Blogging and Websites – Learn Picasa and Google Photos!

Using Picasa for Blogger Pictures

Blogging and Websites, Google+, picasa web albums, Sharing Photos 3 Responses »

May 062014

There are lots of posts on Picasa’s official support forum from people upset that the “Blog This!” feature of Picasa is no longer working. That doesn’t bother me at all. Even though I’ve kept a Blogger.com blog since 2003, and used Picasa for almost as long, I’ve never used the BlogThis! feature to get my pictures from Picasa to Blogger.

Here’s how I do it

Upload from Picasa to a named Web Album in Google+ Photos (what used to be called Picasa Web Albums)
From Blogger, use the “Insert Image” button and choose “From Picasa Web Albums” Find the ‘Devils Tower Album’ and select the pictures

Don’t Delete the Web Album

When you do it this way, you are very aware that your picture is coming from your web album. So, maybe you won’t make the mistake of deleting that album from Google Plus. Many people don’t realize that their Blogger pictures are actually stored in your Picasa Web Albums (now Google Plus Photo Albums.) If you used the BlogThis! button (when it used to work) your pictures were stored in a Web Album named the same as your Blog. If you delete (or even rename) that album from Google Plus Photo Albums, you have deleted the picture that was showing in your Blog.

All your Best Pictures are in the Web Album

Sometimes I’m not interested in scrolling thru all the text on my Blog, I just want to look at all the pictures I took. In our RVing lifestyle, we’re taking pictures all the time, so I upload the best ones into albums by month. Sometimes a special event like ‘Cruise to Alaska’ deserves an album all its own, but normally I have an album for each month. In a month where we traveled a lot, I might have 1-200 pictures, like last September when we started the month in Nevada and ended in Florida. If you click the link you will see all my pictures for that month. You can even click on one picture to see it full screen, then click on the option for Slide Show. Some friends might not want to read all the text in your Blog, but they love browsing thru your pictures.

Only the Pictures Needed to Tell the Story go in the Blog

In that same month – September 2013, I wrote 6 blog posts and used 68 of the pictures from the Web Album. So, I have my choice of just looking at pictures: 157 pictures in the September 2013 Web Album; OR reading the Blog posts that include 68 of those exact same pictures.

Tutorial Videos

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch tutorial videos on this topic:

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, orbecome a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Beware Picasa Web Albums and Blogger!

Blogging and Websites, picasa web albums 17 Responses »

Mar 172013

If you use Blogger.com for creating your blog, and you upload photos from your computer – that creates a Picasa Web Album.

DO NOT delete that web album with the orange Blogger logo!

People have made this mistake. They’ve been browsing their Picasa Web Albums and see an album they don’t remember creating. Thinking it was time to clean up, they deleted the album. Next time they took a look at their blog, they saw lots of red x’s where the pictures should be.

There’s no way to get the pictures back!

Even if you know what pictures they were, and you re-upload them to a web album using Picasa on your computer – they will be in a different location, a different URL than the original album. That means that the references to the pictures in your blog will not be correct. You would need to edit each post and re-insert the images from the new Web Album.

It Gets Worse!

My standard method for adding pictures to a blog post is this:

Using Picasa on my computer, I select the best pictures and Share them online. They are now located in a Picasa Web Album / Google+ Photos Album (see this post for PWA vs G+) in an album which I named.
Using Blogger, I click the Insert Image button and select “From Picasa Web Albums” (which is the same thing as Google+ Photos.)

Using this method, I don’t even get the little orange Blogger logo to alert me that there are pictures being used in my Blog. I just tested this and deleted a photo from my Renaissance Faire Web Album that I knew was being used in a blog post. I got NO WARNING! I thought for sure I would see “This photo is used in a Blogger Blog post, are you sure you want to delete?” In fact, I could swear I’ve seen a message like that in the past. Either they’ve changed it … or I’m dreaming, because it deleted the picture quick as could be without so much as a how do you do!

