Picasa 2.7 for Linux

After about 4 months as a beta, the Google Photo blog carries the news that Picasa 2.7 for Linux is now out of beta and fully released.

The Linux download page carries the details of what is new in this release - with Picasa Web Albums integration being one prominent addition.  It also carries a list of known problems - where I notice one particularly worrying one which says that albums are uploaded to Picasa Web Albums as public, even if you don't select them to be so.

iTag - specialist photo tagging software

There are 3 main standards for including metadata within jpg photo files

• EXIF - used for image capture information (including geolocation), and normally added automatically by the camera (though camera phones and web cams often omit including it)
• IPTC - a standard for adding more textual metadata, describing what the photo actually illustrates, licensing information etc
• XMP - a more recent standard for similar metadata to IPTC

Picasa allows you to give a description to a photo, and to add what it calls keywords (but nearly everyone else calls tags), which are stored in the photo as IPTC.Caption and IPTC.Keywords data.

However there is also a specialist tagging program available in the form of iTag which makes this tagging even easier, and also writes the data as XMP data (in addition to IPTC) for use by other programs that prefer that standard.  This Windows freeware program was written because in the words of it author "I found quite a few IPTC tools but none worked the way I wanted them to. So I decided to write my own."  It is actively maintained and enhanced.

The program's website has a great table which shows the use of IPTC and XMP metadata by a wide range of desktop programs and web applications.

Photoshop for Linux

Picasa is a photo organizer, with a few photo adjustment tools.  However for real photo manipulation the program that defines the category is Photoshop.

To get Picasa working on Linux, Google use Wine - a layer that allows Windows applications to work on Linux.  Google have also extended their work (via hiring of CodeWeavers, Googlers working their normal jobs and in their 20% time, interns, and Summer Of Code students) so that Photoshop also works pretty well on Linux.

More details at the Google Open Source Blog and the Wine-Devel list.

Maybe Picasa for the Mac

Whilst visiting MacWorld, Duncan Riley of TechCruch noticed that the staffers on Google's stand were wearing t-shirts with the logos of Gmail, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa...

Just a moment he thought, and asked outright about whether Picasa was coming for the Mac, to which he got one one inexperienced employee's response of "Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year."  He tried probing other staffers for more details, such as the release date, but was met with a collection of silence - and "smiles like Cheshire cats".  Read what you will in to that!

Update: Google Operating System picked up on the same blog post, and augments it with a useful table showing the various Google installed applications (Toolbar, Desktop, Earth, Sketchup, Picasa, and Talk) and when they became available on Windows (where all are available), on Mac (yet to get Picasa or Talk), and Linux (already has Picasa, but no Sketchup or Talk either).

Picasa 2.7 Beta for Linux

The current version of Picasa for Linux (version 2.2) has fallen behind the features offered on Windows, so a new beta has been provided that brings the Picasa for Linux version up to 2.7.

The step from 2.2 to 2.7 provides the following new features:

• Upload to Picasa Web Albums
• Saving edits back to disk if desired
• Folder hierarchy view
• Better RAW support

and of course plenty of other improvements to existing features.

Picasa team finally have a blog

It's been a rather low key launch (I track Picasa news closely, and I missed it for 2 months!), but the Picasa team finally have an official Picasa blog.

Actually it carries the tagline "The Official Google Photos Blog: News, tips and tricks from the Picasa team at Google", and as the first post "Ready for our close-up" explained, the Picasa team

"works on more than just Picasa and Picasa Web Albums -- we're responsible for a variety of photo-related technology here at Google, such as hosting Blogger's image-uploading infrastructure, developing Orkut's photo picker, and creating Mapplets for browsing geotagged photos inside Google Maps."

