasa, you will see the little red balloon and, if you open the Places pane, you’ll see the picture in place. Here’s a little video:
I’ve even been known to snap a photo at a location when I’m not really taking it for the picture, I’m just taking it for the location. I can later use that picture on the map to navigate back to the same spot.
Other methods to Auto-Geotag
The Droid isn’t the only device that will auto-geotag photos. Other cell phone/cameras have a similar capability and you can also buy SD cards to Geotag. If you use any of these methods, please leave a comment and tell us about 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.
A friend of mine, had her house severely damaged in the recent floods in Tennessee. The house has now been cleaned and gutted and they will spend many months putting it back together. To help the construction workers in putting shelves etc. back in her desired places, she decided to go thru all her pictures from the last few years and collect appropriate photos of each room. She then wanted to put all those pictures onto CD to take to a printer to create a large format print to be tacked to the wall in each room.
Pictures in an Album
All the pictures were organized into a Picasa album, but how does she burn them to CD? She couldn’t find any command to ‘Burn to CD’ or ‘Copy to Disk.’ When she tried to Export and specified the DVD drive, she got an error message, “The Destination Directory could not be Created.”
She was afraid that she had to use Windows and find all the pictures all over again, copying them to CD as she went. She could have exported the album to another folder, then used Windows to burn that folder to CD. But Picasa can do the entire job, if you know where to look.
Two Choices
Picasa actually makes it very easy to copy pictures to disk, but you won’t find it listed in quite the way you might expect, so a lot of people miss it. There are two ways to copy files to disk and both are available on the main menu.
Backup (Tools menu, Backup Pictures) Just click on the desired album and then Tools, Backup Pictures. Click ‘New Set’ and give it a name. This will copy the original pictures *and* all Picasa edits
Gift CD (Create menu, Create a Gift CD) Same start – select the desired album, then choose Create, Create a Gif CD, and Picasa will burn your edited pictures to the CD or DVD in your drive.
Picasa will complete the entire job for you, burning the CD or DVD. The only difference is that, with Backup, you’ll have your original pictures plus any edits. To see the photos as edited, you would need to restore and work with the photos using Picasa. Using the Gift CD method, the .jpg files on the disk will be the edited versions – just as if you Exported them.
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.
