I love Picasa’s Album feature. I use albums to create groups of pictures for my every whim. Want to see my best flower pictures? I make an album to collect all my best flower pictures from over 20,000 pictures in my library. How about pictures of RVing in Florida? We’ve been living in our RV for over 8 years now and roughly 1/3 of that time has been in Florida – so we have lots of great photos for that.
With albums, Picasa creates these groups for me without copying the pictures. (Tutorial Video: Using Albums for Organizing) It’s a wonderful organizational tool, but it has one flaw … it only exists in Picasa. So, if I should decide to switch to some other program, I would lose my album groupings. Or, if something gets corrupted in my Picasa installation, it is possible I would lose my album groupings. Not the pictures themselves – they’re still there – just the groupings called ‘Albums’ in Picasa.
Because of this, I’ve started using Tags much more extensively. Tags are a way to attach an identifier to the picture itself. (Tutorial Video: Using Tags aka Keywords)They are part of the EXIF data of the .jpg file, so Tags can be used by many programs, not just Picasa.
Also, in Picasa, if you ever lose your album, they can be recreated from tags. So, for example, I have an album called Florida RVing. I can select all the pictures in that album and apply a tag Florida RVing. Now I can actually delete the album and get it back using the command:
- Tools
- Experimental
- Show Tag as Album.
When I type in Florida RVing, I now have a new album with all the same pictures as the original album. Using this method, I can even delete the album when I’m done viewing it, or printing it, or uploading it, or backing it up, knowing that anytime I want the album again, I can just click on Tools / Experimental / Show Tag as Album. So, I don’t need all those albums cluttering up my left sidebar. I just create them any time I want, and then delete them
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3 Responses to “Picasa Tags can Make Albums”
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Yeah!!!
This tip coincides with a talk I have been preparing for next week for our Sun City Picasa Group. The plan was to emphasize tags (as permanent) and then use the search feature for that tag to create a temporary album.
Your tip of the week – Tools >Experimental > Show tag as album looked like an easier alternative. But I found two peculiarities. Maybe I am not doing this right.
First, with nothing selected in the library (or it did not matter if I did have something selected) I went to Tools>Experimental>Show tag as album and nothing happened (it appeared) Not even a flicker on the screen. And nothing added to my albums.
However, if I exit Picasa and then come back the album is there – named same as the tag. It seems to be permanent as opposed to the temporary album I would get had I searched for the tag. That was good.
However, when I tried to change the name of the album by double clicking, the album name was greyed out. Unchangeable. But I found I could select the album with the tag name and create a whole new album with another name and then delete the tag named album.
I guess we can maneuver around anything – almost. Now I am thinking I could have done the same thing with the temporary album created by using the search bar for the tag.
Thanks for this timely tip from me and my students.
Barbara
Hey Barb,
Yes, I also noticed that there was a lag between clicking on the command “Show Tag as Album” and the album actually appearing. I never tried to rename, but that makes sense – since the album name should match the tag name. Give a big Hello to your students for me!
Thank you for your tips.
Would leaving a tag album take more space from the computer memory?
Is it possible to share a musical slide show?
Thanks