by Chris Guld, GeeksOnTour.com
ILoveGooglePhotos.com
If you’re like most travelers we know, you take a lot of pictures! As your collection grows, it gets overwhelming. This is the problem that Google Photos sets out to solve. In this short video, you’ll see just how easy it is to browse thru years of photos.
To learn more, check out the free articles on ILoveGooglePhotos.com Or, better yet, become a GeeksOnTour.com member and watch the tutorial videos on Google Photos..
Google Photos sounds like something that has been around for a long time, but what I’m talking about is actually a brand new App for both Android and Apple mobile devices.
The Google Photos App and website (photos.google.com) were just announced on May 28. Using Google Photos you can:
We – Geeks on Tour – will be giving seminars on Google Photos at RV rallies all over the country. We’ve already done one of our live web hangouts on the topic of Google Photos. For this article, let me just give you one example of the power of search.
We are currently on vacation in England and we visited the beautiful Bodiam Castle the other day. I took a picture of Jim in the stairwell:
When looking at this picture I was reminded of a similar picture taken at Blarney Castle in Ireland on our trip there in 2000. I really wanted to see that picture from 2000 and compare them. How could I possibly find that picture from 15 years ago?!
Since the storage space is free, I have backed up ALL my pictures to my Google account. I’ve actually been doing this for a few years – ever since Google Plus Photos (the predecessor for Google Photos) offered free unlimited space. So, I have 30,000+ photos stored online in my Google Account. And, now, with Google Photos I can search the entire library easily.
While Google Photos is far from perfect, if you use your smartphone for taking most of your pictures, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this app.
Even before we bought an RV and adopted the vagabond lifestyle, we started a Blog. I’ve always been a journal writer, this is just the easiest way to keep a journal in today’s digital world.
I would keep this blog even if no one else ever read it. It is my journal. I love going back to previous entries and remembering some part of our journey. In the beginning I even set the security so that no one could see the blog except me and a couple other family and friends. Now I have it set to public so anyone can see it. We’ve made new friends along our way because it is so easy for them to get to know us, and keep track of us with the blog, One of the features of a blog is the ability for a reader to leave a comment, making it a two way communication. And, if I ever did want a book, that is easily accomplished with web services like Blog2Print.com.
In each blog post I write some narrative about where we are and what we’re doing. I also include pictures, maps, and links to other websites such as the RV park where we’re staying. This becomes an invaluable resource for us when we find ourselves returning to some area where we’ve been before.
Blogging is very popular among RVers. You can see a list of hundreds of RVing blogs at HitchItch.com.
But what if you don’t like to write? You just want a photo album. Well, we keep a photo album also. We’ve been using Picasa Web Albums since we started RVing in 2004. It is now transitioning into Google+ Photos, but all of my albums are still there.
Edit your Pictures First. The main reason we use Picasa Web Albums is because we use the Picasa desktop software to manage all the pictures on our computer. For example, so far this month (May, 2013), as we’ve traveled from Florida to Colorado, we’ve accumulated 629 pictures in this month’s folder on my computer. I use Picasa to work with them there. I spend a few minutes every day going thru my pictures with Picasa and making them look better with a little bit of cropping and some color correction, maybe a frame, and definitely a caption.
Upload your Best. The pictures I like the most, I upload to Google+ Photos (what used to be Picasa Web Albums.) Picasa makes this drop-dead simple. just click on the pictures you want to upload and then click the button “Share on Google+.” Of the 629 pictures in the May folder on my computer, I’ve uploaded 181 of them. Then, I use the pictures on Google+ Photos to include in my blog posts. I don’t have to upload them separately to the blog, I just use the “Insert Photo from the Web” command. I count roughly 79 pictures used in the blog during May so far. The web space for your pictures is provided for free by Google.
So, if you had no interest in reading or writing blog posts, you can just skip the blogging part altogether and just use the Web Album. You can see our May 2013 web album, click on the first picture to see it full screen, and even click “Slideshow” to watch all 181 of them play automatically. You should notice the captions to the right of every picture, and even a space where you can leave a comment as well.