So far there been a low number of posts, in order

• Ready for our close-up - the introductory post, by Jason Cook
• Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features - a useful run down by Mike Herf on some special syntax you can use when searching within Picasa
• Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features, cont'd - the continuation of Mike Herf's article, where he talks about backup being a way to transfer Picasa setup between machines, and also mentions the otherwise undocumented Radial Tint filter.
• New Mac Uploaders released - as the title says
• New languages & new features for international users - Pam Benjatanaporn mentions the new languages that Picasa supports, and also that various Picasa Web Albums features gained
• Better connections with Picasa Web Albums - Mark Geller talks about 5 companies who use the Picasa Web Albums API
• Tune into Picasa Web Albums on Tivo® - Derek Collison announces the tie up with Tivo to show off Picasa Web Albums on your living room TV
• Fixing common photography problems - a reminder by Chris Mysen about how to use the "I'm feeling lucky" and other Picasa tuning controls to improve photo appearances.

Upload from Picasa to Facebook

The Facebook PicasaUploader gives the ability to upload images to Facebook directly from the Picasa desktop application.

The application is a plugin for Picasa, which adds a new button to Picasa's button tray.  It's apparently written by a third party developer, neither affiliated with Google nor Facebook, but appears well executed.

Version 1 was released in June 2007, with a number of bug fix releases appearing since.

Additional 11 languages for Picasa

The latest version of Picasa, Version 2.7, Build 37.36 - October 30, 2007 has added support for an additional 11 languages

• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Filipino
• Indonesian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Serbian
• Slovakian
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Vietnamese.

Picasa Version 2.7, Build 37.32 - October 02, 2007

Fixed a case where corrupted AVI files could cause a crash.

Fixed a case that would result in a "This account is not enabled for Picasa Web Albums" error.

Picasa Version 2.7, Build 37.29 - September 13, 2007

Added support for RAW pictures from the Canon 40D.

Fixed a case where certain RAW pictures appeared overexposed.

Full-screen preview using Ctrl-Alt now works again.

Fixed a case where uploading to Picasa Web Albums could result in an immediate "failed to connect" error.

Mapping added to Picasa Web Albums

The Google Blog carries the announcement that you can now show your Picasa Web Album photos on a map.

The new example gallery from a trip to Las Vegas shows the effect of the new feature.  You can view a map showing all the photos in an album (where the individual photos show up as tiny thumbnails), and a small map also appears alongside the photo in the photo view. 

Unfortunately in photo view the screen space is not used very effectively, and the map is often displayed off the bottom of the screen, coming as it does at the bottom of the column of information that includes

• (*) An often meaningless icon representing the photo owner
• Details of the photo (from EXIF and now locational data)
• (*) A few command links (download, slideshow, order prints), each on separate lines
• (*) A link to report inappropriate content
• (*) The latest comment
• (*) Instructions to add a comment or to sign in
• A list of tags, again each on separate lines
• Finally the photo location map

I've placed a (*) in front of the items of data that I think should be moved out of this column.  In addition, the tags list should be redesigned so that it is not just one tag per line.  These changes would allow the map to be seen in many more case than now.  Actually, since the map is fixed size, but the details and tags sections vary in length, it would make much more sense to put the fixed size map at the top of the column.

As well as viewing the data within Picasa Web Albums, there is also a link on the albums page to view the data in Google Earth - this produces a KML file of the album feed.  There are currently some problems with the KML output - the images are marked with the date of upload, rather than the date the photo was taken.

A map appears for an album if a location has been specified for that album, but this is just a rough approximation.  It's also possible to specify individual locations for images, using a drag and drop placement technique.  I've not yet had time to explore whether Picasa Web Albums is able to extract location information that may already be associated with photos when they are uploaded, such as from Picasa itself.

Sample chapter from Picasa book

One of the few books on Picasa is the now rather venerable "Organizing and Editing Your Photos with Picasa", published as it was two years ago.  It's very much a book for beginners, not advanced users.

A lot has happened to Picasa since then, but the book has not been updated, though the author's site does include a very short errata (all just incredibly minor typos).

Also on the author's site are a couple of PDF's - giving the table of contents, and a sample chapter on printing and emailing.

More Tips from Mike DelGaudio

Mike continues to provide useful and informative tips and techniques on Picasa on his blog.

