Sunday, August 10, 2008

Picasa , An awesome tool!

In my investigation of new Web 2.0 technologies, I thought I'd give Picasa a try. Perfect timing, too, as I have a newborn baby, and would like to make pictures available to the family (at least those who are 'web-enabled').

Downloading the software and signing on was pretty easy, and the system search for pictures was very quick. Unfortunately, it doesn't give you an option to skip searching for pictures and add them all yourself, so it had found a ton of clipart and other pictures on my system and indexed it into its database.

Once pictures are there, however, it is very easy to create a blog with the picture. Simply select the picture, and click Blog This, and away you go! In fact, this blog message was written using that method.

There are some things that are a bit confusing about the tool, or at least I haven't figured them out yet. If I attempt to log into Blogger and add a picture I already have posted, it doesn't seem provide an option to allow me to do so, and the help files don't seem to indicate a way to do that. Looking at the HTML code for this posting isn't all that helpful either, as it seems to be referring to 'localhost' for the placement of the picture. Perhaps that will change once I submit it.

All in all, it is a good tool for organizing your images and an easy way to throw them on the web to show your family your newborn baby, for instance. Myself, however, I'll stick with my personal website.
Posted by Picasa

3 comments:

edcs855 said...

I found Picasa by Google to be an intuitive product that works with Mac, Linux and Windows platforms. The download, installation and implementation my Blog was accomplished in less than 20 minutes. Contrary, I encountered more difficulty using with the Flickr interface which require a bit more time to implement.

Lyr Lobo said...

I'm surprised that you do not have a slideshow gadget of newborn pics spinning on your site, in addition to your family site. *grins*

I uploaded my Second Life class images one at a time, using the add image feature while adding a new post to my blog.

They auto add to Picasa and when I added the slideshow gadget, the html for integrating it was easy to paste into an HTML gadget.

I reduced the width and height as I prefer the content to fit within my sidebar and voila, it was finished.

Now, due to changing my mind about whether an image would be left justified, right, centered or of small, medium or large size, I uploaded the same image a couple of times, and both sizes are in Picasa.

Uploading an image via your blog, then deleting the html from the new post added them just fine. *grins*

Lyr Lobo said...

Edcs855, I was able to add Flickr content, but Blogger required permission to do so in the settings, I think. I had to read the FAQ for both tools to find where to do it.

This delayed me about 7 minutes, which is nearly intolerable nowadays. *grins*

I also pointed to a copyright free image during my post about Talking Checkouts to test how that worked. It was a lot smoother than Flickr.