When I went to the blog post where the picture was used, here is what I saw. A gray oval with a white dash where the picture should have been. To fix it, I had to re-share the photo from my computer to the Renaissance Faire Web Album, then edit the blog post and re-insert it.

Lesson to Learn

The only way to prevent this is to never delete photos from your web albums! It’s that simple – just Don’t Delete! I hope none of you have to learn this the hard way. I expect better from Google.

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, using Android Smartphones, 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: Uploading Videos

Blogging and Websites, Picasa, Video 11 Responses »

Jul 142011

If your camera has the capability of taking video, you’ve probably noticed that they come right into your computer and show up in Picasa when you ‘Import’ from your camera.

If you don’t see them, try looking at your options in Picasa: Tools | Options | File Types – and make sure the box is checked next to Movies (.AVI, .MPG, .ASF, .WMV) and perhaps Quicktime Movies too if your camera uses .MOV format.

So, now that they’re on your computer, how do you share them? If you double-click on your video Picasa will play it for you and display some special options at the left, including the ability to upload to Youtube. I use this a lot, I like Youtube. But, what if you don’t want to start a Youtube account? Or, you don’t like how public Youtube videos are?

The ‘Upload’ button at the bottom works just as well for videos as it does for pictures. You can upload videos to any Picasa Web Album. Here is that little train video in my Web Album. Once it’s there, you can also add it to your blog posts, just like you add pictures. If you want to see a sample of how it turns out, take a look at this blog post of mine – the train video is embedded about halfway down. You’ll notice that it says it’s hosted by Google Video, and it works just fine – as long as you have a good, fast Internet connection.

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.

Movies files from your camera

Also check out how to record a movie from your web-cam. WOW

Record a Movie from your Webcam

Make your own movie from your pictures with Picasa

Make-a-movie

Picasa Web Albums for Business Website

Blogging and Websites, picasa web albums 2 Responses »

Jun 082011

Every business needs a website. But many small, local businesses only need a one page business card type of website. I was talking to a small business owner the other day and mentioned just that – they needed a website, but it didn’t have to be more than one page – “Just so people can get your phone number and address when they need it”, I said. The owner replied, “But, I have so many different kinds of projects, he said, people need to see several examples so they know what I can do.” “I can’t afford to pay someone to build that website, and I don’t know how to do it myself.”

If your projects, products, or services can be shown in a picture – I think Picasa web album is your answer. Just get a web person to build you a simple, one page website (or you can do this yourself) and embed a slideshow from a web album where you’ll put the pictures. Every time you add a new picture, it will show up on the slide show on your web page. Don’t offer an item any more? Just delete the picture from the web album and it will be gone from your web page.

Whatever you want to say about a product or service can be included in the caption of the picture. You’d be surprised how much you’re allowed to type. And, if someone looking at your web page clicks on the slideshow, they’ll be taken to your Web Album and see the pictures and captions full size.

Here is an embedded slideshow from a web album with pictures of the products and services that Geeks on Tour offers.

So, how do you get the slideshow into the web page? By copying the embed code on the Picasa Web Album:

Log in to your Picasa Web Album and open the album you want to embed.
Click on ‘Link to this Album’ in the right sidebar
From the options that open up, click Embed Slideshow
You should now see a dialog box similar to the following

Make sure to check the box to Show captions, autoplay, and at least 400px in size. The slideshow above is 600px.
Copy the code from the yellow box
Go to the HTML code for your web page and paste the code in where you want the slideshow to appear.

Now, any time you add, delete, or change a picture in that album – it will be reflected in the slide show on your web page. No need to call your webmaster and pay for revisions, just use the free tools that Picasa and Picasa Web Albums provides!

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.

Upload Photos to the Web (introduction to Picasa web albums

Keeping your Slideshow in a Specified Sort Order

Embedding Web Album Photos Elsewhere on the Web

Using Albums for Organizing

Add Captions to your Photos

Adding Text to Pictures