Amongst the latest post of note are:

• Adding captions to picture pile collages
• Picasa can zoom with a gesture
• Create your own Warhol

Although I noted this blog as being a new blog in December, I've since found out that it's a continuation of his earlier blog Photo Editing with Picasa. Although that is no longer being updated, its back catalogue of posts contains a wealth of useful information. My pick includes:

• Adding Keywords to Photos in Bulk using Picasa
• Create a Multi-Exposure effect with Picasa
• Picasa Thumbnail Icons Explained
• 5 ways to create black and white images in Picasa

I've already noted Mike has a Picasa Web Album, but he also uses other photo sharing services, with collections of images on both flickr and zooomr.

Christina - the new Picasa Groups guide

Picasa has a number of support groups which are hosted on Google Groups.  These get the occasional post by a Picasa employee, but they are not that regular.

However, it seems that a new Google / Picasa employee has been given responsibility to post to these groups under the "Google Picasa Guide" profile.

According to her introductory post on Dec 7th (which announced the availability of Picasa Web Albums in 18 international languages), her name is Christina, and

"I'm your new Picasa Guide on Help Groups. :) Not long ago I was an
everyday Picasa user just like you, and I've received a lot of helpful
tips and troubleshooting advice from this Group. Now I'm on the other
side of the fence and I'm looking forward to this new role!"

Since then, her posts have also covered

• storage updates available internationally
• New features: video upload, prints, search

and a number of quick additions to ongoing threads.  Let's hope that this is indicative of a new emphasis on support from the Picasa team.

New blog by Mike DelGaudio

Mike DelGaudio has just started a blog with the tag line "Learning everything I can, with an emphasis on photo editing, photo sharing and Picasa".

In just a week of posts he's covered a lot of ground, with a number of useful tips about getting the best from Picasa.

As you might expect, he's also making use of Picasa Web Albums to illustrate his techniques.

Picasa upgrades to version 2.6

As well as upgrading Picasa Web Albums, Google have rolled out a new version 2.6 of Picasa on the desktop.

The Picasa readme page notes the major changes as being:

• Added Vista / Internet Explorer 7 support
• Changed update behavior so that it now automatically downloads updates in the background
• Picasa Web Albums is now available in 18 languages

In addition, the release notes page has been updated with news of both this release (build 35.94), and also the previous builds of 32.97 and 32.95 which had not previously been documented.  This adds more details to recent changes, which notably include:

• New autoupdate behavior for Windows Vista support
• New CD/DVD-burning engine (supports more devices)
• Improved upload reliability to Picasaweb
• Added support for 18 new languages
• Added XMP metadata parsing
• Fixed a problem where incorrect GPS values were being saved under certain conditions.

Removed functions

What the readme and release notes do not list is that some functionality appears to have been removed with this "upgrade".  Specifically there are now just 2 items on the Experimental menu under Tools.  This menu also used to have "Publish via FTP..." and "Upload to Google Video..." on it.  It's the nature of experimental things that they may not work out in the future, but I think it's worth a comment on both of these lost items.

Upload to Google Video...

I guess that this was seen as unnecessary since anyone can now upload videos to their own Picasa Web Albums, and having two upload destinations for video may have been too confusing.  It must be noted however that uploading videos to Picasa Web Albums is not the same as uploading to Google Video for two very important reasons:

•  videos in Google Video have a search engine available, so that people can find them easily
• videos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums count against your storage space limits, whereas Google Video essentially has unlimited space

Publish via FTP...

Not sure exactly what the use case for this was expected to be.  It's possible that this was also deemed unnecessary now that Blogger Beta has improved integration with Picasa.

New Picasa 2.5 build 32.97

Downloads of Picasa are being served up a new build now, 32.97, though there are no notes on the regular readmes etc to say what may have changed.

Picasa awards

I wrote yesterday about the Picasa Testimonials page, which carries an old copyright, links to a download for an out of date version of the software, and carries testimonials that relate to the software produced before Google bought the company.

Reached in a similar way from the features section of the Picasa website, the Awards page is similarly very out of date.

It's got a similar 2005 copyright message, but we can be more exact than that - the awards mentioned were last updated with an entry from March 2005.

