Do you take crooked photos?

by Chris Guld, www.Geeksontour.com

I’m always snapping photos out the window of a moving RV, and more often than not they come out looking like this one I snapped this summer as we crossed Lake Champlain into Vermont:







It was such a pretty scene, but this picture is unusable because it’s so crooked (that big orange road marker doesn’t help either!)

Using PIcasa, just click on the straighten tool and you will get a grid of dotted lines and a slider at the bottom. Drag the slider left or right to change the angle of the picture. When the horizon lines up with the grid, click Apply.







And, just a couple more clicks crops out the road marker and makes the sky bluer.







Yes!  That’s more like the scene I saw.

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.

• Basic Edits


• Tuning


• Picasa’s 12 Effects


• Using Special Effects for an artsy-fartsy Miami Skyline

All the details of how to make your pictures look better with Picasa are included in the Geeks on Tour new booklet: Beginner’s Guide to Picasa  Check it out … it could make a great gift for all the amateur photographers on your list!

Overview of Picasa

Overview Presentation of why we like Picasa so much!



Download Video (5.47MB)

Free Picasa Webinar by Google and Geeks on Tour

This Friday, November 13, you can watch a one hour Picasa Seminar on the Web.  Geeks on Tour will be in Mountain View, California to co-host this webinar with Google. 

You can check it out and register for the event by visiting the Picasa Help page. 

Here's the Webinar description:

New to Picasa? Want to learn how to edit and organize your photos? The Picasa team, along with Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour, will be hosting a free webinar tailored to Picasa newcomers. You will learn quick and easy ways to crop, add effects, change the coloring and improve your photos. Following the demo there will be a Q&A portion hosted by the Picasa team and Geeks on Tour. Hope you can join us!

Register for the event

2. Install and Open

Download and install Picasa 3.5 for free from Google.



Download Video (12.67MB)

Backup! Backup! Backup!

by Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour:

I sometimes feel like a broken record, telling people to backup their photos.  Just when I figure that *everyone* has the idea and I can rest, I read something like this post in the Picasa Help Group where someone lost 15,000 photos when their computer crashed.  !?#!!??@!!

How can anyone possibly collect that many pictures without at some point wondering, “What would happen if my computer crashed, or it got stolen, or it fell out of the car, or it burned up in a fire or … “

One of the biggest reasons that I recommend Picasa so highly is that it makes backups SO easy.  First, let me make sure we understand each other with the term ‘Backup.’  It means having a copy of your photos somewhere separate from your computer.  These are for emergency purposes.  I recommend using CD-Rs or DVD-Rs.  I buy the discs in bulk, they come 50 to a spindle.  I make a backup every month, of that month’s photos.  Then I put the backup discs on an old spindle and keep them in a cupboard.  I’ve been backing up photos and other important files this way for over 10 years.  I had occasion to look thru some of the older backup discs the other day, and the pictures were in perfect shape.

Here’s a step-by-step of how you might back up Pictures, using Picasa, for a whole year:

1. Tools, Backup Pictures


2. Click ‘New Set’ give it a name of 2009


3. Check the box next to every folder of pictures in 2009 (that’s easy for me because I store all my pictures in folders by month)


4. Picasa reports that I’ve selected 4,347 files and I’ll need 18 CDs or 3 DVDs.  I choose DVDs ( I use the DVD-R type)


5. Put a DVD in the drive and click ‘Burn’


6. Wait until it completes that DVD.  It will spit it out and display a message requesting the second DVD.  Then it repeats for the third.


7. When it’s all completed, label the disks with a Sharpie marker then take the disks to another computer to test them.  There’s nothing worse than thinking you have good backups and finding out much later (when you need them) that they didn’t process correctly.  When you first put them in the drive, you should be prompted to do a Restore.  You don’t want to restore, you just want to look and see that the pictures are there, so cancel the restore prompt.  What you want to do is ‘Explore’ or ‘Open Folder to View Files.’  If you see that option, just choose it.  If not, you can go to My Computer and right click on the DVD drive, then choose Explore.  You should see a folder called $My Pictures. That’s where all your photos are. (Tutorial Videos:Backup your Photos to CD)

Do it!  Do it now!  Here’s a very short video I made a while back that goes thru the process:

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.

• Backup Monthly to Disk (CD or DVD)


• Backup to External Hard Drive


• Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive


• Moving Folders Among Multiple Hard Drives

 

Dark Photo? Use Fill Light

You will love the fill light slider. Pictures you thought you needed to throw away can be saved. When a photo is dark, just drag the fill light slider (right on the basic fixes tab) towards the right and it will fill it with light!(Tutorial Videos: Basic Edits)



Just drag the slider to the right and it will take you

From this:	To this:
or From this:	To this:

This tip is taken directly from the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Picasa .’

If your original is *really* dark, the fill-light effect will make the photo grainy, reducing the quality.  But, hey!  It can make the difference between a photo that you would just throw out, to one that is viewable!

From this:

To this:

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.

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

• Tuning


• Picasa’s 12 Effects


• Using Special Effects for an artsy-fartsy Miami Skyline

Picasa Tip: A Picasa Plug-In for Live-Writer

This is actually a Picasa tip and a Blogging tip.  Many travelers have blogs (simple, instant, websites used as journals, photo albums, or opinion pages) to share their travels with friends and family.  Two very popular (and free) blogging platforms are Blogger, and Wordpress.  I use them both.  Blogger is the easier of the two.  Microsoft Live also offers a blogging platform on Windows Live and Microsoft offers a blog-writing tool called Live Writer.  See this video on Live Writer(member tutorial video).  The beauty of Live Writer is that it works for all the popular blogging platforms, not just Windows Live.

Although I like Live Writer a lot, I haven’t been using it for my personal blog (on Blogger) because I use a lot of pictures and the pictures come from my Picasa Web Album.  I use Picasa Web Album’s ‘link to this picture’ feature, and it just seems easier to do that while working in Blogger than with Live Writer.

UNTIL …

I discovered the Picasa Web Album plug-in for Live Writer!  How cool!  Now all my Picasa Web Album photos are available to me with just a couple clicks.  I am using Live Writer for all my blog posts now.

If you use Live Writer, you’re familiar with the Insert section of the sidebar.  This contains all the basic tools for creating links, photos, and maps.  If you look at the bottom of the list, you’ll see the option to Add a plug-in.  Click on that and you can spend hours perusing all the possibilities.  The one I’m talking about is called Picasa Image Plugin.  If you don’t see it in browsing around, you can search for Picasa.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you will see ‘Picasa Link…’ in your Insert bar.  Click on that, enter your username and password for your Picasa Web Album, and in a couple seconds, you should see a list of all your albums.

Select the album to work with and you’ll see all the photos.  Adding a photo to your blog is as simple as clicking on the little left arrow next to the photo you want.  The picture will be inserted exactly at the point where your cursor is in your text.

You must be online

In my previous article about Live Writer, I promoted the fact that you can create your blog entries while you are offline.  This is a big reason to use Live Writer for travelers who don’t always have a good Internet connection.  But, to use this Picasa plug-in, you must have an Internet connection to your Web Albums.  You can always use the ‘Insert Picture …’ button to get photos from your My Pictures folder on your computer.  Then Live Writer will upload them to Blogger (or whatever Blog system you’re using.)

If you don’t have a blog now, then just stow this tip away.  The point to learn is that Picasa has gained support from lots of directions.  It’s good to be popular!

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.

• Embedding Web Album Photos Elsewhere on the Web


• Upload Photos to the Web