Picasa Tip: Make a Movie

Picasa 3 has a very easy way to take a bunch of photos, add a song you like, and create a movie.  All you do is select the photos you want in the movie and click the Movie button at the bottom of the screen.  Once in the ‘Movie Maker’ you can add a song from your computer’s music library.  It will even time the playback of the photos to match the length of the song.  You can also choose among several choices for the transition between photos.  Pan and Zoom is the default transition.



Show-Me-How Videos:

• Tutorial Videos Make a Movie


• Tutorial Videos: Movie Files from your Camera


• Tutorial Videos:39.Record a Movie from your Webcam

 

This is different from Picasa’s slideshow feature in that the end result is a single file – a .wmv movie file.  Once the movie is created, you can upload it to your Picasa Web Album, or better yet, to Youtube.  It’s a single click to create movie and upload to Youtube.  You must already have a Youtube account.  The .wmv file will playback on any computer with Windows Media Player.  If you want to play it on a TV’s DVD player, you need one more step.  In Vista there is a DVDMaker that comes with Windows.  Just open that up and add your .wmv file to it – then burn DVD.  If you’re on XP, you need some other software like MyDVD from Roxio. For Macintosh, I believe iDVD will do the trick.

The movie maker capability in Picasa is very basic.  For example, if you would like one song for the first 10 slides and another song for the remaining slides – it can’t do it – one song per movie … period.  Our favorite *free* program for making fancier slide show movies is Photo Story 3. (Tutorial video: download and install Photo Story 3).  It allows for many different songs on the sound track.  It will even create the music for you and make it end at the right place.  You can also add narration.

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.

Show-Me-How Videos about photo story:

• Download and Install Photo Story 3


• Make a Quick Movie


• Adding Narration


• Adding Music

 

 

Resizing Photo Files

When you email a photo using Picasa, the file is resized to something that is compatible with email.  Same thing when you upload a picture to a Web Album, the file is automatically resized to something appropriate for uploading to the web. (Member Tutorial Video: Upload Photos to the Web)

What if you just need photos resized for including in some other program?  Powerpoint, or Word, for example. You use the Export button for that.  Just select the picture, or pictures (as many as you want), that you want to resize and click the Export button.  You will have the option to specify a location and a size for the exported pictures.(Member Tutorial Video: Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program)

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

• Resizing Picture


• Resizing a Batch of Pictures


• Resizing Pictures to Width and Height

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

 

 

 

Picasa Tip: Search by Color

Maybe you need a nice flower, or scenic photo with lots of yellow to print on a birthday card. Or maybe you're looking for that great photo of Aunt Louise when she was wearing the bright purple dress.  Or, you're looking for that RED sunset that you took before you started using captions for identification?

Just click in the search box and type
color: red



When I search for Red, I get some flowers.  I also get a red car, red lobster, and red tshirt.  I don't know exactly how it does it, but you can see where it gets its color information by looking at the histogram.  That's the little multicolored propeller cap button in the lower right when a picture is being viewed in single-picture view.


I don't need this feature often, but it sure is cool when I do!  If you'd like to learn a bit more about histograms - a good starting point is this About.com article on Histograms.

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.

• Searching for Pictures


• Using Search to Create a Temporary Album

 

Storing Pictures on an External Hard Drive

I’ve written about this before, in Moving Folders to an External Hard Drive.  There is also a Geeks on Tour video: (Member Tutorial Video: Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive)

I wanted to talk about it again because I don’t think people realize just how useful, important and easy it is to store photos on an external hard drive and use them in Picasa.  I have over 20,000 pictures that I’ve taken in our RV travels since 2004 and I love being able to browse thru all of them.  In Picasa I can search for ‘Odie’ and see photos of our dog throughout all the years.  Or I can make an album of photos from Austin, Texas which includes every time we’ve visited (2004, 06, 08 & 09.)  Picasa can make this album because it has access to all my photos.

But, those 20,000 photos take up a bit over 50 Gigabytes of hard drive space. On a 200 GB hard drive, that means that my photos would take up 1/4 of all the space available.  If that was the main thing on my computer it would be OK, but I need the space for lots of other stuff as well.  So, all the pictures more than a couple year’s old are stored on the external hard drive – a Western Digital ‘Passport’ drive which I have designated as drive letter P:

The screen shot below is what it looks like in Picasa.  I can’t even tell which folders are on my computer and which are on the Passport when I’m in flat folder view.  All 20,000 photos are in the library, they’re searchable, and they’re available for Albums, emailing, uploading, printing etc.



If you switch to Tree Structure view, you can see that the 200612 folder is indeed on the P: drive.



