Creating Slide Shows - PowerPoint & Picasa

Some basic Power Point Info...

WHAT IS POWER POINT:  Gives you the ability to create a slide show combining your photos, text, animation, sound and more… to make your information much more enjoyable.  Power Point presentations have been used in business for years, but today you see them being used at weddings, showers, birthday parties, reunions, memorial services and by groups & organizations.  Students as young as 3^rd grade are using power point presentations to enhance reports and projects.

POWER POINT APPLICATION SOFTWARE

Can be bought individually or it is included as part of the MICROSOFT OFFICE bundle.  The Power Point Application Software is always required for you to create and or modify a power point presentation.

POWER POINT VIEWER: This is a free software offered from Microsoft that allows you to watch power point presentations sent to you via email.  You can then save them on your computer to send to someone else, you cannot however change or modify them in anyway or create your own without the full Power Point Application Software Program.

ADD POWER POINT VIEWER TO YOUR COMPUTER: Go to www.Microsoft.com – on right hand column – choose Downloads & Trials, search for “Power Point Viewer” and when wizard opens up – choose DOWNLOAD NOW button – in a few minutes this free software will be on your computer – follow directions as it adds it…

CAN YOU MAKE SLIDE PRESENTATIONS WITHOUT POWER POINT?? Yes, use Picasa (a free photo editing software program from Google, if you don’t have it, go to www.picasa.com and download for free).  Picasa’s version 3, has both a slide show & movie making application to use and they are easy to work with.. For those with Windows XP or Vista, your windows software has a free program called Windows Movie Maker which works in much the same way as power point and the Picasa applications… and if you have Windows 7 or 8 you can always search for and download

In our next posting we will talk more about using PICASA to create slide shows.. 

Common Digital Photo Image Types: jpeg, raw etc..

JPEG - RAW-GIFT-BMP -etc - what's the difference??

They are all "Digital Photo Image Files" the sizes for which are based on the number of pixels in an image and the color depth, or bits per pixel, of that image and images can be compressed in various ways, which are determined by their "image type"

JPEG	JPEG or JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is the most common Digital Photo Image type that we use.  It's the most common type accepted by 3rd party software programs like Walgreens, Shutterfly, MovieMaker and when uploading to the "clouds"...This is because JPEG's are much smaller than other image files types and ideal for storing images.. Because they are known for accurate color representation they are an ideal format for photographs - but each time a JPEG is saved, the quality becomes degraded
RAW	RAW is a raw image format that some of the better more sophisticated digital cameras use.  RAW format typically requires special software for editing.  RAW image format is used primarily for editing because it gives users complete access to the data the camera sees before any effects are applied.
GIF	GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is used for animations and for storing images with low colors because it's limited to using 256 colors but can be saved repeatedly with no loss, which is why it works well for cartoon-based images.
BMP	BMP's are Windows bitmap image files and also work with limited colors, and is an image file format originally used in Windows-based applications
TIFF	TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is used most often for sending logos and other images to a printer for reproduction, so widely used by photographers and we often see this format when we are using scanner for photos
PNG	PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is the newer version of "GIF" with many of the same features, except PNG supports 16 million colors vs. only the 256 colors of GIF

JPEG or RAW... Which should you choose

Basically, Raw is the unprocessed information straight off the camera's sensor without any processing for sharpness, white balance, color or contrast.

But when cameras take a jpeg image, it takes the info from the camera's sensor and processes it inside your camera with specialized chips to make a final jpeg file.

When you take a "raw photo" you will have to convert it yourself, essentially substituting your own computer and photo conversion software for the specialized chips built into the camera, which will give you more control over how the image ends up--sharper, softer, more contrast, less contrast, white balance, etc.  But the drawbacks to Raw are that you will have to  take the time to convert your digital photo images and the most important drawback is that you can't share raw files as easily as jpeg files, because not everyone has a converter for the raw format

Now that you understand them a little more, for those of you using Picasa Free Photo Editing Software you can modify which types of Photo Image Types your Picasa will Scan/See - When you are in Picasa go to Tools (on Picasa Menu Bar) and choose "Configure Photo Viewer" and when the list appears - Check off which types of digital photos you want Picasa to Scan/See

Which Folders And/Or Sub-Folders Will Your Picasa Scan/See

It is your choice and you can change your mind whenever you'd like as to which folder and or sub-folder it will scan...  

