Do you use Picasa Web Albums?

 picasa web albums, Sharing Photos  4 Responses »
Apr 272010
 

Most all of the articles in this Picasa Tutorials blog are about the Picasa software that runs locally on your computer and manages your photos.  If you want to share your photos with family, friends, or the world, you can upload them from your computer to Picasa Web Albums.

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Share your Pictures Using Picasa Web Albums

I think everyone who uses Picasa, should also use Picasa Web Albums.  No more printing, no more emailing.  If you’re connected to the Internet, Picasa makes it a single click to upload your selected photos to Picasa Web Albums.  Simply select the picture (or pictures) you want on your Web Album, and click the Upload button.  There is a little bit of one-time setup to establish your Google Web Album account, and there are some options with each upload.  Once you’re set up and have your options selected, each upload is really that easy … two clicks.

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With your free Google account, you get 1 Gigabyte of free Picasa Web Albums space.  The number of pictures that will hold depend on the size of your uploads.  I use the middle size option (1024 pixels) and I have nearly 4,000 pictures uploaded over 3 1/2 years.  I still haven’t reached my free 1GB limit.  And, when I do, I’ll pay the $5/yr for 5 GB of space.

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Don’t *Store* your Pictures on Picasa Web Albums

Some people seem to think that, just because they are using Picasa, their pictures are on the web and they can delete them from their computer.  There’s two things wrong with this thinking:

  1. Pictures only go to Picasa Web Albums if you manually Upload them, or set a folder to ‘Synchronize’ to the web.  None of this happens automatically.
  2. Even if you have uploaded all your photos to your Web Album, I wouldn’t trust the Web with my originals.  They should be on your computer, and backed up to Disk.
    see past article: Don’t Delete your Original Photos

Using Picasa Web Albums as a Backup?

If you use Picasa Web Albums (PWA) like I do – uploading the smaller sized picture – then it’s definitely not a good backup.  I don’t think PWA was ever designed to be a backup system for your photos, however, recent enhancements may make it possible.  You can now upload full-resolution pictures, and, with Synchronized folders – it will automatically upload all pictures in that folder.  This is going to take a *lot* more space, but for $5/5 GB – maybe that’s OK.  It looks to me like Google has future plans to convert PWA to a place where we keep our photos online … period.  With increased Internet speed, and cheap storage it becomes possible.

But, I don’t think it’s here yet.  If you should happen to lose the pictures on your computer – having them on PWA is certainly better than nothing, but I’d rather use something like Carbonitewhich is designed as an online backup system.

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.

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Picasa Tip: Error Emailing a Picture with Gmail

 Picasa, picasa web albums, Sharing Photos  7 Responses »
Mar 262010
 

4/1/10 Note: this error has been fixed by the folks at Google.  The article is still worth a read to see how to find out what has been fixed or not, as well as how to use Web Albums to share your photos instead of emailing.

Several people this week told me they were having a problem when they tried to email a picture using Picasa’s email button and choosing ‘Gmail.’  So I tried it and, sure enough, I got the same error message:

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I checked the PIcasa user forum and found that lots of people were having the same problem.  Google has acknowledged the problem.  They’ve been working on it and have now posted a notice that they’ve identified the problem and they know how to fix it.  The fix will be in the automatic Picasa updates that will be pushed out to all users starting next week (3/29/10.)  It’s always a good idea to check the Picasa ‘Known Issues’ page when you get an error so you know if it’s a problem they’re working on before you go to too much trouble trying to fix it yourself.

Meanwhile, here’s another way to share your photos.

Upload your photos to a Picasa Web Album. Once it’s there, you can view it in the Album, then click the ‘Share’ button.  You just address it like any other email, write a message and send.

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Your friend who receives the email will see something like this:

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They can see the thumbnail (small version) of the photo right in the email.  If they click on ‘View Photo’ that will take them to the photo on your Web Album.

I think this is a better way to share photos anyway.  What do you think?  Leave a comment.

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.