The full list of awards given (and it's not a long list!) are:

• 5-Stars-Award. CHIP Online - March 2005
• Editor's Choice Award 2005. PC Magazine – January 2005
• DIMA 2005 Innovative Product Award. - February 2005

The above all relate to Picasa 2.  In addition there is a list of awards for the earlier Picasa 1 software:

• Editor’s Choice: Australian Personal Computer – October 2004
• Best of the Year 2003, Digital Imaging. PC Magazine – December 2003
• 2003 Editor's Choice Award. American Photo - 2003
• DEMOgod Award: DEMO 2003 – February 2003

I can't think what good Picasa thinks keeping such an out of date list does - I rather suspect that, like much of the Picasa support documentation, this page has simply been abandoned.

Picasa testimonials

Picasa has page of customer testimonials accessed via their features section of their website.

However, I think it's fair to say that the page is woefully out of date - the copyright reads 2005, and the "Download Picasa now" link gets you a version of Picasa 2 from March 2006, rather than the current Picasa 2.5 with Picasa Web Albums.

Even more telling are the testimonials themselves, which include

"...My husband suggested that I purchase Picasa..."

"...It's the only one I've actually liked enough to spend money to purchase..."

"...I downloaded your trial copy..."

Notice the emphasis on having to pay for Picasa - that means that all these testimonials relate to the old Picasa 1 software - from before Google bought the company!

It's not as if Google don't solicit testimonials - the Picasa support page has an explicit button to "Share my testimonial or personal story with the Picasa Team" which takes you through to the How do you use Picasa? page.  This page asks:

How do you use Picasa?

Has Picasa changed the way you edit and share photos? Do you have a special or fun story about Picasa you'd like to share with us? We'd love to hear from you!
Type your story in the box below and hit the "Submit Story" button. Feel free to include additional information, such as a Picasa feature you've discovered that may be helpful for others. It's up to you if you'd like to include information about yourself.
We love hearing from our users and we share your stories with members of our team. Some of these stories will also appear on our Picasa website, so look for yours in the near future.

By submitting your story, you grant Google Inc. permission to use your name and testimonial for marketing purposes. Google will not sell your name or email address.

Using recorded macros in Picasa

Squelly has an interesting set of blog posts about using recorded macros to automate repetitive processes in Picasa:

• Using Picasa and AutoHotKey to scan Photo Albums Part 1
• Using Picasa and AutoHotKey to scan Photo Albums Part 2

These both talk about using AutoHotKey to record a macro for a task to be repeated, assigning it to a key, then using it to make light work of doing the repetitive bits of the larger task.

Part 1 covers importing multiple pages of a physical photo album from a scanner, and Part 2 covers cropping individual photos from the album pages.

Both parts have clear simple instructions, and include a video to show the technique in action.  A useful technique indeed.

The same blog also had an earlier post about Backing up your digital photos with Picasa which is a similarly well written tip about using the program to do a task that many people neglect.

Inspiring Ideas: Picasa in Education

Via Mark Wagners blog, Educational Technology and Life I was directed to the wiki he created for his recent Picasa in Education training session.  The wiki itself is very sparce at the moment, but it does link to a PDF handout which provides a list of ways of using Picasa in school, entitled Inspiring Ideas: Picasa in Education.

The list is under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 License, and consists of the following suggestions:

1. Slideshows for Back to School Night or Open House
2. Slideshows of Performances, Celebrations, Assemblies, or Field Trips
3. Photo Yearbooks (For a school, a class, or a club!)
4. Photo Journalism, Documentaries, or Dramatizations
5. Time Lapsed Photography (Especially in science!)
6. Class Books (Think big books!)
7. Story Books (“Digital Story Telling”)
8. How-To Guides (Address non-fiction standards!)
9. Exercises in Classifying, Categorizing, or Compare and Contrast
10. Photos as Anticipatory Sets, Writing Prompts, or Review
11. Document Learning (Great for parent conferences!)
12. Photo Portfolios (Can be used for student presentations, too!)

Some graphic skills that could do wonders to Picasa

Via an entry on the Google Code blog, Announcing OpenVis3d, which pointed out that Google is "very interested in computer vision and graphics", I was led on to this Google job opening for a Software Engineer, Computer Vision and Graphics.

