I want to clarify how some of them work, so you can make the most of the tools at your disposal.

Cell handles

First off, let me tell you about the various cell handles that Excel makes use of. You use a cell handle by hovering the mouse on various parts of the screen. Fire up Excel and try this for yourself. Nothing beats a little practice.

I’m going to show you this in Excel 2007, but only the most advanced options are version-specific. You’ll be fine. One thing though. If you don’t use the default Windows mouse cursors you might see different sorts of shapes. Change it back to the defaults until you get the hang of this.

Select

You already use this one, if you use a mouse at all. Hold the mouse anywhere within the confines of a cell in a spreadsheet, and the mouse cursor becomes a small white cross. Hold the left button down and drag the mouse to select all the cells you slide over, in a rectangular shape. That’s it.

Move

If you hold the mouse over the edge of a cell, then it behaves differently. It’s quite common for people to do this by mistake, but it’s easy to avoid if you take a look at the cursor. It should be a thin black cross with arrow-heads on it.

The move handle does exactly what you would think. It moves the current cell, or the current block of cells if you have more than one selected. It’s smart though. If the cell you are moving is referenced by formulae in other cells, each formula is automatically adjusted so everything still works.

One safety tip. Make sure the cursor isn’t over the small black square in the bottom right corner of the cell. You’ll be doing something completely different. I’ll explain that soon.

Copy

To copy cells instead of moving them, put the mouse in the same place, and hold down the Control (Ctrl) key. The cursor changes back to a white arrow, with a small black cross beside it.

The behaviour is a little different now. If you drag the mouse to another location, the cell or cells you have selected will be copied and pasted there. If the cell contains a formula, it will change its references just the same as it would if you have used copy and paste. The contents of the cell you are copying from will not be changed.

Fill

Now this is the interesting one – the Excel fill handle.

If you hold the mouse over the bottom right corner of the cell or cells selected, the cursor will change to a simple black cross. That’s the Excel fill handle, and it does some cool stuff.

First off, if you have a formula in the cell, and you want to copy it to some adjacent cells, you can do that.

Hold the left button…

…and drag the mouse down (or to the right).

Release the mouse.

What happens in this case is the same thing as you would have achieved with the copy example further up. However, if the cells don’t contain formulae then the behaviour is different.

If the cells involved have a discernable pattern, then Excel will attempt to extend that pattern as best it can.

So imagine the above example again, but pretend, just for fun, that it contains 500 rows, instead of the four shown. You’re suddenly required to apply numeric codes to the items…

Create the first two, or however many are needed to establish a pattern. Hover over the fill handle…

… and drag the cursor down over the next two (or 500) cells.

Note the indicator to the right of what the final number will be. Release the mouse.

That’s it. The series of numbers is extended down over the other cells. Note that all the cells contain the actual values, not a formula.

You can use this for much more complex operations, none of which I have room for in this post, including complex lists, custom lists, and copying a formatting pattern along with the value pattern.

So tell me, do you use the handles? Did you already know what they do? Have you ever used the Excel fill handle by mistake? I certainly have. What else could I cover in Excel that might be useful?

Let me know in the comments.

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I’ve been using both Vista and the Windows 7 RC, and the official recommendation for those platforms for raw copy tools is to use Robocopy, rather than the rather dated XCopy.

Robocopy has a GUI that leaves a lot to be desired, and Microsoft have been quietly pushing a free tool called RichCopy, so you would think there were plenty of options, but I’ve had an awful time with everything except for the barbaric option of running Robocopy from the command line, so I was really on the hunt for something less official.

FreeFileSync (FFS) takes the sting out of synchronising local backups. I’d still go some other places for Internet backups, and this isn’t the tool for scripted synchronisation either, if you’re headed down that path. Robocopy is great for that.

There isn’t much information available about FFS, so it’s just as well that it largely seems not to need it. Download, install, start, and get things done. It’s that easy.

I have an ongoing need to ensure that I have my photographs saved in at least two places. I have another copy that leaves the building with me as well, but we’re just looking at the locations I can see on the network for this.

When FFS is started, you can see a fairly straightforward interface.

The idea is to put the source location in the left column, and the destination in the right, but the terms are less than distinct, because at least by default, FFS is going synchronise the files in both locations, and will happily update both ways.

In my case I have files in M:\pics that I would like to backup to K:\backups\pic. Just browse to both of those locations, as shown above.

The big compare button does exactly what you might think. It doesn’t move anything anywhere, just takes a look and reports back.

FFS lists the folders and files that need to be copied across,and would also list any that needed to go the other way. This set is pretty straightforward though.

Click the options button to sort out the way you want the synchronisation to happen. You’ll be presented with a list of options which are mostly self-explanatory.

Warning! Take some care in here. If you get these, or the folders you’ve listed in FFS the wrong way around, you could end up deleting files by mistake. Measure twice, cut once!

You can select a main option from the left, and then make minor (but important) adjustments to it on the right.

For instance, if you choose Mirror on the left, you’ll get this list on the right.

What this says is that if you have files that exist only on the left, they will be copied to the right. If you have files only on the right, they will be deleted. If you have newer files on the left they will be copied. If you have newer files on the right, they will be overwritten.

You can also adjust each of these actions, by clicking the green buttons, if none of the major options is what you want.

Spend some time and get familiar with this. Really.

Mostly, though, the requirement is to mirror folders, as in the larger image above.

Once you’ve chosen the option you want, click the Apply button to return to the main screen.

The settings you’ve chosen for this session are displayed above the Synchronize button. Check things are as you want them to be, and then click the button.

You’ll get one last chance… A preview screen is displayed that shows you what is going to happen.

At about this point I’m getting tired of symbols, and wish the application would just put things in English.

The star is the number of files that will be created. The bin shows the number to be deleted. The arrow shows the number to be overwritten, and the pie chart shows the total amount of data that is going to be transferred.

Click Start.

Depending on the amount of data involved, you may or may not see much happen before you are eventually presented with a completion screen.

Click OK to return to the main screen. You’re all finished. Congratulations!

Most folk would like to perform the same sync activity over and over, and FFS has the ability to save and open setups so you can run them again any time.

Click the button with the red arrow to save the config you’ve just been working with, and you’ll be prompted to supply a (would you believe) .ffs_gui file name. Take the offered name or change it to something more useful, and then click Save.

Opening a session is just the same in reverse. Click the button with the green arrow, etc.

That’s it. Now you have one less excuse for not doing backups…

I’d be most interested in any experiences you’ve had with this or other similar products. Do you use any sort of sync tools? let me know in the comments.

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I’m going to show you how to use styles in Word 2007, but if you have an older version you’ll be fine. This stuff is largely unchanged since Word for DOS, and that was too long ago to discuss. Most other word processors have similar capabilities, so don’t despair if you’re not a Word user.

An analogy is the simplest way to approach this, so come outside with me, and take a look at the fence. No, really.

