Thepipbuzz

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog. Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.   And it is still available for you to use on your computer, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive. For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because: The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does. It lets you control the size of the uploaded file It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages. Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with t...

This article explains what has happened to Picasa-web-albums, why it is now re-directing to Google Album Archive, and what you can do about it. Back in July 2013, I described how many people who started  Picasa-web-albums  were being immediately re-directed to Google+ photos and what they could to to return to using PWA again without being re-directed . Quite a few things have changed since then   In particular, Google have: Changed their strategy around Google+ Released Google Photos and retired Google+ Photos Changed the Picasa-web-albums re-direct to go to Google Photos instead of Google+ Photos Stopped supporting Picasa ( announcement ) Stopped supporting Picasa-web-albums ( announcement ) Released a new tool called Google Album Archive , which gives you access to photos, photo-albums and data about photos that you created in Blogger (and other Google tools) - which isn't available in Google Photos . Changed the re-direct on Picasa-web-albums, so that it g...

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums.  It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums. Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums and your PC An introduction to Picasa . describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums.  A key difference between is that : Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and  Picasa-web-albums is a Google program that you use through your web-browser  and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored. Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.    Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos for each ...

This article shows how to manage your Google+ Page's photo collection using Picasa-web-albums. Recently I described how to always use Picasa-web-albums, rather than Google+ photos , to work with the images that are stored in your Google account. One issue was that there was no way to use PWA to work with the photo's uploaded to a Google+ Page, rather than an individual Google+ profile. And this was highlighted when Google introduced an auto-enhancement feature which  could be disabled using Picasa-web-albums , but not using Google+ Photos. However a new feature introduced to Google+ Pages means that you can work around this. How to access Google+ Page photo albums using Picasa-web-albums Set up a separate password for your Google+ Page. . Log out of Google / Blogger / Picasa-web-albums (if you log out of one, you are generally removed from the others too). Log back in again , but this time using your newly created Google+ Page account. Point your web-browser to Picasa-web-al...

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website. The Image gadget Dry dock in Claddagh Basin A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use an Image gadget (previously called a Picture gadget). This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up on all screen and is linked to somewhere. Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go in other places too (header, footer, etc). Follow these steps to add a picture gadget in Blogger 1  Make sure you know where the original picture is  and that you have copyright permission to use it . 2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet. ( This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's alread...

This article shows how to let another person (Google account) upload pictures to your Picasa-web-albums:   this is one possible way to work around the issues with Google's photo auto-enhance feature. Picasa-web-albums and your Google account Previously I've described Picasa desktop vs Picasa-web-albums , and noted that you can upload pictures to your PWA folders using either of the two pieces of software. Each album and folder in Picasa-web-albums belongs to one Google account (which may or may not have an associated Google+ account ). Google now provide a tool to transfer Picasa-web albums from one account to another - but only once ever in the life-time of the album.   You cannot transfer ownership to one person now, and to another person in  a year's time (which is quite different to the way you can easily transfer other aspects of your blog to a new owners ). And Google also provide a way for an account owner to let another Google account add photos to the owners ...

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos. Picasa-web-albums vs Google+ Photos Picasa-web-albums is a on-line photo storage and management tool, now owned by Google.   It is the on-line version of Picasa, a desktop-tool.   (Learn more about PWA and Picasa here .). Google would ideally  like everyone to use Google+ Photos. But there are many people who store pictures in albums that are not associated with their personal Google+ accounts:  these may be for businesses, schools, clubs, etc. So it is likely PWA will continue to exist for a good while yet.   And I am sure that Google appreciate this:  they have made a number of changes to Picasa-web-albums to make it work better both with Google+ and without it. Options for editing pictures that are are uploaded to Google If you have a Google+ account, then there are two ways of editing photos that you have loaded to Goog...

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums. A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC. Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger. Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc).  Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service. Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, water...

This article shows how you can make a slideshow of all the photos from an album in your own Google Plus Photo collection, which can be shown on a website or blog. Sharing a photo album from Google+ Photos Google's help-pages note that you can share a Google Photos album using a link - and is a good option for showing your photos to people who are outside of Google+. But what are the options if you want to show a Google Photos album, not just an individual picture, in your blog or website? Put the link in your website. But that just gives bland, boring text, like click here to see my photos. Put one picture in your website, labelled "click this photo to see the rest", and link it to your Google Photos album. But that just shows one photo - and it takes people away from your website when they go to view your photos. Load each photo from the album individually to your website. That's fine for 2-3 or even 10 photos. But what if you've got dozens or even hundreds - ...

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos. Update - August 2016 The article below was written in 2013, and has remained correct until very recently.   But changes which Google started rolling out from 1 August 2016 mean that it is now obsolete.    See the article Picasa-web redirects, August 2016 update for more information. The following article is kept here for historic purposes only. What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums? If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums ), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos . When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:  " Click  here  to go back to Picasa Web Albums. " But if you do something in Googl...