There's an impressive list of technologies listed there, and although I rather think this is position is about Google Earth (the clue is perhaps in the question "would you like to build the largest image ever, a petapixel multi-resolution 3D mosaic of the earth using a few thousand computers and millions of source images?"), more than a few of them could be applied to Picasa with good effect.

The list includes

• image stitching - [yes please, it would be great if Picasa could help form panoramics and other stiched images easily]

and a whole load of techniques to help understanding what the picture might contain, to make searching images more precise

• structure from motion or shading
• object detection
• document image understanding
• pattern recognition

Picasa has a couple of "experimental" menu options that allow for searching based somewhat on the content of the images - the search by colour, and the "find duplicates" options, but these are fairly easly attributes of an image to work out.  Deeper understanding of what an image contains, such as objects or text, will add considerably to the search abilities of the program, and indeed at the time of the Neven Vision acquisition, the stated aim was that this facial and object recognition technology would find a place within Picasa.

More quick tips on using Picasa from Hin Man

Hin Man continues to add posts to his tech blog about using the various tools available in Picasa.  He now has specific posts on:

• cropping
• focal black and white
• straighten

These add to his earlier post simply titled Picasa which covered the use of a number of these techniques.

Picasa for Educators

As part of their new Google for Educators site, Google lists a whole load of Google features that may be of use to teachers.

They have put together teachers' guides to 12 Google products, including one on Picasa. This notes that as Picasa is a downloaded program it will need to be installed on all computers in the class, then goes on to say:

For use in your classroom, you can organize photos of your class and special events, and make each of your students a photo CD. You can also create Web Albums for students to access from home, and integrate photography into your courses by having kids take lesson-related photos, post them to their Web Albums and present oral reports.

Journalism students can keep all photos for each edition of their newspaper or magazine in one location, so they're easy to see and find. And students of all kinds can use Picasa and Picasa Web Albums to supplement their research and presentations in almost every subject they study. Or, just to organize and share their personal photos with friends and family.

There is also a testimonial from Amber F. Price, Instructional Technology Resource Teacher, Suffolk Public Schools, Suffolk, VA, talking about how her students have used Picasa:

Using Picasa, my students have created slideshows from scratch at the click of a button, created timelines and picture collages of famous Americans, and they have learned how to crop, edit and add effects to photos they have taken with the digital camera. Students can also create an instant web page with their photos, and with the Picasa upgrade students can create a web album of photos. What a great way for students to share their learning!

See also my previous post on Using Picasa for student creativity.

Picasa 2.5 build 32.95

There is no indication as to what may have changed (the readme and release notes have not been updated), but current downloads of Picasa are being served the 32.95 build, dated 3rd October 2006.

The previous build was the 32.94 build, from the 15th September.

Update: Presumably the new version was needed to add support for uploading videos.

Picasa and the Mac

Google is reminding its users that it really does quite like the Mac, and so has created a Mac Blog.  They've also put together a page that showcases Google's software downloads for the Mac which includes the Picasa Web Albums Uploaders, which were introduced at the beginning of August.

Picasa also got a further mention on Google's blogs, with an entry on Helpful Resources, which talks about the U2U (User to User) groups which provide support for a number of Google products - including Google Desktop, Toolbar, Picasa, Maps, Calendar.

Picasa on FreeBSD

Google produce Picasa for Windows, and also provide a version that runs on Linux.

The Linux version is the same code that runs on Windows, running using a technology called Wine, that allows Windows programs to be run unchanged on other x86 based operating systems.

It's not all that surprising therefore that some people have tried to run Picasa on other operating systems, for which Wine is also available.

How to install Picasa to FreeBSD is an entry on a Japanese blog that gives instructions how to achieve this for FreeBSD.  Although the title is in English, the instructions themselves are in Japanese.  I think the main point that is made is that (despite the similarities between FreeBSD and Linux) the installation uses the Windows download of the program, not the Linux version.