Okay, you work as a painter. You have all the gear. Brushes and paint cans. Overalls. Unfortunately you don’t work for yourself though. Your boss is a nice enough guy, but there’s one thing he does that’s really annoying. He changes his mind at the last minute.

So with this fence, he has told you to paint all the normal pickets white, and the larger posts blue. You’ve put in some time, and the result is great. The boss comes flying by in his new car, takes one look at the fence, and decides the posts need to be the same red as his sports car.

So you need to sand, prepare, prime and paint all the blue posts. Three coats.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of painting the posts blue, you could have tagged them all somehow to say they were the same, called them something sensible, and then just said all ‘posts’ should be blue? Then, when the guy with the Porsche came by, you could tell the system to change all the ‘posts’ to red.

That is exactly what styles do, in Word.

The simplest way to do this is to use the predefined styles.

Let’s put some text in a document to start with. No formatting. Just type it up.

On the ribbon, on the Home tab, there are a number of styles listed. The ones you can see depends on your screen resolution.

The text you have in there now is already using styles. It’s all set using the Normal style. So the first thing we want to do is to change the headings so they look different. That’s easy. Select each of the headings, and click the Heading 1 option on the ribbon.

And you will end up with something like this.

Don’t worry if yours doesn’t look quite the same. If anyone has messed with the defaults for the styles you could have some differences.

Okay, now here’s that same situation as with the fence, right? You’ve taken the document in to show your boss, and he’s told you the headings need to be red. Like his car.

To understand how much time this can save you, you need to think about a report that’s a hundred and fifty pages long, rather than the snippet you have here. If you have gone into each heading, and changed it to Cambria 14pt Blue, and now need to make each of them Arial 15pt bold, and red, you would be in for a lot of effort. With styles, all you’ve done is tag all the headings to say that they are Heading 1, and then taken the defaults as to what a Heading 1 looks like.

So to make them red, we just redefine what a Heading 1 is, and they all change.

How easy is that? Very.

Right-click the same box you used to set the style in the first place…

Click Modify…

And then change the settings as you require. You can see here I’ve made the headings just the way the boss said he wanted them. you can also see a preview of what the result will look like.

Click OK.

All fixed.

It’s worth some effort from the start to try to only use styles in your documents, so that you can quickly deal with the unexpected later. And remember that as the body text is also a style, you can change that.

So, given that your manager has a lot of power, and absolutely no sense of style, let’s apply the next set of crazy requirements.

The main text, for whatever reason, needs to be indented, blue, and italic.

Right click the Normal box:

Easy, right?

But there’s a trap. Once you know, it’s not much of a problem, but it throws people off the first time. Styles cascade. if you work with the web, that might be enough explanation, but if not, it works like this. Most of the default styles are based on the Normal style. By changing the Normal style, which you just did, you change things in other styles as well. So that’s why the red headings are now indented along with the body text, and also italic.

You can fix it a few ways. In this case the simplest is to go back and change the settings for Heading 1 style back the way you want them. Note that anything you already messed with (such as the red) isn’t touched.

We want to change the headings some more anyway, so let’s go and deal with that.

Right-click the Heading1 style. Click Modify.

Porsche-guy wants the headings be inside shaded boxes, so let’s fix the font stuff first, and then go take a look at how to do that.

Instead of clicking OK, click on the Format button.

Click Border…

Follow my example, or format it as you please. Click on the Shading tab.

Find a shading colour and/or pattern both you and the big guy can live with, and then click OK.

You can see an example of what your design efforts will do to the headings.

Click OK again.

Again, think about long documents, rather than something short.

You can also create completely new styles, and assign the styles back to templates so they are always set up the way you want them, but that might have to wait until another time.

So tell me, how do you use styles in Word? How do you find them? Do you have any trouble? Clever ideas? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Step 1 – Show off your best

No one is ever going to know what sorts of photos you are interested in unless you get some of them online. If you take photographs regularly, upload regularly. Really, what excuses do you have?

Second only to getting the images online is making sure they can be found. I’ve spoken about tagging before, but perhaps an example might help?

If you want other folk to find your photos, you need to take some good guesses as to what they might search for, and add those word or phrases to your photo as tags.

Some people like to look at photos of roller coasters. I think this is the only one I have, so I’m not one of those people, but I’m not immune to wanting people to like it. So I’ve tagged the image with the search phrases I think people might use to find it.

Needless to say, your list would differ from mine. I posted this a few years ago as well, and these days I’d probably add ‘roller’ and ‘coaster’ separately as well.

But the focus here is to find other people’s images, so let’s move on.

Step 2 – Join groups

Aside from searching for images in Flickr, you can search for groups. Just in case there is any confusion, a group is like a set, except that it’s designed for multiple people to use. Most groups are public, but you can also restrict the membership of a group.

Search for groups that contain things you are interested in. That could be objects (like roller coasters), colours (careful with your spelling), techniques, moods… I’ll be surprised if you can’t find at least one Flickr group on any reasonably broad subject, and you’ll generally find hundreds.

Join groups. Add images. Comment on other images you find there. Go on.

Step 3 – Create your own group.

Eventually, you might find that you’re searching for something that’s too specific for a group to already exist, and you’ll need to create one of your own. That’s going to take a little more work, so decide if you’re up for it first.

Just as an example, I like to take photographs of rusty things. Peculiar I know, but I’ve even exhibited on the subject, so I’m definitely not alone. Anyway, I became interested specifically in images that were rusty, and also blue. At this point, feel free to substitute your own obsession.

I’m going to cheat anyway, as this group already exists. I’ll create a similar one for yellow rust pictures.

Creation

After checking that a group doesn’t already exist on the subject, create a new one here.

You can see that various types of groups are possible. Given that we’re looking to find people, let’s make it public.

Supply a name for the group, and add some idea of what it’s all about. Make a decision about whether there’s anything that might be in the group that kids shouldn’t see. Click Next.

Decide what non-members of the group should be able to see.

Decide what to call the administrators and moderators.

You can make a whole set of choices about administration, addresses, moderation etc. Just remember you want people to join. Which leads me to the next part…

Invitations

You can use all the means at your disposal to invite folk to your new group. You can email them, send them a text from your phone, put an advertisement on national television. Whatever you like. Flickr has its own method as well, so you can easily invite your contacts.

Go to the main page for your group and look at the top menu.

Click the invite Friends link, and invite anyone you think might be interested.

Of course for this to be useful it assumes you already know the people who might want to join. If you don’t, you need to locate some images that might fit in the group, and invite them instead.  Let’s switch back to my real group of blue + rust to see how this works.

Basically, other than images I stumble across in Flickr, I want to know about images which are tagged with both blue and rust. You see why it’s important to correctly tag your images?

Click the search link on the main Flickr page, and then click on advanced search. You want something like this:

Run the search, and depending on what you’re looking for you’ll almost certainly get back a stack of images.