Maybe when you began using Picasa you thought you had to have Picasa Scan/See all your photos - Now you only want Picasa to Scan/see specific folders or sub-folders you want to work on - Then simply change those folders in Picasa's Folder Manager..

Each time Picasa is opened, Picasa will scan the computer to find the folders or sub-folders you have chosen (and photos with the compatible photo file types you choose) and display only the photos in those specific folders or sub-folders.

Photos never move to Picasa, the original photos stay in their original folder locations.

To modify which folders or sub-folders Picasa is Scanning/Seeing from your hard drive or Portable Hard Drives/memory Card or Flash Drives - use these steps once you are in Picasa:

1.    Click the Tools menu in Picasa.

2.    Select Folder Manager.

3.    Select a folder from the folder list on the left that you want to add or remove from Picasa's watch list.

4.    Select one of the following monitoring options on the right:

·       “Scan Always”: Picasa views all compatible image types in these folders, and it automatically adds new photos. Picasa actively scans this folder for changes.

·       “Scan Once”: Picasa accesses all compatible image types in these folders only once. It doesn't detect new photos added to folders with this setting.

·       “Remove from Picasa': Picasa doesn't look in folders that are marked with this status.

5.    Click the OK button to save your changes.

The folders that you've set Picasa to continuously scan are listed in the 'Watched Folders' section.

You can also set a folder to 'Remove from Picasa' by right-clicking (Windows) or Control-clicking (Mac) the folder in Picasa and selecting “Remove from Picasa.”

Remember-you can always change your mind tomorrow on what you've set this setting to by simply repeating the steps and changing your choices... 

Rename digital photos quickly & easily

Summer is almost over – an no doubt we all have taken lots of photos – now to file them so we can find them in the future… As we all know when we take digital photos our camera names each photo with a number unique to that camera.. So once we’ve moved them to our computer, it’s helpful to rename them with a name that we can recognize. 

Personally I rename ever photo with the date it was taken and a brief name of the event… But it’s time consuming and totally unnecessary to do each photo individual – so let the computer do it for you – and that can be done using either Windows Explorer (open this with the Windows Flag Key & letter E) or for those who you Picasa you can do it there…  Here’s how…

In Windows Explorer - Use the Detail View and Sort by Date Created Or Modified so you can easily put your photos in order that they were taken before renaming them

• Select/Highlight your group of photos in your folder that currently have the camera numbers.  To highlight them either use CTRL+A for all, or use your shift or CTRL keys to select a group of random photos…
• Once the photos are highlighted that we want to “rename” right-click on the first photo, when the action menu appears, choose “Rename” from the menu. When you rename the first image in the group, all of the others you had selected will also get that name, followed by a consecutive number o they will remain in the order that you took them…
• This is a fast and easy way to group similar pictures together in a single folder. If you wanted to undo the batch renaming, all you’d need to go is highlight them all again, right-click them and choose the Undo option 

IN PICASA – Renaming a group of photos is called “Batch editing”…

Use batch editing to make the same edits to multiple photos at the same time. For example, use batch editing to auto-correct redeye for an entire album at once. Please follow these steps:

1. Select/highlight all the photos that you'd like to edit.
2. Click the Picture menu.
3. Select Batch Edit.
4. Select the editing feature that you'd like to apply to all selected photos (such as renaming)

Note.. You can undo edits for multiple photos at once by selecting those photos, then clicking the Picture menu, and selecting Undo All Edits .

In Picasa - what’s the difference between Folders and Albums?

Q: In Picasa - what’s the difference between Folders and Albums?

A: Folders actually contain photos and they use space on your hard drive; whereas Albums, only exist within Picasa.