The command to do this is

% wine /tmp/picasa2-current.exe

Google can be used to give an automatic translation of the page - which gives a page that's still rather difficult to follow.  I think the instructions also list a number of problems that were found with this method - when installed the slideshow does not work, and there is mention of problems with sending emails.  I've not got FreeBSD to try this out on, so can't check out these problems myself.

It's been reported that the Windows version of Picasa also mostly works when run using Crossover Office for Mac (a commercial package based on Wine) on Intel Mac OS X.

4 picture limit from Picasa to Blogger

A further issue has surfaced with the newly working Picasa to "Blogger in Beta" BlogThis! button.

The Blogger in Beta Known Issues now also lists:

There is a 4 picture limit when posting from Picasa. If you select more than 4 pictures, only the first 4 will appear in your post.

Since the known issues blog uses tags, you can get all Picasa related problems together on one page.

Using Picasa, from Hin's Tech Corner

As promised in his article which I already covered about using Picasa to improve his photos from the mall, Hin Man has followed through with a more technical explanation of how he used the features of Picasa on the photos.

The features he covers include

• straighten - which as well as being used on the surprising number of images that are not lined up, can also be used to deliberately adjust an angle to change the sense of perspective
• fill light - a lifesaver for pictures that are too dark (often by deliberately not using the flash which would have been ineffective anyway)
• conversion to black and white, and changing contrast - to adjust a poor photo into one that looks sufficiently "arty" to be used to illustrate a blog post
• focal black and white - a "special effect" where some of the image is left in colour, whilst the rest is changed to black and white.

There are flickr photosets of the before and after pictures and of all the mall photos.

BlogThis from Picasa to Blogger Beta

Finally Blogger have sorted things out and got the BlogThis! button in Picasa working against the new version of Blogger in beta.

The announcement on Blogger Buzz says:

One of the last features missing from the new version of Blogger in beta — posting photos directly from Google’s Picasa photo organizer — has been released today. Picasa’s BlogThis! button is the easiest, most convenient way to post photos from your Windows or Linux desktop to your blog, and now you can use this great (and free!) program with the new version of Blogger.

There are a few known issues that we are working to quickly resolve, but we know that Picasa users have been eagerly awaiting this feature and didn’t want to make them wait any longer. Happy photoblogging!

Those known issues that it refers to are detailed as:

The initial release of BlogThis! from Picasa to the new version of Blogger in beta has the following problems that we are working to resolve as quickly as possible:

• Errors posting from Picasa to Blogger if there are html validation problems.
• If you are signed in as a Blogger user, sign out, and then sign back in with your Google account (to post to the beta), you will receive an error. The work around is to close the window and repost from Picasa (signing in with your Google account).
• Once you post to beta, you will not receive a confirmation window. Once the rainbow progress indicator goes away in Picasa, open up your blog in your favorite browser to confirm the post.
• You cannot post from Picasa to Blogger in beta if you have backlinks turned on.

Noah Grey and Thomas the teddy bear

Noah Grey worked for a summer as a "creative consultant" for Picasa.

When Picasa 2 launched in January 2005, he wrote about the program, and noted the Easter Egg keystroke that remained largely unpublicized until I wrote about it again recently.  This brings up a teddy bear, which he identifies as his bear Thomas.

Noah has written again about Thomas, having been informed of his new found fame. 

"Frankly, I’m just surprised some where-are-they-now TV show hasn’t knocked on our door yet. His brush with Googledom quickly went to his head, and from his beachfront apartment in Los Angeles, he was soon partying every day and spending every night hanging out on the Sunset Strip with Tux the penguin. Then, of course, there was the whole dark turn his life took after leaving California — all those days of spiked salmon and hard honey weren’t very pretty. But I’m glad to say that he’s cleaned himself up now; he’s straightened his bow tie, and is currently working on his comeback photos, taking them around to other companies to be easter-eggified with... last I heard, he’s even in talks to do a reality show with Clippy."

There's also a link to a November 2002 story and photo of Thomas, from long before he was included in Picasa.

Picasa processed mall photos

The "once in a lifetime" wedding days photos from James Mok represent a professional's use of Picasa in their work.

