Organize with Tags

 Organizing, Picasa  4 Responses »
Apr 172010
 

The following tip is excerpted from the Beginner’s Guide to Picasa.

Tags are a way to add some identifying words to a photo without using the filename or the caption, and without putting them in a special folder or album.

For example, I take a lot of scenic pictures and I may sometime have a need to find the best picture of a beach or a mountain. I can use Tags for this. One given picture can have many tags, and this will make the picture searchable by any of the words used in the tags. It is recommended to use single word tags.

To add a tag to a picture, select one or more pictures and click on the Tags button in the lower right. You should see a new Pane open on the right side of your Library. You can type a new tag in the space provided at the top,and press the + button to add the tag to the selected picture(s) or you can choose one of the quick tags.

image

If you spend a few minutes adding tags to photos whenever you import new pictures, you will love yourself later when you can search for anything your heart desires.

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.

 

 

Gift CDs and Temporary Albums

 Organizing, Picasa  6 Responses »
Feb 182010
 

I’ve had a couple questions this week about making Gift CDs.  The readers had photos scattered throughout their computer’s folders and they wanted to burn them as a group to a CD to give to someone else.  The Gift CD process is very quick and simple:

  1. Select the folder or album with the photos
  2. Click the Create menu, then Create a Gift CD
  3. It will tell you if your selection will fit on the CD
    image
  4. You can include more folders or albums by clicking the ‘Add More…’ button.
  5. When you’ve selected all you want, click Burn Disc.

The resulting CD will have all the pictures – the edited versions – and it will automatically play a slideshow after being inserted into a computer’s CD/DVD drive.

The point of this article is how you can use Albums to collect all the photos you want to group together.  You *don’t* need all the pictures to be in a folder.  Anything you can do with a folder, you can do with an album.  Think of albums as ‘virtual folders.’

Now, here’s the really cool part … temporary albums.  Any time you search for something the search results can be shown as a temporary album.  With the temporary album selected, you can play a slideshow, create a collage or a movie with all the pictures in the temporary album.  You can also Export, Upload, Email, Shop, or anything you can do with pictures in the selection tray.

image

One thing you cannot do with a temporary album is create a Gift CD.  But, not to worry, you can simply create an Album from the pictures selected in the temporary album.  After burning the Gift CD – you can simply delete the Album you created.

 

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

Starring Pictures

Using Albums for Organizing

Using Tags aka Keywords

Using Search to Create a Temporary Album

 

Picasa Tip: Search by Color

 Organizing, Picasa  3 Responses »
Jul 082009
 

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

search-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.
histogram

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.