Lets say you name your folders by date & event, like I do. You might have a main folder for a specific year, then within that year you might have sub-folders by months or events - then within a specific event folder you might have additional sub-sub-folder... For example, you went to California for 2 weeks, so inside a California Trip folder, which is inside your 2011 Folder, you have 3 sub-folders for: 320 pictures in a San Diego sub-folder; 120 in a Hollywood sub-folder and another 280 in a San Francisco sub-folder. Your family and friends might love you, but showing that many pictures to anyone would probably not be a great idea, so we want to “choose some from each city sub-folder, to create a “synopsis” folder or album, to create a slideshow, a book, or other project..

That’s where your Picasa Albums can come in very handy - but it's important you understand albums versus folders....

Folders actually contain photos.
The folders you see in Picasa are the real folders you see when you are looking in your Picture drawer on Windows Explorer (what I call my vault).

• If you delete a photo from a folder in Picasa, the real photo in the real folder on your hard drive, will also be deleted.
• And, when you delete a photo from a folder in your Picture drawer on Windows Explorer (what I call my vault) it will no longer be in the Picasa view.

Albums, on the other hand, only exist within Picasa.
Albums "point to" photos in folders, they don’t actually have their own copies of photos.

• Albums let us create multiple ways to view and organize the photos in your folders.
• If you add a photo to an album, the photo remains in its original folder and Picasa adds a reference to that photo to the album.
• If you delete a photo from an album, the photo remains in its original folder and Picasa removes that album's reference to that photo.
• A photo exists in exactly one folder, but the photo can appear in (be referenced by) several albums.
• If you delete a photo from a folder, the photo will be removed from the folder AND any albums it appears in (because the albums no longer have a photo to reference).

Some of us organize our photos using Windows Explorer by creating a main Project folders in the Picture "vault" for our “copies”, but another way to do that is to create Albums in Picasa, to organize your photos.

Main difference is, if I put copies in a folder in the Main Picture drawer using Windows explorer they are truly copies; whereas albums are not true copies…

So when you use albums in Picasa, you are not using actual space on your hard drive

How to convert music to MP3 format?

How can I change my iTunes or other music, to MP3 format so that I can insert them when I am creating a photo video in Movie Maker or Picasa Movies?

This is very easy and a very common question - whether your are using a PC with windows software or a MAC. When we purchase and download music from various vendors or when we rip them CD's, they typically come over the “fullest” version.

However when we want to create a project, using software such as Picasa Movie and or Windows Movie Maker, many of these application programs will not allow us to use the “fullest” version of the music because it is too large.

So when we open the music files from these programs, although we know the songs are there, we don’t see them - the file appears to be empty; so we need to change/convert the music to MP3 format, which all these programs accept - follow these steps:

• Simply open your iTunes or media player
• Be sure on the left you have chosen music as the media folder you want to see, and then find the album or individual song you want to convert to “MP3 format”..
• Highlight the song/songs that you want to convert in the playlist
• Go to the menu bar: in Windows choose Edit and on a Mac/iTunes – Choose iTunes
• When the menu bar drops down, choose Preferences,
• When the Preferences Dialog Box Opens, be sure you are on the General tab
• Now Choose Import Settings (about the center of the dialog box-right side)
• When the Import Settings Dialog Box opens, Change AAC Encoder to MP3 Encoder
• Also be sure High Quality is chosen and then click OK

Now, be sure your songs are highlighted that you want to change

• Right Click on the songs and when the action menu list appears, choose MP3 Version
• You’ll see the songs being converted
• You are done..

Notes:

• Next time you open the music folder from Picasa or Movie Maker you will see the songs as MP3 format and be able to include them in your video..
• You will now have 2 versions of every song – the original “full” version and the more condensed MP3 version

How to manage what photos are in Picasa

I DON’T WANT ALL MY PICTURES IN PICASA – I WANT TO CHOOSE WHEN AND WHICH PHOTOS ARE IN PICASA?

This can be done, but remember you cannot disable the initial scan for photos after installing Picasa – after you have downloaded Picasa to your computer, it will ask you to make one of 2 choices:

• Scan your My Documents, My Pictures drawer OR


• Scan your entire computer, which would mean all drive’s plugged in

But once this is done, you can use the Folder Manager to specify which folders on your computer Picasa should scan in the future.

• Once the initial scan begins in Picasa, click the Tools menu.