Click on one that’s of interest (such as my friend Kate’s wheel), and fill in the boxes…

Hit Post Comment, and you’re all set. Take a look at Kate’s image to see how it comes out.

Maintenance

One of the toughest parts of running a group is keeping things moving. You always want new members, more images, interesting competitions and discussions.

Assign some other folk admin privileges so things don’t stall if you’re busy. Start conversations.

The query process above is great for getting things started, but it’s not great for ongoing invitations. You need a way to be automatically told when new images arrive that might suit the group.

That’s where we add a little more technology…

The Flickr API is able to generate RSS feeds on the fly, based on a query string. Then you sign up for the RSS feed, and every few hours you get some more images to invite. How this looks depends on both your browser and your feed reader, but the way it works is fairly clear in the link.

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=blue,rust&tagmode=all&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

Take a look at the query. Just replace blue and rust with whatever you want to search for, separating any additional terms with commas.

And that’s it. Now you have a group, some members, some images, and a way to build on it.

I’d love to know if you’ve used any of this and if you have any other tips or tricks. Let me know in the comments. Oh, and… any chance you might want to join my group?

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However, if you want to create a blog which contains rich media, and you don’t know (or don’t want to know) much about the technology it sits on, then it’s hard to beat the simplicity and capability of Tumblr.

The site, and the technology, are free to use. Customisation capability is high, and advertisements are only very seldom shown.

If you’re an experienced blogger then you might have some trouble with hitting the edges of what’s possible, but the casual or new blogger is in great hands here. For those in the know, a quick note. Tumblr uses templates based on CSS. You can customise that extensively. Now go do that while I talk to the new folk, okay?

How to create a new tumblr site (called a tumblog)

Firstly, like most other sites, you need an account. Click here, and do that. It’s very easy. They want your email address, a password (make it different to your other passwords), and a URL. One note of caution on the last one.

The URL is the address people can find your tumblog on. You can have custom domains with tumblr (that is you can use your own domain name), but for today let’s stick with the basics. You get to choose the part that says differentperspective in the example above. I made some bad choices in the past and now I’m paying for them. Choose something short, snappy and able to be memorised. You’ll almost certainly not get your first choice, but keep trying.

Once you’ve signed up, you’re ready to rock with the content.

Tumblr adds a few dummy posts to your screen so you can see how it’s going to look, then suggests you add a photo of yourself. How about we do that?

Click the Photo icon to start.

You can either upload a local image file, or point to one you have stored on the web. Add some sort of a caption, and click the Create post button. We can look at the other options a little later.

The tumblr folk are a little impatient, and want to help you customise your blog, so let’s do that first, and then we can take a proper look at the post.

Click Customize button. I’ll let the American spelling slide this time…

A whole host of sample content is displayed on the page so you can see the effect you are having on the posts. Click the Theme link, top left, and select one of them to see what it looks like on the samples.

If the themes are in the way, click the Theme link again and they will disappear.

Browse until you find one you like, and then click on Save Changes. If you are worried you’ve done the wrong thing, hit Cancel, and start again.

Tumblr suggests you follow some people next, but I’ll leave that one to you. Click the blue X in the top right of the message, and take control back.

A couple of points. What you can see now is the Dashboard view, and not what your tumblog actually looks like. Click the actual URL for your tumblog to see what it looks like with the assigned theme.

So long as you are logged in, http://www.tumblr.com will always return you to the Dashboard view.

And that’s good, because all the work is done here.

Let’s quickly add a few more posts, and then I’ll tell you about reblogging and tumblarity, I promise.

Tumblr directly supports all of the media types you can see listed at the top of the Dashboard. They all work in similar ways.

• Text – Add a title, and then some formatted text. You can add links and images from the web if you wish.
• Photo – You’ve already seen this. Title, photo from your PC or the web, rich-text caption, and a link if you like.
• Quote – Text of the quote, and the source if you have it. Each theme has a predefined font, colour, size and layout for quotes.
• Link – Title, the URL for the link, and optionally a rich-text description.
• Chat – Not an interactive chat, but a way to record a discussion in such a way as it’s easy to read. Just use alternate lines, and your theme will format it for you.
• Audio – I haven’t used this. I’m not sure about the legality of uploading audio to the site.
• Video – Ditto, but it works just like you’d expect.

Reblogging

It’s very easy, and very common in tumblogs to steal content. That is, to post to your tumblog something you’ve seen on another one. It’s all quite legitimate, and in the rules for tumblr. Reblogging is easy. Make sure you’re logged into tumblr, and then click on a post you like. In the top corner of your page are some buttons.

You can ‘heart’ a post to say that you like it. The owner gets a notification of that in their Dashboard.

You can choose to follow the blog, which means that from now on the posts to this blog will show up in your Dashboard. Not in your blog, just your Dashboard, so you can see them.

The Dashboard link just takes you back to your own Dashboard from wherever you are.

The Reblog button opens the item so that you can post it on your own blog, and it’s very similar to the screen you would have if you were posting it in the first place.

You can go ahead and repost the item from here, changing the caption/description if you wish. Politeness suggests that you leave the trail of links, so that other folk can find their way back to the source.

In some cases you can also change the type of post. For instance, you can repost an image as a link.

Tumblarity

If you’re the kind of person who tracks interestingness in flickr, or your followers in Twitter, then tumblarity is just your sort of thing.

Most of us, however, don’t take it too seriously. It’s a measure of your popularity in tumblr, and there is no reliable information available on how it works. After a few weeks of monitoring it, I claim that it makes no sense at all, and I’m not alone.

Click the Tumblarity link to take a look at the details.

Along the top are some stats on your tumblog, and then to the left is your current score.

You can see your rank in the world ( so long as it is better than 50,000).

You can also take a look at your rank for your own country. Sometimes it’s good to live in a small country.

I can only reiterate two things. Firstly, it doesn’t matter, and you shouldn’t take it too seriously. Secondly, please visit my tumblog and save me!

I’d love to know how this goes for you, whether or not you have any problems, and how you feel about other platforms for similar functionality. Let me know in the comments.

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Here’s my attempt to make up for it.

First off, this isn’t difficult or complicated, and it is very cool. Windows XP and Vista used something called Known Folders as a standard set of places for you to store your files. In XP, the primary folder was My Documents, and there were some additional known folders inside that for My Pictures and My Music.

In Vista, some other folders were added to the picture, but the structure was much the same. There was one major change though. Microsoft removed the ‘My’ part of the names, so we ended up with Documents and Pictures. Windows 7 takes that base and does something stunning with it. Let me explain, and then I’ll show you an example.

Windows 7 contains a set of libraries. Each one works that same way, and they all take the place of the standard folders in XP and Vista.

A Library can be treated like a folder with a group of subfolders inside it, and can also pull some nifty tricks all of its own. The important thing to remember is this: the subfolders are not actually stored in the library. They are just made to seem as though they are. Each library has some default contents, but you can change these, and also create new libraries if you wish.