Print a Photo Book: There are lots of services which will take your digital photo albums and turn them into 4-color books. In fact, using Picasa on your computer, there is a command on the File menu called Order Prints that will take all the pictures you’ve selected and send them to a service that will print your book. All you have to do is pay for it!
Pictures and Blogs are two of the main topics we (Geeks On Tour) teach. We make tutorial videos in 5 minute segments and have produced several hours worth of training on how to make a Blog using Blogger.com, and how to manage your pictures using Picasa. You can go to our Learning Library right now. Just pick your topic and learning by watching videos. After the first 3, you will need a username and password.
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.
by Chris Guld, www.GeeksonTour.TV
If you have thousands of pictures of your travels, you need some way to find them. I look to Google for all my search needs, so what better place than Google’s photo software, Picasa, to turn to for searching my pictures?
One of the reasons I use captions on all my good pictures is so I can find them even years later. I keep most of my 40,000+ pictures on an external hard drive, but they all show up in Picasa’s Library so I can view any digital picture I’ve ever taken as long as I can find it!
Let’s say I want to see a picture of that cool Stonehenge place we visited in Washington State. I just type Stonehenge into the search box, next to the magnifying glass in the upper right corner. Picasa will instantly match whatever you type by looking at captions, folder names and descriptions, file names, tags, people, albums, and more. Since I entered captions on all the good pictures of Stonehenge, my search will produce results. Notice that it even finds that we were there 2 times, once in 2004 and again in 2010. I didn’t have to know that, it found all pictures with the word Stonehenge in the filename or caption.
When Picasa finds matches, it filters the pictures in the library to just those that match. It will appear that all your other pictures are gone. Let’s say that, in my thousands of photos, I have a few hundred with the word ‘beach’ somewhere identifying them. If I search for ‘beach’ my library view will now consist of the few hundred beach pictures. It will look like I have no pictures except those of beaches. You need to click the ‘Back to View All’ in order to see your complete library again.
Captions and filenames aren’t the only thing that can be found with search. Picasa will also search for your word in the Folder name where a picture lives, or any album that includes the photo, or tags or even the camera name that took the picture.
Dates: you can enter a year, e.g. 2007 in the search field and your results will include all pictures taken in that year. You can narrow your search by adding multiple words. If you add a month, e.g. 2007 August – your search will be limited accordingly. Just realize that this will also find pictures from 2007 with the word ‘August’ in the caption even if it wasn’t taken in August. There is no way to limit searches to any one source – Picasa searches everything: Filenames, Captions, Tags, Folder or album names, Camera maker, and Dates.
Colors: If you’re looking for that perfect picture to match your yellow walls, you can enter Color: yellow in the search field to see all picture with that color!
Just remember to click that all important Back to View All button!
The closest competitors to Picasa in ease of use are iPhoto and Photo Gallery. They even have some features that are an improvement over Picasa. iPhoto gives you multiple ways to view your pictures in location on a map, better slideshow features, and built in ways to make cards and books. Photo Gallery has a cool photo fuse feature where you can replace one person in a group shot, it has a Panorama feature that Picasa lacks, and I like the way tags are handled better in Photo Gallery. I actually considered switching to Photo Gallery but then realized that I simply could not live without Picasa’s features of text on photos, or combining pictures in a collage. Photo Gallery and iPhoto only have a fraction of Picasa’s photo editing features. I have so much fun just trying all the different single-click effects, then undoing them if I don’t like it.
Google is going through a lot of transition these days, with their social network Google + leading the pack. The company made an announcement a few months back that Picnik is closing on April 19. Picnik was an online photo editing website that Google bought last year. They linked it to Picasa with a button along with Picasa’s main editing tools. Now they’re taking it away which has started many rumors about the future of Picasa. Many of the cool photo editing tools that were developed at Picnik are now incorporated directly into Picasa 3.9, and many more have become part of the online photo editing available thru Google Plus. The Picasa desktop product is still very strong at Google. Google is certainly not above killing product lines, but they do it with failures, not stars.