• Select Folder Manager


• In the Folder Manager, exclude all folders that you don't want to include in Picasa


• Once you have made your selections, click OK

So, for those of you who only want pictures or folders in Picasa when you want to edit those specific folders or pictures; simply remove all folders from Picasa. Now when you want to work on a specific photo or folder, simply drag the photo (s) or folder (s) to Picasa to the Picasa editing screen once you have opened your Picasa…

How to Scan Photos Using Picasa

In our last blog posting, we described how to scan photos and documents to your computer using Picasa. Picasa is Google’s Free photo editing software – if you don’t have this on your computer, you can go to www.picasa.com and download it)..

Scanning allows us to save our photos and/or documents onto our computers in “digital format”. Most all-in-one printers today have built in scanners, but we often hear they are confusing to use. So, for an easy option, Picasa might be the right choice for you…

Once you get going, you'll find that you can easily scan 50-60 or more photos in an hour (and this is true whether you use Picasa, your scanner's software or your operating system software such as Windows Photo Gallery, so it’s a great winter or rainy day project… And it’s wonderful to know that those old family photos won’t be lost.. Here's how:

• Be sure your computer and printer/scanner are on
• Open your “Picasa” application software program
• Always scan just one “1” photo or one “1” document at a time
• Put the photo on the glass of the scanner – face down
• In Picasa, click ‘Import’
• Click the arrow for the drop down list of devices. You'll see your scanner listed, select it
• Each scanner shows a different screen, but I believe all have an option to "Preview"
• Click the "Preview" option and now you'll see your photo
• If you want to crop the photo you can do it now or save the entire photo & crop later
• Once you're happy with, Click the button to Scan
• When it’s done scanning, you’re back at the standard Picasa Import screen
• Click Import all
• Select or create a folder to put it in
• I usually name mine: "Scan & today's date - i.e. Scan 2011.11.2"
• Now my first and subsequent photos scanned today will go in that folder
• Tomorrow I would create a new folder & name it with the correct date
• This way I can either name each individual photo or number them 1, 2, 3 etc..
• Once the photos are in the folder you want, you can certainly export them to your 'My Picture/Picture drawer - in whatever folder you want them in"

Tip: Once you have completed your scanning for the day, some of the Picasa forums recommend that you use Picasa’s Batch Edit command, and choose “I’m Feeling Lucky” and “Sharpen” to all of the photos in the “Old Photos-Today’s Date” that you just created… you can always open this again later to do individual editing of each photo you’ve now saved on your computer..

Note: In our classrooms, the Scanner is hooked up to one specific computer, so that is where your photos will be saved. Once they are in your specific folder, and if you want to move them to another computer in the classroom or your home computer, simply copy the entire scan folder you just created to your flash/removeable drive and then copy them to the computer of your choice...

What does Download & Upload mean?

When we “download” something – we are bringing “it” from the source we are connected to on the Internet to our computer. Such as, we might "download" music, videos or photos from a website we are visiting to our computer so that we can save it for future use. It is very common today to purchase software from an online store or source and then “download” the software to our computer. In all cases – when you download something – the original remains at the source you are copying it from. You are downloading a copy - never the original.

When we “upload” something we are sending a copy of “it” from our computer to the source we are connected to on the Internet…- such as when we want to order or share photos, we will “upload them” or send a copy of them to Walgreens, CVS or Picasa web albums so that we can then access them from anywhere in the world; when you add an "attachment" to an email, a copy of the original is being "uploaded" and attached it your email.. In all cases – when you upload something – the original remains on your computer – it is simply a copy of that original that is uploaded and sent to the source

Sharing Photos Safely on the Internet

Today more and more of us are sharing our photo’s with others online. This can be done today using our digital cameras and cell phones as soon as the events happen.. No doubt, these options are another wonderful way of using technology but it’s important to be sure you are sharing your photos safely..

Almost all cell phones today have cameras, and because most of us carry our cell phones with us all the time - and the quality of the cell phones cameras have and continue to improve almost daily - they are becoming a popular way to post photos as soon as we take the picture...We may post them to our online photo-sharing accounts (such as Picasa Web Albums, Walgreens, Snapfish, PhotoBucket etc accounts, our blogs, mobile blogs (called moblogs); personal Web sites; or share them via our e-mails and IM - no doubt sharing our photos and videos has never been easier.