If you’re feeling a little confused, this example should clear it right up. You won’t need to see your doctor. Relax.

I’m a photographer, so the most interesting library to me is Pictures, but all of this applies to any library you choose. They all sit inside the Libraries, which is available as soon as you start Windows Explorer, so let’s start there.

As you can see, the four default libraries are here. Double-click the Pictures library to have a look inside it.

Inside Pictures is a single folder, called Sample Pictures. Now, come for a ride. It’s 2007, and you’re seriously early to the Windows 7 world. You’ve taken a whole lot of photographs, and you want somewhere to put them. Easy. Create a folder in the library, just the way you do anywhere else. Right-click in the open space, choose new – folder, and give it a name. Like 2007 for instance.

Now double-click that folder to open it, and put all your images in it. Let’s hope you managed to save more images than this, though.

Okay, now so far this is all just the way a folder would work, right? You could also create more subfolders in here if you needed to. No problem. But in this case, you didn’t need to.

Now, a year or so goes by, and you’ve been busy using up disk space with whatever you usually use to fill it. None of my business. in any case, You bought yourself a new-fangled USB hard drive, and plugged it in. It popped up as your E: drive, and you stored some more images there.

All good so far, except that now you have two places to look for images, unless you can remember which year you took them. Library to the rescue.

If we go back to the Picture Library, you can see there’s a link under title. It currently says 2 Locations. Click the link.

By default, the library includes files from your own Pictures folder and also the Windows 7 Public Pictures folder. We want to add another location. The place we stored the 2008 images. Click the Add… button, and browse to the folder that contains the folder you put the images in. So, don’t choose E:\pictures\2008, just E:\pictures.

Click the Include folder button, and then OK.

It might take a while to save the changes…

… but then, you’ll see that a new location has been added, and the photos are now all available in the library, just as though they had been moved there.

So why is this so cool?

• The pictures have not been moved
• The link is live. That is, if you add more folders inside E:\Pictures, then they will also appear in the library
• You can, with the right network setup, add folders from other computers to the libraries
• You can create whole new libraries if you wish

Most importantly, you can view things in the library in ways that you just can’t do with a folder.

Let me just add another folder to keep it interesting. Now that you know how it works, I’ll show you a short-cut as well.

Browse to the location that you have your 2009 pictures stored in…

Now click the Include in library button.

Choose the Pictures library. You’ll get that same delay as the files are added…

Browse back to the library, and you’ll see you have yet another year’s images.

Now, for some “Library-only” tricks.

See the Arrange by option, which is currently set to Folder? Change it to Day.

Now the pictures are sorted by the date on which they were taken. All of this is completely independent of the folders in which the files are stored. Try Month.

I hope you’re impressed.

One more. Try Tag.

I’ve written about image meta-data before. I’ve used some other software to add tags to these images, and now Windows recognises them. So, if I wanted to find all the images taken at Waihi Beach, I just need to do this. Double-clicking on one of the tags opens a folder with all the matching images inside, in date order. Very nice.

Try this with your music files and you’ll have a whole different set of options.

And that’s it. Libraries are great, especially for anyone who has been creating files for some time. But I’d like to know what you think. Will you use them? What for? Let me know in the comments.

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• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Master The Special Effects In Picasa (16)
• [Google Picasa 101] – How To Edit Your Photos (14)
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I’ve talked about Flickr sets before, in terms of how to best get your images noticed.

The Collections are live. That is, if you add more images to the member groups, then the Collections are updated accordingly.

Unfortunately, Sets themselves are static. They contain whatever images you add to them, but there’s no capability within flickr to automatically add images on the basis of any sort of rules.

Ideally, sets would work the way that smart playlists do in iTunes. These playlists are essentially sets of rules, and can be set to update themselves when new tracks are added to iTunes. Until a similar capability is added to Flickr, some clever folks have found ways to achieve similar ends. We plan to take advantage.

All of this requires the use of tags, which are keywords that you can add to your images in Flickr to make them easy to find later. I’ve talked about this before as well.

SmartSetr

The idea here is to set up some rules in SmartSetr, and then have those rules update your flickr sets. It’s pretty easy. Just follow along.

First off, you need to have a Flickr account, and you need to let SmartSetr have access to it, just the way any Flickr add-on works.

After that, click on the Click Here link, just as you might expect.

Create a new SmartSet. First you need to select a type. We’re going to use tags, but some of the other options are interesting, especially the last one, which lets things get quite complex by adding multiple sets of rules.

Fill in the boxes…

The SmartSet title is what finishes up being the title of the set in flickr, and description is added to Flickr as well.

You can choose to use public images, as we have here, or those which you only allow certain groups of people to see.

Sorting the images in the set isn’t exactly intuitive, but the Interestingness Descending option, despite the long-windedness, is usually the best choice. Your most popular images will be shown first.

In the real world, it’s best to stick with the default 500 images rather than the more manageable 10 I’ve chosen here.

Now for the crux of the matter. Add the tags you wish to filter by, with commas between multiple selections. For instance, if you only want pictures of rusty walls in blue, then try rust, wall, blue, using the exact same words you used for tagging the images in the first place. I’m just looking for anything that’s been tagged yellow.

You can say that the resulting set needs to match all of the tags, or any of them, as we have here.

Hit Preview First 50.

SmartSetr will interrogate Flickr, and come back with an example of the set contents.

If you’ve made the right choices, go ahead and hit the Save button. If not, backtrack a little and make some changes.

You’ll finish up on a confirmation screen with links to your set in Flickr, and an Edit link to make further changes to the rules.

On that same screen you’ll find a Refresh All SmartSets option, and that’s the one downside to SmartSets.

They don’t update unless you ask them to. You need to come back to the SmartSetr site, and request it to refresh all your sets any time you want to include new images.

Flickr Set Manager

The second option is very similar to SmartSetr. Let’s run through the same example to see what’s different.

Click on the Manage My Sets link from the main page of Flicker Set Manager, and then click Create New Managed Set.

The interface is a little unusual. Each section is opened by clicking on the title of it. Start with the Title and Description heading first, and fill in the name and description for the set.

Click the Set Type heading, and choose Most Interesting for the sort order, 20 for the number of images, and then we have the major difference between this product and SmartSetr. Flickr Set Manager will automatically update the sets on a daily basis.

Click Text Filtersand add yellow as the only filter.

We’re not going to use the Date or Location filters, but feel free to take a look.

Hit the Preview button to see what the result looks like.

Those are the same images with got with SmartSetr, so click the Back button, and then click on Save.

My new set – along with a couple I’d already created – are listed, and you have the option to Edit Set, Delete Set, or Create New Managed Set. Enjoy.

I use sets a lot in Flickr, and plan to add new ones using one of these webapps. How do you manage your sets? What functionality do you think is missing? What other tools do you use to help? Tell me in the comments.

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What’s that all about?

