Picasa

[n5lp]

As a moderator I have occasion to edit posts to make the photos show up. Sometimes I can go back to the hosting site and figure out a way to edit the links to make it work, often I can not. Some of the sites seem to allow only a small version of the uploaded photo or the original size, which almost always is too large for this forum.

I haven't learned all the sites, but I do know that Picasa works very well for any size original and is free.

If you haven't used it, I will try to lead you through the procedure I use. First you need to go to the website http://picasa.google.com/ and set up an account and download the uploader, which is a separate application.

Once you have the Picasa Web Albums Uploader on your computer, the rest is easy. You start the Uploader application and merely drag your photo, of any size to the "Drag Photos Here" box. Then you click on the upload button with the option of "Actual Size" or any of the other options will probably work well. This will put your photo on the Picasa server, along with all the rest of your uploaded photos. I have 31 photos on my page, mostly other peoples photos, and have used about 1% of my allotted space.

When you want to use a photo in your post to the forum, you click on it at the Picasa page. In the lower right portion of the resulting page there is the choice "HTML to embed in website." Pick that. Under the "Select Size" menu option, pick "Large 800px." That makes it just the right size for this forum. In the "HTML to embed in website" box is a bunch of gibberish. Copy that gibberish. In the post you are making, click on the image icon that looks like a yellow landscape photo, with mountains and the sun, in the icons above your post. A box will come up with highlighted text starting http://. Paste over the highlighted text. The gibberish that you copied will now be in the box. Now you need to edit the gibberish. Start at the end and delete everything after .jpg. Then go forward toward the start of the link and delete everything before the last occurence of http://

Press return now and your photo should be in the post when you select "Preview Post." If it isn't showing when you select that button, there is a problem.

Rats, now that I have written all this stuff out, I see that it looks really complicated, but maybe it will help?

[Ironflight]

Well, it looks complicated Larry, but it is exactly what I do, and once a person has done it once or twice, it becomes second nature - so I encourage people to plow through it a couple of times....it's no harder than deburring a wing rib!

Aside from the web posting capability, Picasa is the easiest off-line picture organizer/viewer/editor I have found!

Paul

[DeltaRomeo]

Thanks for that write-up, Larry. I don't remember who turned me on to Picasa, but I've been happily using it for years.

b,
d

[Mike S]

Originally Posted by Ironflight

Well, it looks complicated Larry, ---- Paul

Boy, aint that the truth.

So much so that I dont even care to make the attempt.

Why cant we just do a "Copy/Paste" or a "Drag/Drop" type of operation????

If not into the actual text box in the site, (I keep hearing reasons using the term "Bandwidth, whatever that is) how about a magic little button up above the text (with all the other little magic buttons) that opens up a window which will allow me to either C/P or D/D the photo, not a link, into it????

Then something inside the magic window makes it all work----and the photo ends up in the message

Is that why they call them "Wizard"s??? Small window opens, you do something in there, magic happens, and all is good??