But it’s important to carefully manage who sees your digital images, from photos to videos, is critical to avoiding the potential exposure of private or personal information to people outside your trusted friends and family. The same pictures and videos you want to share with friends and family may contain information that also has value to criminals.

Only use reputable sites (such as Picasa Web Albums, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish and others we’ve discussed in class) and only share photos that contain identifiable information with people you trust.

To make photos with identifiable information safer to share publicly:

• Use a photo editing tool such as Picasa that we work with in our classes, or Windows Photo Gallery to cover up or crop out information that could put you or the people in your photos in harms way, such as house or apt. numbers, street names, name of your school or business, etc – Photo Editing sites allow you to blur small sections of your photos, so you can then put them online safely.


• Remove metadata from the photo. Some sites allow viewers to see the settings used to take the photo, the time and date when the photo was taken, and even show the geographical coordinates of the place where the photo was taken if the camera or camera phone documents this information. The last thing you want "just anyone" being able to see is the actual address of your home, school or day care center when you took pictures of your kids or grandkids...


• Change/reduce the resolution of the photo – because lower resolution makes it less likely that others will copy the photo.

Configuring iTunes for Music Downloads

Before you can start downloading and/or converting songs in your iTunes library, you need to select an audio format to convert to: To do this:

1. Be sure you your iTunes library/account open
2. Click edit (from the main menu at the top of screen) and then click preferences.
3. Select the advanced tab and then the importing tab.
4. Click on the import using drop-down menu and select an audio format (such as mp3 which is my personal favorite to use in most free movie making and other project software or wav).
5. To change bitrate settings, use the settings drop-down menu .
6. Click the OK button to finish.

Note-many of the songs we purchase today are downloaded in mp4 or another format and are often too large to be used in some project software, such as Picasa's movie making; Windows Movie Maker, Power Point and some mp3 players - so personally I always download all music to my computer using the mp3 format, so I can use it just about anywhere anytime...

Picasa "free download" for Digital Photo Editing

PICASA** (a Google product) is a FREE award-winning software used for working with photos, on your PC, from emails, disk, CD-Rom and digital cameras. It works on PC’s and MAC’s and can be downloaded in just minutes from the Picasa or Google website.. Note that Picasa's newest version #3, can only be used with Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. If you are using an older “Operating System” such as Windows 98, 2000, ME, then you will continue to use Picasa Version 2

Picasa helps you find and organize all your pictures – once it is on your computer and you start/open the program it will scan your hard drive to find and automatically organize all your pictures.

PICASA FINDS THE FOLLOWING IMAGE AND MOVIE FILE TYPES:

• Image file types: JPG, GIF, TIF, PSD, PNG, BMP, RAW (including NEF and CRW). GIF and PNG files are not scanned by default, but you can enable them in the options dialog.
• Movie file types: MPG, AVI, ASF, WMV, and MOV.

Try it today - not only is this an easy to use "photo editing program to brighten, crop, change colors to sepia and/or black & white and lots of other great editing tools, but you can create slide shows, save your slide shows easily to gift cd's & dvd's, order photos from various vendors, post complete photo albums on line using Picasa Web Albums - that can be then added to your BLOG, turn your photos into movies including text slides and music, label your photo's with the newest Picasa name Tags and GeoTagging and much much more - and Picasa has a wonderful tutorial help section to make it easy to learn the program and again, it's all FREE..

To download it, go to their website: www.picasa.com

Tutorial for Picasa's many features

There are so many wonderful features to use in Picasa ~ a great free software program from Google, that allows you edit and be creative with your digital photos..

If you don't already have Picasa on your computer, just go to their website and download the free software - it's easy and only takes a minute... you may be pleasantly surprised by all the photos it finds on your computer that you knew you had but couldn't find!!

www.Picasa.com

For those of you who do have Picasa and are confused or not sure how to use some of the many features - such as their new picnic editing; name tags which recognizes faces; creating a movie; using web albums to share entire photo folders, geotagging and much much more - Google has a great tutorial website that will work with you on all these wonderful features... This is definitely a website that should be in your favorites...

www.picasatutorials.com

So if you are bored on these cold winter days... experiment with your digital photos and videos and you'll be amazed at all you can do and how easy it is...