Just so we’re all on the same page, GReader is a web-based RSS feed reader from Google. If you need to know what any of that means, click the links above. You want to be familiar with RSS and GReader before you try this.

Imagine taking the functionality of GReader, and then rebuilding the visual part of the site. Paring it down, and just leaving what is necessary. It actually takes some getting used to, but once you get there the result is very nice.

Helvetireader is essentially a stack of CSS, packaged in a number of different ways.

Getting your copy

The most likely way you’ll get hold of Helvetireader is by downloading the Greasemonkey script and installing it in Firefox, with Greasemonkey already installed.

You probably don’t need much help with that, but just in case, follow these easy steps:

Take a ride to the Helvetireader site in Firefox (for other browsers, see below), and click on the Install as a userscript option.

Wait for a moment then click the Install button.

Making it work

Refresh your GReader page, and take a look at the differences. That’s it.

Menus

Before

After

Individual feeds

Before

After

Using the result is easy too. Mostly, things are just the same, but you’ll find it’s better to make use of the keyboard shortcuts than the mouse.

Icons for options are sometimes a little less obvious, but the red highlighting in the menus is wonderful.

In the end, it’s more about visual design than functionality for me, but I like it. I’d just like to perhaps see a dark version as well. Photos are my thing, and they generally look better against something other than white.

Other options

If you’re a little more adventurous you can also make use of Helvetireader in other browsers such as Opera, Chrome, Safari and Omniweb. Details at the site again.

Outside my area of expertise, you can also make use of Fluid [Instructions] and Mozilla Prism [Instructions] to turn GReader into a desktop application.

For you low level types, you can also just grab the CSS. The beauty of that is the ability to customise things to get them just the way you want them.

So do you use Google Reader? Is it customised? Are you big on keyboard usage? What add-ons do you use? Let me know in the comments.

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First off, hear this. Most things are the same. Whether you were using XP or Vista, you’ll generally find things in the same places, and find that they work in a similar way… Generally.

And while some things are thoroughly different under the hood, I’m concentrating on everyday functionality here. Sending emails, or writing blog posts.

What’s Changed?

The XP and Vista Task Bars were pretty similar to each other.

System tray on the right, active applications in the middle, and perhaps a toolbar or two on the left.

Windows 7 has a TaskBar too, but this one is a completely different beast.

The System Tray, on the right, works much the same as the old one, though it’s visually quite different…

…but there is no longer a simple distinction on the left between shortcut icons for applications you might want to run, and those for applications already running. The two sets are mixed together, but are differentiated visually.

Icons with borders around them (such as the Firefox one above) are running. The others are just shortcuts for now.

One thing that caught me out for a while was that you can’t run the same thing multiple times the same way as you did in earlier versions of Windows. It’s logical enough though. Hold the shift key down when you click on the icon, and it will start another copy of the program for you.

For instance, in this case there are multiple copies of Windows Explorer running, one each of Firefox and Outlook, and the others are not running at all. It’s different, but it’s good.

The menus have had a design makeover as well, but the functionality is largely the same.

Windows Explorer have additional functionality, but work much the way you might expect.

Windows 7 uses the concept of Libraries to group together multiple sets of folders in handy ways, but you don’t need to understand that to get going.

What did I install on top?

You know, there are some things I just can’t manage without, and even though some of them might not be necessary in Windows 7, I just couldn’t help myself. Among the freeware candidates:

I have it on good authority that IE8 is a wonderful product, and I’m sure I’ll be using it at work, but I have too much time and familiarity invested in the combination of Firefox and Greasemonkey to leave them behind just yet.

I used to be a big Trillian fan, but Digsby stole my heart. I’m keeping it.

I mentioned this in my previous post, but take care installing Digsby, or you’ll get more than you bargained for.

You need music for blog posts.

Trust me.

And iTunes works well for me.

I love this. Phrase Express saves me a LOT of time.

What’s no longer needed?

Taskbar Shuffle is great in XP and Vista, but Windows 7 simply doesn’t need it. You can drag icons around all by yourself. I’m undecided about whether I need IrfanView and Copernic Desktop Search. Ask me in a few more weeks.

What’s broken?

Well, basically… nothing.

I’m not kidding. My requirements aren’t extreme, and I don’t play games, but for my day, it all just works.

I did have an issue with the VMWare player in that it refused to resume an XP VM, but it turns out that I was stupid enough not to shut it down before I shifted to Windows 7. (It’s easily fixed. Delete the .lck files)

I’ve had a recurring issue with my NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT. Every few days, the driver crashes for a moment, and then recovers. That’s much better than the behaviour I have with my laptop running Vista, so I’m not complaining.

More to come?

Could be. I haven’t played with the Virtual XP functionality yet, haven’t hammered IE8, and haven’t done anything to really stress the graphics card other than photo processing. I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, Did you take the leap? If so, how did it go? If not, is there anything else you need to know? Fill me in via the comments.

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Digital Photography School

Tutorials, cameras, accessories, software. You name it, these guys know more than you think they do.

I’m constantly impressed with both the depth and breadth of knowledge here. I keep track of their RSS feeds on a daily basis, and they are responsible for a substantial proportion of the time I spend in front of my screen instead of out with the camera.

Interesting recent articles include a post on time-lapse photography and a review of the R-Strap camera strap replacement from BlackRapid. These things are cool, and I really want one.

If you use Lightroom or Photoshop, or just spend too much time at the computer after a session with the camera, the Post Production section is just what you need, but check out our own Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop first.

DPreview

If you’re a camera geek and you really need to know the specifications of your existing or next machine, it’s hard to beat this site.

dpreview takes reviews to a new level.

All of the specifications on all of the digital cameras I’ve ever owned. Great comparisons, wonderfully reasonable advice.

It’s the depth of this stuff that’s stunning. I recall waiting impatiently for weeks a couple of cameras back because I was unwilling to slap down a credit card on anything until I’d checked it out on here. And in the end, they changed my mind for me.

The only vaguely upsetting thing about this site is the way they blithely list my poor overworked 30D in the discontinued list. Oh, well.

Good feeds from dpreview, too, and the Buyer’s Guide is comprehensive, with a great features search capability.

Photo.net

Photo.net and I don’t have a whole lot to do with each other these days, but in the early days before flickr caught on, this was my favourite hangout. Back then, the interface was a little simplistic, and the content was… well eclectic is the best word to use.

These days things are much nicer. The content is well organised, and the members tend to be a little more skilled and experienced than the flickr crowd. They take it all a little more seriously too, and the site features some wonderful photographers.

Aside from sharing your images here you can find like-minded communities, learn more about your equipment and ask tough questions.

Blogs, monthly projects. It’s all there for the taking. Free and paid memberships ala flickr are available and worthwhile.

Photography.com

Photography.com must have the best URL in the industry, and if you choose to remember a web address this wouldn’t be a bad one for the job.