Here’s my system: Whenever I take pictures, I copy them from the camera to the computer into a folder for the current month.  All my pictures are in folders by month that they were taken.  I keep a year or two on my computer.  When I want to move some over to the USB Hard drive, I use Picasa to do it.  It moves the whole folder off of my computer and onto the external hard drive.  Using Picasa to make the move means that it keeps track of the new location for all the photos, this maintains their placement in any folders.

Works great!

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.

• Tree Folder Structure


• Backup to External Hard Drive


• Moving Folders Among Multiple Hard Drives


• Using Albums for Organizing


• Import from Camera

 

 

Picasa Tip: Download photos from a Web Album

Do you have photos you want to share with others?  If so, Picasa Web Albums is the best way to go.  Maybe you currently use email to send photos to your friends.  Do you ever wonder if you’re sending them more than they want?  How about letting them view all your pictures, then they can download any that they really want?  That’s what Picasa Web Albums allows you to do.

I belong to a club where one person takes all the photos for the club and uploads them to the club’s Picasa Web Album.  Then, any member of the club, can visit the Web Album and look at the pictures.  If I see a picture I want to have for my own, maybe a nice photo of me, I can download that photo to my computer.



You can download a single photo, or an entire album.  Just go to the album in question and look for the ‘Download’ button at the top.  If you’re viewing a single photo, you will see ‘Download photo’ as the only option.  If you’re viewing an album, the download command will download the entire album to your computer.  You’ll see a couple of prompts that you need to approve, then finally, click on Download.

If you don’t see these options, it means that the owner of the album has disabled it.

 

Once you successfully download the photos … where are they?  You don’t get an option of what folder you want them in.  It automatically puts them in My Pictures/Downloaded Albums/nameofalbum.  You’ll see them in a special collection in Picasa under all your folders called Downloaded Albums, or Web Albums.

What if you are the owner of the album and you don’t want people to be able to  download your pictures?  That’s a setting.  If you visit your web albums and make sure you’re logged in, you should see a link called Settings in the upper right.  Click on that, and then on Privacy and Permissions.  You’ll see lots of options, we’re talking about allowing visitors to download your photos.  If you want to allow it, make sure the option is checked, if not, make it unchecked.  Then make sure to click on Save Changes.



This will take effect right away.  So, you can even allow a visitor to download just for a few minutes then turn it back off again.  This is an easy way to give family or a friend all your photos

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 to Facebook

If you have a Facebook page - you may want to upload photos from Picasa to Facebook.

The long way is to prepare your photos in Picasa and Export them to a separate folder.  Then, using Facebook's upload utility, you can select all the photos in that folder.
see Video: Member Tutorial Video: Exporting Pictures for Use in AnotherProgram

The short way is to download a third party tool called Picasa Uploader.  The purpose of this program is to add a button to the bottom row of buttons in Picasa.  It is a Facebook button and it will work like all the others.  Simply select the photos you want to upload to Facebook, click the facebook button, and follow the prompts.

 


Here's the step-by-step: Go to the  Picasa Uploader page, and click on the big button to Install Now.'  Follow the prompts and click 'Allow' or 'Yes' or 'Ok' for any messages that come up.  Shortly you should see the 'Configure Buttons' screen.  Click on the Facebook Button and click 'Add>>



When you click OK, you should see the Facebook button at the bottom of your screen with all the other Picasa buttons.  To get back to that 'Configure Buttons' screen in order to add, remove, or rearrange your buttons, click on the Tools menu and 'Configure buttons.'

So, for example, if you don't have enough screen room for all of them, you might want to remove the BlogThis! button (I never use that one because it limits me to 4 pictures). To change the order of the buttons, click on a button to move, then click on the Move Up or Move Down button.  To clean up the buttons and return to basic Picasa, click on 'Reset to Defaults.'

Now you should have a Facebook button at the bottom of your Picasa screen.  To upload photos to Facebook, simply select them and click that button!



The first time you do this, you will need to log in with your Facebook username and password.  Then you should see a screen where you can specify an existing Facebook album, or make a new one.  You can also specify whether the album should be private or public.



The final step is to 'Approve' all your photos.  Be sure they are all selected, then click 'Approve Selected Photos.'



If you've ever tried to use Facebook's album feature, you can appreciate how much easier this is!  Although I'm not a big fan of Facebook, so many people use it, that it's become almost a necessity.  The connections that are made on Facebook just by the sheer volume of people who use it are quite impressive.

With this great plug-in tool, at least the photo album part of Facebook has become *very* easy.  The Picasa Facebook button takes care of resizing your photos appropriately, it also keeps your Picasa caption and displays it on the Facebook album.  This button works on both Windows and Macintosh versions of Picasa.

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 video.  Not a member?  Join now.

• Where’d the Buttons Go?