Hin Man represents a quite different demographic - someone who wants to improve the look of more casual snapshots gained from a trip to the shopping mall with a point and shoot.  (Actually I'm doing Hin Man somewhat of a disservice here - his photo blog shows that he's a passionate and talented photographer with a keen eye for a good shot - but he did blog about the mall trip which is sort of the point I'm trying to make).

The mall photos were taken with a Casio ex-z750, which Hin notes sometimes struggles with low light pictures.  To counteract this, he shot all pictures without flash, turning up the ev compensation to +3 and then post processed in Picasa afterwards.  The examples he shows have a number of Picasa's special effects applied - including converting some to black and white.

The article concludes with the comment:

When I find time, I will write up on Picasa in my Tech Corner blog page, it is a wonderful editing tool that everyone can grasp without a long learning curve.

I hope that comes soon - its likely to be an interesting take on the program.  For the moment there is just a short teaser in place on the tech blog which says

I find Picasa very useful in organizing photos and it provides a very complete suite of basic editing tools. I highly recommend it.
More details pending ...

Experiences batch editing with Picasa

James Mok is serious about his photography - witness his flickr pro account, his high end Nikon D2X digital camera, and his easy working familiarity with Photoshop.

So when he has a particularly important assignment - to produce a set of stylish wedding photos for a friends wedding, what does he reach for?  The answer is Picasa of course.  Although it's possible to achieve the washed out tinted and grainy feel that he wanted with Photoshop, the batch editing, and simplicity of the slider controls in Picasa made the job much easier.

Things didn't all go smoothly:

• Picasa works in RGB, rather than sRGB, so for his discerning eye, the end results were initially too saturated - so he redid the originals to desaturate them first in Photoshop, then reapplied the imaging editing to the desaturated images in Picasa.
• On exporting the files from Picasa after editing, the file sizes grew - no doubt a result of a change in the quality settings compared to the input images.

The resultant set of images is available as a flickr photoset.

More Picasa tutorial videos

Atomic Learning made available at techLearning a number of parallel videos showing how to do the same operation to photos using either Picasa on Windows, or iPhoto on the Mac.

The videos are all in the QuickTime format, which requires installing a player to watch them on Windows, though I guess that most Macs should cope with the format already.

The operations covered are:

• Importing Pictures from a Digital Camera (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Reducing Red Eye (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Straighten a Crooked Photo (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)

These were published in January 2006, so relate to the older version of Picasa, rather than to Picasa 2.5.

These videos are part of a wider set of short videos about Picasa available direct from the Atomic Learning site.  There are two additional free videos there

• Understanding the Library View
• Working with Folders on Disk collection

and the full set of tutorials available to subscribers includes

• Adding pictures to Picasa
• Importing pictures from digital camera
• Managing how Picasa finds pictures
• Moving and renaming pictures
• Adding a star rating to a picture
• Adding keywords to your pictures
• Adding a new collection
• Labeling a picture
• Adding an existing label to a picture
• Adding a picture to multiple label collections
• Deleting from a label collection
• Rearranging in label collections
• Saving changes (exporting pictures)
• Zooming and panning in the editor
• Cropping a picture
• Straightening a picture
• Removing red eyes
• Producing an ideal image
• Using Auto Contrast
• Manually adjusting the picture lighting
• Fixing the lighting in one click
• Making your picture warmer or cooler
• Applying amazing effects
• Writing captions for pictures
• Viewing advanced picture information
• Sending photos via email
• Adding your pictures to Blogger
• Sharing your picture via Hello
• Exporting pictures as a web page
• Viewing a slideshow of your pictures
• Using Timeline view
• Searching for your pictures
• Printing your pictures at home
• Exporting pictures to a photo processing website
• Burning your pictures to CD or DVD
• Creating a gift CD with slide shows
• Hiding and unhiding pictures
• Password protecting a collection
• Hiding and unhiding a folder
• Creating a movie from your pictures
• Making a screensaver
• Setting a picture as the desktop background
• Creating a poster
• Making a picture collage

Picasa and hardware devices

I've come across a couple of hardware devices that claim some sort of integration or compatibility with Picasa.