Articles abound, but that’s not all.

Links to photographer websites, access to stock photos, somewhere to build your professional photography website using ImagePRO. It’s all here. Careful with the links. They’ll take you to numerous other websites.

PopPhoto

Popular Photography is the reference site I’ve stumbled upon most recently. Their style is different, and their articles are thoroughly interesting, even when they might not be directly useful.

Where else might you find a post on photographing hot springs, for instance?

Great How-To articles are easy to find. Spend some time and pick up some new skills.

Need more?

You can catch up on photo news, find other photograph sites, or check out a seriously large photography blog.

So tell me, where do you spend you valuable time online? Do you have any secret resources the rest of us should know about? Let me know in the comments, when you eventually get back here.

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A word of warning: Windows 7 is not free. It’s not even close. But this is the Release Candidate we’re talking about. Windows 7 RC may be used for free until June 1, 2010. Just keep in mind that at some stage you’re likely to have to go through this again, either to install a final copy of Windows 7 (after you purchase it) or to downgrade back to Vista or XP.

Editor’s note: Windows 7 RC will operate normally until March 1, 2010 then it will shut down every 2 hours.

Once more, this is a Release Candidate. A piece of beta software. It’s good and seems stable. It’s not necessarily ready for your use. There may be things that don’t work for you. Don’t go doing this if you are unprepared to accept that fact.

Before we start

Varun has done the hard yards to determine if your machine can actually run Windows 7. Check that out first. This is not for you if your computer cannot support the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

Decide whether you plan to upgrade your existing system (if you are running Vista already) or will be starting from scratch. Microsoft’s recommendations used to be to always start again, but this time around they seem a little more mellow. Nonetheless, I chose to lose all my settings and installation, and start clean on an empty hard disk.

Backups, backups

Make sure that you have backups of all your important stuff. Okay, that’s hardly a new recommendation but definitely worth remembering. If you are blowing away an existing Windows installation, a number of things go with it. Most of your data is hopefully on another drive but I have a few hints for some apps you might be using. Think it through. Here are some examples.

• Firefox bookmarks need to be exported, and the resulting file put somewhere safe. Any add-ins will need to be reinstalled. Take a note of the ones you have. Here’s how to backup your Firefox preferences.
• Trillian. Copy Program filesTrillian and everything underneath it.
• iTunes. Careful here. Use the Apple instructions or many of the other how-tos on the web to ensure you have a valid copy of your music and the database files. Remember to deauthorise your machine if necessary for iTunes Store purchases. Jackson wrote a short manual on how to migrate iTunes from Windows to Mac, but that article can also be used in terms of backing up your iTunes library.
• Office configuration. This is easy for Office 2003 but the Office 2007 tool (Windows Easy Transfer) never seems to work for me. Take notes so you can reinstate files. Make sure any .pst files are somewhere safe.
• Digsby. This one is easy. Nothing to do. Reinstall and set up. Log in, and everything reappears. Careful with the install though. Digsby has a habit of installing things you don’t want if you don’t watch closely.
• Logins. It’s easy to forget your logins if you’ve set up applications or websites to remember them on your behalf. Make sure you have backed them up before you wave goodbye. We have had several great articles about password managers: KeePass, LockCrypt and MashedLife.

If you have multiple partitions or hard drives, make sure you take note of the drive mappings so that you can recreate them later. Some of those configs you saved will benefit. Don’t leave your notes on the computer, especially not in the C: drive. Yes, of course I’ve done that myself. But not lately. Write them down on good old paper.

Take note of your hardware specifics, especially if you are running a machine with parts from multiple suppliers. Video cards, CPUs, network cards, monitors, printers, wireless mice and keyboards. You can also backup each driver (restoration might not work in Windows 7).

Commitment

So you have backups, details, configs and exports. It’s time to cross the line and make something happen.

You can get hold of a copy of Windows 7 RC here. Remember to get a key for the product. You’re going to need that to activate it.

Download Windows, and burn the .iso to a DVD.

Time for some more decisions. If you intend on performing an upgrade from Vista, then insert the DVD while Windows Vista is running. The rest of these instructions assume a fresh install instead. Therefore, shut down Windows XP or Vista, checking once more that you have everything you need.

Boot from the DVD. Most machines will display a message during boot up indicating which keys to press to change the boot device. The PC will display a ‘Press any key to boot from DVD…’ message. Best to follow that advice. Welcome aboard.

Choose an appropriate language and location.

Accept the terms. Choose the Custom install.

Carefully, choose the partition you wish to install to. Normally that’s the one that just had Vista or XP on it, and is marked System. To keep this as clean as possible, choose Advanced and delete the existing partition. Needless to say, you are now committed to the cause.

Create a new partition in the empty space. Note that Windows 7 may create an additional system partition as well.

Let the installer do what it’s paid for. Files will be copied, expanded and installed. Restarts will happen. Just go along for the ride.

Choose a user name and password.

Remember that product key I reminded you to pick up? Now, is its moment of fame. Best to choose Automatically Activate.

Choose your poison with regard to updates. I just left it on Recommended.

Set your Timezone, and your Location. I sincerely hope most of you are doing this at home, rather than in the office. Let everything finish and reboot some more if necessary.

Well done! Welcome to the newest game in town!

Have a wander around, and play with things. I’ll be back soon with a follow-up post.

So tell me, how did it go? Where did you get to? What did you forget? Tell me in the comments.

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Kate’s done a stunning job of reviewing my notes on a Mac, and letting me know what’s different. She didn’t even tell me I’m wrong on this post, but has a couple of things to note in blue.

Just to recap something I mentioned earlier, Picasa doesn’t generally change your files. It keeps a track of the changes instead. That’s great, so long as you are in Picasa. But if you go to take a look at your funky pictures elsewhere, you’ll likely be disappointed, because they still look the way they used to. So that’s the first part.

Saving and Exporting

Save

If you save your image, then a new .jpg file is created, your original file is backed up in a subfolder (Originals in Windows or .picasaoriginals on a Mac),and your changes are suddenly visible from Windows Explorer or wherever.

Also, on a Mac the .picasaoriginals is a hidden folder and can only be seen if you right-click on a modified photo and select Show Original In Finder.

Double-click an image in Library View to start Edit View.

Make whatever changes you need. In this case we’re going to crop the image. Go ahead and finish that.

If you hop out to Windows Explorer and take a look, you’ll see the image is still un-cropped, even though you’ve applied the crop in Picasa.

The Mac does a better job of this, and shows an icon of the edited version.

From the menu, click File, Save.

Click OK, and the cropped image will be saved back to your hard drive.

The original file will be backed up to a subfolder. You could end up with a few of these….

If that all seems a bit laborious, there’s also a way to do this for a whole folder. If you have made changes to any files in a folder, there’s a Save to Disk button in Library View to take care of it.

If you need to get the original image back you can go looking in the subfolder yourself, or you can Revert to the old file.

