Digital Photo Magic with Picasa
by Greg Thomas
The rapid change from film to digital photography brought with it a need for some means of transferring, editing, organizing and storing digital images. Just keeping up with all your pictures can sometimes be a real chore.
Picasa is a freeware program from Google that simplifies all of these tasks and provides several quick and easy ways for displaying your pictures as collages, timelines and slideshows. Starting the program for the first time sends Picasa on a quick search of the entire hard drive for digital images. Picasa automatically finds all your pictures - even ones you forgot you had - and sorts them into albums organized by date with recognizable folder names.
Picasa displays the contents of a selected folder as thumbnail images. Double clicking on a thumbnail brings it to full size and opens several tool bars for editing, cropping, red eye correction – a lot of the things we all do with digital images. Some folks like to print a contact page for helping with picture selection. Just select a folder, click on “create contact page” and it’s done. The program also includes a particularly useful search function to help quickly locate an image, movie or folder.
Digital cameras assign images names such as “WTF007,” which can make locating that perfect picture of last year’s reserve champion mini lop a real challenge. Renaming pictures is normally a pick and choose – one at a time – adventure in tedium and patience. Picasa makes renaming images in batches as easy as a click of your mouse. And moving pictures is just a matter of selecting the ones to move and dragging them from one folder to another.
Another handy feature is the ability to archive pictures onto CD or DVD with a single click. In addition to portability, moving images onto CD or DVD frees up valuable hard drive space and gets them onto a reliable type of storage that also holds a lot of pictures.
Slideshows are really useful for meeting events where an ongoing display can be enjoyed by the audience. Creating them in Picasa is as easy as moving pictures into a folder and clicking on the slideshow button. Each picture can be captioned for slideshows detailing specific
Picasa includes many other features such as creating a gift CD, exporting an image or collage to a web page and creating posters. For such a small program it really packs a lot of tools and abilities.
Where can you find this gem? It’s as close as the Spring 2005 County Support CD (recently provided by the friendly folks at EIT), or at http://www.picasa.com. Installation is a snap and learning to use the program takes very little time. Give Picasa a try. You may find it’s just the tool to help straighten out, organize and put to use all those digital pictures.
Sessions are offered via Centra Symposium. To enroll or browse events, or to learn more about Centra, click the Centra Symposium link from the EIT webpage at http://eit.tamu.edu. If you miss an event or would like to view it again, go to http://eit.tamu.edu/recordings.html or click the Public Recordings link in Centra to view recorded events.
We have online training from Element K available. To request an account or get more information contact Jennifer Jahedkar at jenj@tamu.edu or 979.845.2290 or Susanna Coppernoll at 979.845.2250.
The Brazos Valley Macromedia Users Group-Summer Wilson The Brazos Valley Macromedia User’s Group will meet Tuesday June 21 from 11:45 to 1:00 at MicroAge in College Station. For more information visit http://bvmmug.tamu.edu
The Brazos Valley Web Guild-Summer Wilson The Brazos Valley Web Guild will meet July 1. For more information visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bvweb/
FCS - Families and Work Institute - http://www.familiesandwork.org
AG and Natural Resource - Fire Ant Program- http://fireant.tamu.edu/
4H -4H Roundup -- http://texas4-h.tamu.edu/roundup/
All images on webpages must include an ALT (alternative) tag. It provides an alternate text equivalent of graphics on a page, which will allow visually impaired users to use a specially written software to hear a synthesized voice describing the graphic. In addition, some users choose not to view graphics on pages, but can read the ALT text described on the graphic. This option is especially important to those visitors who have slow connections to the Internet.
To learn more visit these sites:
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/forms.cfm#labelling
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/accessible-forms-1.shtml
Email can be a great tool, but staying on top of the messages you get each day can be a daunting task. Categories and find results folders can really help.
Categories provide a way to organize your items. You create and add categories, give each an identifying color, then assign a category to an item. The colors display in the Item List and in the Calendar, making it easy to quickly see the category. I created a number of categories, including one called Follow-up.
When I receive a message that I need to do something with, rather than keep it in my inbox I assign it a category of Follow-up, then put it neatly in the folder that corresponds to the subject, like accountability, CECP or centra.
To make sure to do something with that message and not have to go digging through folders to find it, I’ve created a Find Results Folder that gathers all of my Follow-up items in one convenient place, regardless of what folder they are in. A find results folder searches for items that meet certain criteria and shows them in the folder.
To create one, go to File, New and choose Folder. Click Find Results Folder, and choose Next. To set the criteria, click Custom Find Results Folder and click Next again. Then specify the search criteria by clicking Advanced Find. Choose to find all items where the category is Follow-up, then click OK and Next. Specify display settings for the folder and click Finish.
When you open a message and determine that it’s something to follow up on, click the Personalize tab and click to select the Follow Up category. Then move the message into the appropriate subject folder and remove it from the inbox.
But when you open the Find Results folder, the one with the magnifying glass on it, you’ll see all of the items that need to be followed up on.
Using a Find Results folder to search for items with the Follow-up category really saves time! The Fol-low-up folder is the first folder I open in the morning and the last one I check at night.
Ever need to do a slide show in a hurry? At many events we take digital photos and need to view them in a hurry or display them for folks to just see the fun. You can certainly use programs like PhotoShop. Picasa, IrfanView or PowerPoint to create some really fancy slideshows, if you have a few minutes to spare.
But if you don’t have any other programs to use, or time to spare, you can use Windows!
Windows itself has a special folder named My Pictures that can help you do some really quick Photo work.
To do a quick slide show:
Windows will begin displaying the photos, one at a time every five seconds, and will repeat the show over and over. This is great for doing an impromptu slide show or creating a self-running display. Just press the ESC key to exit the show.
If you don’t want to show all of the pictures, no problem! Simply select the photos that you do want to include in the slide show by holding down the ctrl key and clicking on each of them. The photos
that aren’t selected won’t be shown in the slide show.
You can also place photo files in other folders and make slides shows. In fact, any folder that has photo file types in it will have the View as Slide Show option in the left pane.
HINT: When the slide show is playing, move your mouse across the screen. A small control panel will appear in the upper right corner. With it you can stop the show, manually go forward and backwards and pause the show.
You view your photos a number of different ways. Viewing as a film strip, will allow you to move through them and rotate them. Or view your photos as thumbnails – small images, so you can easily find the ones you want.
So if you don’t have time, or even if you do, you might try using Windows to put together a quick slideshow of images.
Check out the article on Picasa in this newsletter. It is free tool that can really help you organize your photos!!