Should you Use Picasa’s Albums or Tags to Organize your Photos?

 Organizing  7 Responses »
Oct 252013
 

imageAlbums and Tags are both organizational tools in Picasa on your computer.  They allow you to group your photos by categories of your choosing without physically moving or copying  pictures from the Folders where they are stored.  In our fulltime RVing lifestyle, we are taking pictures all the time, so our folder structure is simple – one folder per month.  All pictures taken in a month are stored in a folder for that month.  Sometimes a special event warrants a folder of its own, but all ‘miscellaneous’ pictures go into the monthly folder.  Albums and Tags allow you to create groupings like music ‘Playlists.’  You can include pictures in different groups without copying or moving them to another folder.

 

State Signs Example

As we travel, I like to take pictures of the sign we see each time we cross a state border.  According to my system, these pictures will be stored in a Folder by the month they were taken.  I then want an Album of all the state signs so I can make a movie like the example below.  To make this movie, I added a few other pictures in addition to the state signs, I found the music “See the USA” by Dinah Shore, and I put it all together in a Movie using Picasa’s “Create Movie Presentation” tool.  Finally I uploaded it to Youtube so you can see.  It all just took a few clicks in Picasa.

Tags are Better than Albums

The best way to prepare for these different groupings is to use Tags.  Whenever I take a picture of a State Sign, I tag it with the keyword ‘statesign.’  Tags are better than albums, because they are stored right with the .jpg file.  If you stop using Picasa at some point, the tags will still be included with your pictures and some other software (like Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Photoshop Elements) can read those tags.  Albums are strictly a creation of Picasa and are only useable with PIcasa.  To gather all the pictures for the Movie above, all I had to do was click on Tools->Experimental->Show Tag as Album
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You may need to refresh the album list before you see the new ‘statesign’ album.  Just collapse the Album collection with the triangle and then expand it again.  You should notice that it has a green album icon with an asterisk, that is the indicator that this is a dynamic album create from Tags.  Once I can see the Album, I just click on the button for Create Movie, enter the music selection, then click the Youtube button. 

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Albums are Temporary

Once you have your movie, you can even delete the Album – it was just a temporary grouping to facilitate making the movie.  Delete the album and your pictures are still in their respective folders, along with their tags.  At any time, you can use the “Show Tag as Album” command and see the statesign group again.

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How to Remove a Tag from a Picture

 Organizing  6 Responses »
May 192010
 

Question from Bette: “….if I Tag a photo and then want to remove the Tag from that photo only how do I do it?

Great question Bette.  It’s not immediately obvious how to do this, but it’s actually quite easy.  Here are the steps:

  1. Select the picture in question
  2. Open the Tags pane and you should see the offending tag
  3. Hover over the tag, and you’ll see an ‘X’ at the right, clicking on that X will remove the tag from that picture.

And, here’s a video to show you how:

Other Videos you may want to watch:

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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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Albums vs. Tags

 Organizing, Picasa  6 Responses »
Apr 212010
 

Albums and Tags are both methods of identifying and grouping your photos.  Any given picture can be marked to appear in many Albums.  And, any given picture can have many tags (aka keywords.)  See last week’s article on Tags. The main difference is that Tags are bits of data that are stored with the picture itself and Albums are a creation of Picasa.  You can even see Tags while browsing your pictures in Windows My Pictures.  It works the other way too.  Tags entered using Windows will be useable in Picasa.  Tags are stored with the picture just like the date taken is stored with the picture.

Here’s how tags show up in Windows Explorer:

I love Picasa’s Album feature, but it makes me nervous.  You see, albums are a creation of Picasa alone.  They are easy to lose because the information about a picture belonging to an album is not stored with the picture.  It’s stored in a separate database file, buried in the user Profile, called a .pal file.  If something gets messed up with your Albums, you can use a backup of the .pal file to get them back.  There are lots of messages in the user forum like this message which discusses how to get albums restored.  It is not a simple matter.

Use Albums *and* Tags

Here’s how I do it.  Once I’ve created an album, I’ll select all the pictures in that album and assign a tag.  Now I have the best of both worlds, I have the album in Picasa which can be used just like a folder, but if I should delete that album, I can still find and group all the pictures by searching for the tag.

For example, let’s say I have an album for all the photos I’ve ever taken in Utah.  I use that album to play slideshows.  I will also select all the pictures in the album and apply a tag ‘Utah.’  You do that by clicking on ‘Tags’ in the lower right corner (or shortcut Ctrl-T) typing Utah, and press Enter.

When I tire of playing the Utah slideshow I might delete the Album ‘Utah’, secure in the knowledge that I could re-create it at any time just by searching for ‘Utah.’  My search results will find all the pictures tagged with Utah.  ‘Search results’ is actually a temporary album – that temporary album can now be used just like any other album.  You can play a slideshow from the temporary album.  Or, you can select all pictures in the temporary album and add them to a new, permanent album.

Unique Tags

Be aware that your search might find the word ‘Utah’ in other places besides the tags.  Search uses filenames, captions, and folder names and descriptions as well.  If you really want the tag to be used just to re-create this exact album, you’ll need a unique tag like, “utah-album.”  Also make sure there are no spaces or commas.  Although you can have multi-word tags, if there is a space – search will treat each word separately and you’ll still end up with more than you wanted.

Show Tag as Album

There is also an experimental tool that, with one click, will display a tag as an album.  It’s Tools / Experimental / Show Tag as Album.  When you use this, the album will show up on the very top of the Album list (left side of library) as a green – Picasa generated – album.

If any of you have used this ‘Show Tag as Album’ feature, please leave a comment to tell us if it worked well for you.

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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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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.

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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.