Right-click your final image, and choose Revert. Then Undo Save will take you back one saved version, or Revert will take you back to where you started.

Save a copy

This is all very similar, except you original file is left alone, no subfolders are created, and the new file name has ‘-1’ added to its name to distinguish it.

Save As

From the file menu, choose Save As. Same thing again, except you get to choose where to put the file.

Export

Select some files in Library View, and then choose File, Export to Folder from the menu. You can also click the Export button below the images. This option lets you decide where to put the files, what size they should be, and how high a quality of image you want. (More quality means more size,basically)

You can also add a watermark to the images. That’s something that I’ve covered in another post.

Click OK, and your images will be created.

Further afield

Picasa has a bunch of options to get your images on the Internet. The main focus here is to use something called Picasa Web Albums (PWA), but there’s nothing stopping you from saving your files and uploading them somewhere else. let’s look at what you can do with PWA, though.

First though, you need a PWA account. If you have a Gmail account, you’re all set. Use that. If you don’t, why not? Go on. Get one now. Sure I’ll wait.

Upload

Select some files, and click on the Upload button.

Before you can do anything with PWA, Picasa needs to login. Help it out.

Clicking on the Remember me will avoid a lot of repetition, but don’t do that if you don’t have the computer to yourself.

PWA needs some help to continue at this point.

By default, it wants to create an album with the same name as the folder the images are in. Three options. Accept the offer, select another existing album, or create a new one. You can click on the Album Title and Description boxes to edit the contents as well.

You have three options for the size of the images to upload. The guidelines that pop up are quite good. Remember that the larger the images that faster you use your 1GB free space.

You can make an album Public: which means it’s listed and publicly searchable, Unlisted: which means it’s difficult to find, but still able to be viewed if you know the address, and Sign-in: which means you need a login to view the images. Take care out there.

Click the Upload button to transfer the images.

Click the weirdly named Clear Completed when the upload is finished to return to Picasa. Note that your uploaded files are now decorated with small green arrows, indicating that they have been added to PWA.

You can also synchronise images with PWA. Maybe that’s another post….

Email

This is pretty simple. Select some images, and click the Email button.

First you’ll be asked if you want to use your default email application (Outlook in my case) or Gmail. Let’s use that. See, I said you need an account! Note that you can set either of these as the default for future emails.

Fill in the recipient addresses, and hit Send.

Share

Finally, if you like the look of those two options, you can basically combine the two. Click the Share button in the top right corner of the Library View.

Decide whether you just want to share the images you’ve already uploaded, or the entire file. Add some email recipients. Hit Send.

And that’s it. I hope you’ve enjoyed the in-depth look at Picasa, and that I’ve helped out with the learning curve. I’d love to know what you’re doing with it, and whether you’re having any problems. I’d also like to know what you might be using instead. Feed it all back in the comments please.

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Feel free to head back to the start, or just dive in here. Kate, who has been helping me with Mac version differences, tells me there is nothing of concern, so you can all sit together today.

We were in Edit View, and had worked our way through the Basic Fixes and Tuning tabs. Now we need to take a look at the third tab, Effects.

The other two tabs focused on fixing things. Making corrections and adjustments. Now we mostly want to have some fun.

Find an image, grab a coffee, change to Edit View, and click the Effects tab.

Sharpen

Most of these tools work in a similar way. You click on the thumbnail, and either get a result, or some questions. Sharpen only has one question.

Drag the slider to the right to sharpen the image, or to the left to soften it. Note that over-sharpening images is a common problem, so take it easy. You can’t actually fix a blurry image with this tool. You just think you can. Click Apply or Cancel.

Sepia

No questions with this one, or any of the others with a little (1) in the bottom right corner. You just get an old-fashioned image in multiple shades of warm brown. For some images this looks really stunning.

Click the Undo if you don’t like the result. Note that you can undo multiple effects if necessary. Weirdly enough, you can also apply effects multiple times. Try clicking on the Sepia thumbnail a few times.

B&W

Much the same, except we’re talking about shades of grey.

Warmify

And again, except this one changes some of the colours to make the image look warmer. The butterfly is warm enough already.

Film Grain

It’s difficult to see the effect on this image, but it looks great on anything that looks old-fashioned, and perhaps a little plain.

Tint

Two steps to this. Click in the Pick Colour box, and choose a colour from the resulting choices. Then decide on the Colour Preservation. Slide to the left to remove all the original colour. To the right to add most of it back.

Saturation

Just one slider. Drag it to the right to increase the intensity of all the colours in the image. Careful now. This picture has enough intensity already. Dragging to the left pulls the image closer and closer to black and white. Find somewhere you’re comfortable with.

Soft Focus

What happens here is that you have a portion of the photo which is nice and sharp, and the rest of the image is softened and blurred.

You can adjust the Size of the sharp area with the first slider, and the Amount of blur with the second.

You can adjust  the position of the sharp area by dragging the green crosshairs around on the image.

Glow

This is another strange effect, but it really does make some images look as though they are glowing, by brightening the white areas of the photo. You can adjust the Intensity and the Radius of the glow. Needless to say, there’s little point of trying it out on this image.

Filtered B&W

If you’re old enough to have dabbled with film then this might make more sense. The Filtered B&W effect simulates filling your camera with B&W film, and then putting colour filters on the front of it.

The outcome is that certain colours are blocked, and others are enhanced, but the result is B&W. Mess with it a little.

Focal B&W

Now it’s getting interesting.

With this tool you are able to keep the main point of your image in colour, while the surrounding area gradually fades to black and white.

You can adjust the Size of the colour area, and the Sharpness of the transition to B&W.

Graduated Tint.

This is the last one, and you can tell it wasn’t designed for buttefly photos. Graduated Tint applies a tint of the colour you choose to the top of the image. You can determine the Feather of the tint, which is just like the Sharpness in the previous tool, and adjust the Shade slider to decide just how much shading needs to happen.

When you’re happy with that, drag the crosshairs around on the image to adjust the height and angle of the shade.

So why would you want to do this? Skies mostly, actually. You can darken a boring pale blue sky to make it more dramatic.

Onward

That’s it. You now have control of all the tools. I just have one more thing to talk about. How to get your fixed, adjusted, modified, enhanced and funky images back out of Picasa and on the web. It’s easy, so keep your eye out for the post really soon.

In the meantime, how about leaving some comments so I know how it’s all going?  Perhaps you have found a special use for one of these tools?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
• [Google Picasa 101] – How To Edit Your Photos (14)
• Stitch Panoramic Photos Together with CleVR (21)
• 5 Useful Websites For Photographers (9)
• 5 Cool Google Picasa Tips to Make Use Of your Photos (10)

Now where were we? Editing.

Before we start making changes to your images, you need to understand something about the way Picasa works. The important point is this. As a general rule, Picasa doesn’t change your original image. It just keeps a record of the changes.

