4. Library View

When you first open Picasa, you're looking at the 'Library View.'  This video gives you a tour of the screen while using the Library View.

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Download .mp4 Video (14.5MB)

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Picasa Tip: Save Edits and Resize with Export

I just read a question from a Picasa user, Joe, who needs to use his photos in a Website. He makes all his edits with Picasa, cropping, fixing red eyes, retouching a spot ... but when his website software uploads the photo from his My Pictures folder, it's the original photo. It still needs the red eyes fixed, it needs to be cropped and it needs to be resized to something a lot smaller than his original photo.

What Joe needs to know about is the Export command. After making all the edits to make the picture(s) look good:

1. Select the photo or photos you want to use on your website
2. Click the Export button at the bottom
3. Choose or create the receiving folder - e.g. My Pictures\Website photos
4. Choose a size (I use 400 pixels for most web photos)
5. Click OK

Now when you use the website software to upload your photos, upload the ones in the \Website photos\ folder instead of the original folder.

There are a couple of videos in the classroom at GeeksOnTour.com on using Picasa to prepare photos for websites. You need to be a member to view them in their entirety, but here's a 30 second preview of one:


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You have a Digital Camera ... Now What?

Aren't digital cameras wonderful? You never have to worry about running out of film (just battery :-) )You never have to wonder, "Is that picture going to come out?" because you can look at the preview. And, you don't have to pay for processing. But you *do* have to learn a little about what to do with the photos after you take them.

Emailing Photos with Picasa

Have you ever opened a photo attached to an email and found yourself staring at a person’s eyeball taking up the entire screen? That’s what happens if the person sending the photo doesn’t know about resizing it first. That is, if you receive the photo at all! It may be so big that your email inbox simply rejects it.

Here’s a photo of my motorhome as you would see it if I emailed it to you full-size. This is how it would appear in many programs - then you would need to scroll around to see the entire photo. This photo would be taking up a lot of space in your inbox as well - 2.7 megabytes to be exact. And, if you have a mailbox that is limited to 10 megabytes, it would fill up real quick, and any further mail would be rejected.



There lots of ways to send photos with email and resize them first. Picasa is my favorite. You simply select the photo (or photos) you want to send, click the email button, and Picasa does all the rest. Watch the quick video below to see how.

 

Chris Guld
www.GeeksOnTour.com

Organizing with Sortable Dates

Renaming Photos with Sortable Dates
Watch Video

This tip comes from my photo filing system that I've developed over the years. Filing systems are very personal. If you've devised a system that works for you - that's cool - no need to change. But, if you haven't ... read on.

Making a date 'sortable'
I'm very date-oriented and I like my pictures to be in date order regardless of what program I'm using or what device they are being seen on. I get lots of emails about wanting photos to play in date order when a Gift CD is played on a TV. Usually, the TV is just going to play them in order by the filenames. Filename is often used for sorting whether you want it to or not, so why not have the filename be a sortable date?

Notice that each file in the right column starts with 8 digits. This is the only way to represent the date that sorts properly. Spelling out the date will result in all the April's being sorted together, regardless of what day or year. Using standard 4-21-2008 type of date notation will produce equally erroneous results. The 8 digits that sort properly are referred to as yyyymmdd. That means the first 4 digits represent the year, the next two are the month, and the last two represent the day.

Using Picasa to rename files
In Picasa, you can accomplish this by selecting all the photos that you want to rename to a particular date, press F2, and type the appropriate 8 digits. Picasa knows that no two files can have the exact same name and it will add a -1, -2, -3 etc. to the end. That's OK. As long as the first 8 characters of the filename are a sortable date, these photos will automatically be kept in date order, regardless of what program you are using to view them.

Realize that you cannot add a prefix number to filenames when you rename. Therefore, I rename photos immediately after importing them from the camera. So, at the very least all my photos have a filename that means the date it was taken. Then, if you want words after the date, you can add them later. See the Picasa Show-Me-How video, "Renaming photos with a sortable date."

Date-based folders
I also like to group my photos together by month, so each month I create a folder named with the corresponding 6 digits: 200802, 200803, 200804 etc. This makes it especially easy to keep track of backups. At the end of each month, I create a backup of that month's folder.

I used to create a folder for a year, then have subfolders for each month: January, February, etc. However, in Picasa, if you sort by name - you would end up seeing all the April folders, then all the August folders regardless of year. Using the sortable date system for my folders works much better.

Show-Me-How video tutorial: It's a lot easier to show you what I mean than to explain it all in writing. Check out the new video on Picasa and Sortable Dates.

Sharpening Photos with Picasa

Can you see the difference between the photo on the left, and the one on the right? The one on the left is the original. The one on the right has been 'sharpened' by Picasa. In Picasa, you double-click on the photo you want, then, in the left column of Editing commands, click on 'effects'. Sharpen is the first one. Each time you click it, it gets 'sharper.' Once is usually enough - I clicked this one twice to be sure you can see the difference.

The first picture is not out of focus. I took it with my Canon Digital SLR camera. It's a very good camera, with a very good lens. It's a fact of digital photography that, where two different colors come together, it blends them slightly, giving it a soft look. The 'sharpen' command finds those 'edges' and increases the contrast. I find that every photo can benefit from one click of the sharpen effect, so here's the real kicker: in Picasa, if you click on the Picture menu and then 'Batch Edit', you can sharpen all selected photos at once! If you decide you don't like this effect on any given picture, you can always 'undo' it!

For a video that shows how to do this, go to the Picasa tutorial page and click on 'Improving Photos.'

Congratulations on your eBook Purchase!

Thanks for buying the Picasa for Beginners eBook.

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Download Beginner's Guide to Picasa 3.9 

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