DOWNLOADING PICASA 3

PICASA (a Google product) is a FREE award-winning software used for working with photos, on your PC, from emails, disk, CD-Rom and digital cameras.

**PICASA’S NEW VERSION 3, can only be used with Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. If you are using an older “Operating System” such as Windows 98, 2000, ME, then you will continue to use Picasa Version 2

Downloading Picasa to your computer is quick and easy and again FREE - Just open your Internet and on the Internet address toolbar, type: http://www.picasa.com/

• Click on the button that says “DOWNLOAD PICASA”
• This brings you to a dialog box where you must choose whether to “RUN” or “Save” the file, Click “RUN”.
• Depending on your Internet service speed, this may take a few minutes
• Another dialog box will appear asking: Do you want to RUN the software? Click RUN
• The software should be installed on your computer. If you’re asked other questions, respond “yes” or “OK”. Picasa 3 will be installed on your PC
• Picasa then will search over your whole computer for pictures or merely look in the “MYPICTURES” directory. I prefer the MYPICTURES directory only, but you can choose whatever option you wish
• The Picasa Icon is now created and on your desktop (and you can add it to your Quick Launch)
• The Picasa Media Detector should be installed on the system tray in the taskbar toolbar. This is necessary so that Picasa 3 can add any new photos that are added to the MyPictures folder.

Picasa software allow you to:

• Create quick & easy photo Slide Shows- with or without music
• Easy to view Photo Library
• Numerous quick & easy photo editing tools including red eye reduction, cropping and changing photos form color to black & white or sepia
• Photos can be sorted by folder or timeline
• Great tools for printing - wallet, 4 x 6 or full page
• You can convert you photos to movies with sound & motion
• You can easily upload your photos to an online web album for easy sharing
• Or identify all "faces" in your photos for easy sorting-called tagging
• and much much more...

Once you have download the free software, like all Google products, there are great tutorials which will help you learn to use the software - or join us in class...

What is Picasa Movie Maker?

Picasa is a free “Google” digital photo editing software for anyone who has a PC or MAC. For anyone using Picasa Version 3+, there is a wonderful feature “movie maker” that allows us to quickly and easily convert any photo folder on Picasa into a slideshow/movie..

Picasa software is easy to use, but a few tips on using Movie Maker..

Once the Picasa folder is highlighted, simply choose the “CREATE MOVIE” icon which is:

• located above every Picasa album and also located in the action bar at the bottom of the Picasa screen

Once this icon is selected the movie is created and you can now make other enhancements to personalize your movie...

You can enhance your movie by uploading a song - an audio MP3.
When you add music, you will have several options as to how the music will work with your photos - If you choose ‘fit photos into audio’, Picasa will space your photos to fill the length of the song you have chosen

You can choose various transitions, how your slides will appear on the screen, such as “PAN & ZOOM” seems to be the most popular

You can also rearrange your photos, you can add captions, you can add slides that contain just text AND throughout the process, you can “view” your movie to see how it looks and sounds…

When you are finished you can save it to the computer, send via email, share with Skype, save to your Picasa web albums for easy sharing, or export/upload directly to YouTube or other social networking sites…

Your finished movie is saved and will then be uploaded as a.mov file.

And you can re-edit the movie later if we want to change –remove or add photos..

Try it today – go to www.picasa.com

Picasa - Geotagging Photos with Google Earth

You need to have Google Earth and Picasa installed on your computer to use this feature. This feature is not currently available in Picasa for Mac.

Download Picasa - go to http://www.picasa.com/

Download Google Earch - go to http://www.earth.google.com/

The easiest way to match your photos to a specific location is to use Google Maps in Picasa. However, you can also use the original geotag feature in Picasa, which launched Google Earth to accomplish the same thing. Geotagging your photo does the following:
• Embeds location information within your photo.
• Displays your photo on a satellite map rendered by Google Earth.