PhotoVu - wireless digital picture frame

The PhotoVu digital photo frame is mostly just like a computer screen (without keyboard, mouse etc) that displays photos.  These photos can be copied to the device via a number of different photo management packages, including Picasa.

The press release announcing Picasa compatibility is not very clear exactly what the integration with Picasa is, but it does mention that the frame can use RSS to directly download images from Picasa Web Albums.

Google Picasa remote control

This other hardware item seems to have even less real integration with Picasa - all it appears to be is a package for using your PC on your TV screen, via a TV like remote control device.

I'm not going to provide a direct link to it, since it looks to be very spam like - and it's promoted by x10 - those masters of the popunder ad.  If you really want to find it then this Google search will currently show you it as the top result.

Using Picasa for student creativity

techLearning has a article entitled "How To Use Picasa for Student Creativity" which is a useful reminder of some fun things even junior school students can do using Picasa.

It suggests:

• create a slideshow
• create a timeline
• create a picture collage
• editing and adding effects to photos
• cropping photos
• making a webpage

The article is accompanied with well done screenshots, with a torn paper edge effect (those weren't done in Picasa!), though unfortunately despite being written just recently, these all show the old version of Picasa, rather than Picasa 2.5.  Some details have changed in the current version, in particular "Make a webpage" is now called "Export as HTML page...", but the activities all still apply.

Just a few days earlier, another article "Going Ga-Ga for Google" on the same site had briefly touched on a number of Google products and sites of great use to educators, mentioning Picasa, video, scholar, calendar, and spreadsheets.  I think they rather missed out an obvious other one there - Google Earth, which has immense educational opportunities. 

Delete thumbnails and the photos vanish too...

Last Sociable Hacker relates a story about his father's use of Picasa.

His father has Picasa installed, and one day found that all the photos had disappeared from the My Pictures folder in Windows. This was strange, since he didn't think he had done anything to cause that, though he did say that "I recently deleted some photos within Picasa but I don't think it had anything to do with it."

It turns out that he thought of Picasa and the underlying disk folders as being quite separate, and saw no reason why deleting items in one should affect the other.  This had been "proved" by deleting some items in the My Pictures folder before, when they remained visible in Picasa (well at least momentarily before the thumbnails were updated).

It's a tricky issue for Picasa to educate their users on.  One of the great points of Picasa is that it does provide isolation between the Picasa view of a photo and what is stored on disk - the Picasa view may include rotation, cropping, and image enhancements which are not visible if you view the image in another program, since (unless you explicitly use the "save changes to disk" feature in Picasa 2.5) Picasa does not affect the original on disk image.  However, this isolation does not extend to deleting images not affecting them!  To be fair to Picasa, it does put up a confirmation box when you try and delete images within it - but if your mindset is that you are only deleting Picasa's (thumbnail) copy of an image, then that confirmation box is unlikely to stop you from going ahead with the delete.

Folder properties in Picasa 2.5

Folders have a large part to play in organizing photos within Picasa, and it is therefore useful to take a close look at what Picasa allows us to do to a folder.

The current folder may be selected by clicking on one of the folders shown in the folder tree at the left of the screen, and this causes the folder and its images to scroll into view on the main pane to the right of the screen.

The display shows

• A folder icon - which if you move the mouse over, the icon shows a more open folder, and a tooltip showing the location of the folder on disk (and clicking this will open that folder in Explorer).
• Alongside the icon is the name of the folder (which Picasa tries to keep in sync with the name used to store the folder on the disk) - double clicking this brings up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the name is the date for the folder, followed by optional "place taken" text - double clicking these also bring up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the date and location is a row of buttons, which depend on which options apply to this folder, and may be hidden or grayed out if they do not currently apply.
• Below the buttons is an optional description for the folder, or the grayed out text "Add a description" if no description has been given. This description can be changed in view, simply my clicking on it, and making the changes in place.
• Finally below all of that, we get to see the thumbnails of items in the folder.

Buttons that may occur in the row of buttons include

• "Select Starred" - which is alway