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.

 

 

 

Picasa Tip: Picasa Web Albums

1. Picasa is free software for managing your photos on your computer.


2. Picasa Web Albums is a free online photo-sharing website.

These two are both made by Google but they are completely separate.  People can upload photos to Picasa Web Albums even if they don't have Picasa on their computers.  And people can use Picasa to manage their photos without ever knowing about Picasa Web Albums.

BUT ...

They work together SO beautifully!

If you want to share your photos by putting them online, you have lots of choices: Flickr, PhotoBucket, Snapfish, Smugmug - to name just a few.  But, using Picasa to upload to Picasa Web Albums is by far the easiest way to do it.  You will need a Google account in order to use Picasa Web Albums.  It is your Google account that identifies your photos as yours.

Picasa Web Albums is located at www.Picasaweb.google.com.  Your web albums will be located at www.Picasaweb.google.com/youraccountname.  If you don't already have a Google account, the easiest way to do that is to sign up for Gmail.  Gmail is Google's free email system.  If you have a gmail account, that is also your Google account.

So ... if you have Picasa and you have a Google account, here's how you upload a photo to Picasa Web Albums:

1. Select the photos you want to upload


2. Click the upload button


3. Review the options: name of web album, visibility of album


4. Click Upload

You're done.  You should be able to go to www.picasaweb.google.com/youraccountname and see these photos.  And, as long as you selected 'Public' in the Visibility option, anyone else in the world can also see your photos at that location.  All you have to tell them is the web address: www.picasaweb.google.com/youraccountname.  If they can't see it, then it's probably because you left the Visibility option set to 'Unlisted.'  Unlisted is the default for that particular option.  See a previous GOT Picasa Tip on how to change the default options.

You can fix that.

While viewing the Web Album in question, click on Edit / Album Properties.  here is where you can change the option for Visibility.



 

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

• Upload Photos to the Web


• Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program


• Embedding Web Album Photos Elsewhere on the Web


• Removing Google Plus to Use Picasa Web Albums

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: Import from Camera

Many people use the software that came with their camera to import pictures to their computers. That's fine. Picasa doesn't care how your pictures get onto your computer. As long as they get saved into a folder that is being watched by Picasa (like your Pictures folder), you will see them next time you open Picasa.

But you can use Picasa to do the import process as well. Then, you don't need the software that came with the camera. As soon as you plug in the cable from your camera to your computer, or insert the camera card into a card-reader in your computer, you should see a screen pop up that looks like this image. (Member Tutorial Video:Import from Camera)

You may have more options. You may even have another pop-up window from your camera's software. You can ignore, or close, any other popups and select 'Copy pictures and view them using Picasa3', as shown in the image at left.

Once you click on 'Copy pictures and view them using Picasa3', you will see the 'Import Tray.'

Can you tell I'm writing this tip right after Valentine's Day?! The roses Jim gave me keep getting prettier every day. I just have to get out the camera and take a few more pictures as they unfold! I even got a little creative and laid my black bathrobe on the ground to make the background go away.

Ok, anyway ... this will take a minute for Picasa to see all the photos. Wait till you see the message 'Copying 15 of 15' - your number will be different - the point is that it has finished getting all of them. Then click on 'Import All.' Now you will see this screen:

If you want these photos to get saved into an existing folder, you just click the Browse button and find the existing folder. If you want to put them into a new folder, you first make sure the 'parent' folder is selected in the 'Location' field, then enter the name of the subfolder you want to create in the top line. Make your choice for what to do with the camera card after the copy, and click 'Finish.' I usually choose the 'Safe Delete.' So, every time I use Picasa to transfer photos from my camera to the computer, the end result is a clean card to put back in my camera.

So now all my photos of the roses show up in Picasa and I can crop, sharpen, make collages and add text. Wanna see the end result?

 



You can do it too --- watch the member tutorial videos. Not a member?  Join now.

• Basic Edits


• Quick Collage


• Adding Text to Pictures


• Picasa’s12 Effects


• 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.

• First Time Picasa Opens – the Scan


• Folder Manager

 

 

 

 

Picasa Tip: To Save or Not to Save

This is so odd. For all of my 25 years teaching computer software, I've repeated over and over again to "Save your work!" "Save often." With most software that is important. But, with Picasa I never use the Save command!

You really don't have to. Picasa remembers everything you've done to a picture. As long as you use Picasa, what you see is what you get. But, if you use another program to view that picture on disk it will see the original photo without Picasa's edits. To use a photo in another program, you must either Save, or Export. I use the Export command to create a new original. Export is the only way I can make the photo a different size as well.

Geeks on Tour Members can view Tutorial Videos on

• Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program


• Resizing Pictures


• Resizing a Batch of Pictures


• Resizing Pictures to Width and Height

Not a member?  Join now.

If you want to use the Save command, let me tell you how it works. I'll use the example of a photo I took of a hay field. I think it would be more artistically pleasing as a black and white, so I use the B&W effect in Picasa, and I see it in Picasa as a B&W photo. But, the original, color photo is still what's on the disk in My Pictures. If I use Powerpoint, for example, and import the Hayfield photo from disk, I'll get the color one.

Edited, how it appears in Picasa

Photo file on disk

You can save your edits to disk by using File | Save, or by right-clicking on the photo and selecting Save. Now the photo file on disk will also be B&W, and therefore, if you use Powerpoint to insert the file, you will get the B&W version.

But, what if you should change your mind sometime and want the color one back? No problem, Picasa won't allow you to lose your original. When you use the Save command, Picasa creates a hidden folder called 'Originals' and puts your original, color photo in there. After you save a photo, Picasa's 'Undo' button will show, "Undo Save." If you click on that, Picasa will retrieve the original from the hidden folder and put it back in the file position.



So, go ahead and Save if you want to! It doesn't hurt anything, you can always 'Undo' the save. It just takes up extra space on your disk for the originals. And, it certainly is less confusing when the pictures on disk are the same as what you see in Picasa!

Picasa even provides a button to save all the edits in any given folder. Look in the upper right corner of any folder in the Library view. In the example below, Picasa tells me it will save the edits on 88 pictures if I just click the 'Save to Disk' button. That would also put 88 originals into the Originals folder.

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


• Ways to Save

 

Picasa Tip: Photos as Wallpaper

Did you know you can take any photo that you see with Picasa and set your desktop background (wallpaper) to that photo?

You know what I'm talking about, right?  The 'wallpaper' or 'desktop background' is what you see when you first start your computer.  In Vista a normal desktop looks like this:



Let's say you have a photo of a flamingo that you'd like to see every time you started your computer - so much more meaningful than what comes with your computer:



Picasa does everything you need.  All you do is view the photo you want, click the Create menu and then Set as Desktop ...

Check it out.  It's done!

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.