To geotag a photo, follow these steps:

1. Select the photos in Picasa.
2. Click the Geotag button in the Photo Tray. Google Earth opens up and a small Picasa window appears in the lower-right corner.
3. Navigate and zoom to the location in Google Earth that corresponds with where your picture was taken, and place the yellow cross-hairs on your chosen spot.
4. Click the Geotag button to place the selected photo. You can also click the Geotag All button to tag all of the selected pictures with the same location information.
5. When all of your pictures are geotagged, click the Done button to finish the placement.
6. When you exit Google Earth, click the Yes button to save the geotagged locations in your 'My Places' folder.
7. You'll then be able to access the photos in 'My Places' any time you open up Google Earth.

Picasa will write the longitude and latitude to the photo's EXIF GPS metadata. You can view this data (GPS Latitude and Longitude) by right-clicking (Windows) Control-clicking (Mac) a geotagged image in Picasa and selecting Properties. Geotagged photos are marked in Picasa by a small cross-hair icon on their thumbnails.

Digital Cameras - Zoom: Optical vs. Digital

If you want zoom power, Only Optical Zoom Matters

Optical zoom uses the optics (lens) of the camera to bring the subject closer – 3x optical zoon was quite common on Digital Camera’s but today we often see 10x or 12x zoom – The higher the Optical Zoom, the better.

Digital zoom is strictly an invention (and in my opinion hype) of digital video cameras. It is not uncommon to see digital videocams with 300x digital zoom – so when a digital camera is advertised with 3x digital zoom, no big deal. You can achieve the same 3x (and in fact as much as you want) digital zoom effect in an image editing software, such as Picasa or Photoshop. It is much more advantageous to do your “cropping/editing” later, so that you can then decide exactly which portion to crop and how much to enlarge (3x, 4x, …). If you do it in camera, image quality is irreversibly lost and you use valuable battery power.

What to do with the digital photos you are taking?

Here we go again – taking lots of photos and then stashing them in our computers – like we’ve done over the years with photos that weren’t properly identified with whose in the photo, when it was taken or where – we meant to do that, but life got in the way.. Now it's the digital age and we're doing the same thing when we put them in our computer instead of in a box, bureau drawer or closet… We hope these ideas will help you as you build your photo library on your computer

When you copy photo's from your camera's memory card to your computer to the "My Picture or Picture" folder it is beneficial to immediately create a folder indicating what the event is - better yet, consider having master folders for each year, and then sub-folders for the 12 months during the year and within the months, sub-folders for specific events... When you want a particular photo (s) in one of these sub-folders, simply create a new folder with the project name on it, or to email, or to print, and copy the photos you want from the various folders, to the project folder; done with your project-empty/delete the folder - and you will know that the original photo is safe in the correct folder...

Editing photos using Google's "Picasa" a "free photo editing software program" that allows you to easily and quickly edit your photos, crop them - improve color, change to sepia or black & white, add soft focus lighting or enhance them in a variety of other ways; upload them to web albums to share with friends & families or to add to your blog, create collages, movies, print them and many other wonderful features... and it's all free...
to download this free software, go to http://www.picasa.com/ and follow the download wizard

Windows Movie Maker: another free software, that will allow you to create movies with your photos and enhance those movies with with animation and music that you've downloaded from your favorite CD's. Again, this software is free and easy to work with - finished movies can be saved to CD's or DVD's for gifts or personal use..
This free software is included on all computers with Windows XP & Vista and can be downloaded to those pc's with Windows 7 - for more info on this go to the following hyperlink:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/02/11/windows-movie-maker-2-6-available-for-vista-windows-7/

Create and Publish your own book: another free software from either http://www.blurb.com/ or http://www.lulu.com/ that allows you to create and publish your own book - either all photo's, all text, or a combination of both... Sizes, styles, paper choices all vary depending on what you want and your budget... when you go to these websites - you can download their free book creation software - blub.com uses "booksmart" and you can then create your book in your own time; personally I know of people who've taken over a year - so no rush.. once the software is on your computer you can work at your own pace...

Hopefully we've given you some food for thought - we will share more ideas with you in the weeks ahead, including digital scrapbooking and more. If you have a suggestion, send it to us so that we can share it with your fellow students... In the meantime - enjoy...