That’s good, but it means that if you look at the pictures outside Picasa then you won’t be able to see the changes. That is, unless you specifically Save or Export the files. More on that later on, but keep it in mind.

So, at the end of the previous post, we double-clicked an image, and that put us into Edit View.

Picasa isn’t an image editor as such. It doesn’t let you adjust individual pixels in your photographs. What it does is allow you to alter the images to correct or enhance them. Those enhancements are categorised in three distinct groups.

Basic Fixes

These are the things you’re most likely to want to use first. The idea is to quickly fix mistakes you might have made when you took the photo.

Crop

Let’s pick on an easy one. Cropping is the removal of unnecessary parts of the image to improve the composition. Select an image you’d like to crop. Click the Crop button.

You can manually choose the shape of the cropped image, or select from the list of shapes. Click on the combo box to choose.

You can also take a look at Picasa’s suggested crops. It’s interesting how often one of the three preview boxes is pretty close.

Once you’ve made your selection, drag the mouse over the image and adjust it until it’s the size and shape you want.

If you’re happy with the result, click Apply. If you’re not sure, click Preview to take a look at what the result will look like without the distraction of the rest of the image.

If you have used one of the preset sizes, you can switch between portrait and landscape orientation using the Rotate button.

If you change your mind before you finish, click Reset so that you can make a different selection, or Cancel to get out of the Crop module.

Now that you see how that works, let’s quickly step through the rest. First, the other Basic Fixes.

Straighten

You can use this to tip your image to the left or right so that lines are horizontal and vertical. Or not, as you please.

Redeye

I don’t have a good example for this, because… well, you can see why. But it’s easy. Click the Redeye button, and drag the mouse of the eye you want to fix. Release the mouse and then repeat on the other eye. Click Apply.

If you’re feeling lucky, click on Auto, instead of all the dragging routine.

Auto Contrast, Auto Colour, I’m Feeling Lucky

These all work the same way. Click the button, and watch the improvement. For those of you with a lucky streak, I’m feeling lucky just does both of the others at the same time.

Retouch

This tool is wonderful. It lets you select a part of an image that has blemishes (like the bolts in the wall here, perhaps) and then select another part of the image to replace them with, and does a nice job of it.

Click Retouch, adjust the size of the brush if necessary, click the blemish, click the replacement. Click Apply, or cancel if it all goes wrong.

Text

You can add text to your images using this tool, and there are an impressive array of options, including font, size, border and transparency settings. Have a play with it.

Apply when you have a result you like, or Cancel to back out when you’ve made a mess.

Fill Light

This option lets you correct situations where the darker portions of the image are a little too dark. Just use the slider to adjust the result. Don’t overdo it, or you’ll lose some detail in the lighter areas.

That’s it. The basics are fixed. Next, click the Tuning tab.

Tuning

These settings are all about making careful adjustments to your image so that it is presented at its best.

The first slider, Fill Light is exactly the same as the one we just used in the Basic Fixes area.

The next two, Highlights and Shadows, adjust other parts of the image, recovering burned out details, deepening shadows etc. Mess with the three of them to get the result you want.

Take care with adjusting things too drastically. Your image might show evidence of the manipulation as a result.

The last option in the tab allows you to adjust what’s known as the temperature of the image. That is, to make it appear warmer or cooler than it is. It’s all to do with the colour of the light you took the photograph in, and the colour the camera thinks the light is. But don’t worry about that so much. Just use the slider.

There are also two buttons on the right hand side that let Picasa take a guess as to what you might want. They sure didn’t help with this image, but sometimes they do a great job.

Great place to take a break. You’re all tuned and ready to go. When we come back, I’ll tell you all about the third tab. The one that’s so much fun. Effects.

Get some practice in, and then let me know how it’s going in the comments.

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• Stitch Panoramic Photos Together with CleVR (21)
• 5 Useful Websites For Photographers (9)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Master The Special Effects In Picasa (16)
• Remove Unwanted Photo Elements With Photowipe (12)

Kate tells me that aside from two things I’ll point out below, this is all on the up-and-up for the Mac interface as well, so you can all join in. Mac notes in blue.

Library View

This is the default view when Picasa starts. Any time you’re dealing with more than one image, or browsing to find one to work with, you’re spending your time here. Let’s break this down.

Menus and toolbars

At the top of the screen is the normal collection of menus and toolbars, and most of these do just the things you might expect them to. We’ll deal with these as they come up. Note where the help menu is though. It’s very useful, but has an annoying peculiarity that’s becoming rather common. None of the help info is stored locally, so it will only work while you are online.

Folder list

On the left of the Library View is the Folder List. There are two ways to view this. The default, shown here, is called Flat, because it just lists all the folders without any indenting.

There are, when you start, two Collections in the list. Albums and Folders.

Folders are grouped by year.

It’s only by chance that my folder names are also dates, and confuse the issue. Sorry about that.

The Folders listed directly relate to the folders/directories you see in Windows Explorer.

Albums are virtual collections of files, and don’t relate to anything real on your hard drive. You can create an album and add images, and all Picasa does is keep track of them together, without actually moving any of the real files. Albums are wonderful, but more on that later.

This is where you find the first difference that Kate told me about. On a Mac, there is another collection below the Folders that shows iPhoto Library Items. Whatever they are. Moving along…

You switch between the Flat and Tree view using the view tool in the toolbar or the Folder View option in the View menu.

The Tree view shows the folders nested, the way Windows normally does.

Folk often find the Flat View thoroughly annoying until they get used to it, and then switch camps, so give the Flat View a try first.

Whichever view you use, they operate much the same way. Enjoy yourself.

Light box

The major portion of the screen, and the one you’re likely to spend most of your time, is called the Light Box, after the boxes traditionally used by photographers to view and compare slides.

The light box is similar to the thumbnail view in Windows Explorer, and mostly behaves the same way, except for one very strange but handy feature. If you scroll out the top or bottom of the view of the older you are in, it just happily continues to the next or previous folder (or album). This is great, but weird, so beware.

Once you actually click on an image, the Folder List highlights the current folder again.

Just a few to go. Hang in there.

Status Bar

Directly underneath the Light Box is the status bar. This shows you a whole lot of information about whatever is currently selected. Keep an eye on it. It’s very handy.

Underneath the Status Bar are two more important features, collectively known as the Photo Tray.

Photo Tray

On the right are all the tools you need to deal with moving your images onto the web, printing them, blogging etc. More on that in another chapter. Kate did tell me that on the Mac the very right hand button says Movies instead of More… I’m sure you can cope.

Top right of this tool is a slider to let you change the thumbnail size in the Light Box. To the left are some buttons for dealing with individual images, including rotating and favouriting (alright, favoriting) them.

Over in the left corner is the Photo Tray itself. This tool lets you deal with multiple files at once. We won’t be doing that here, but those three buttons are (from top to bottom) Hold, Clear and Add to Album.

Okay, now you know your way around, you can take a look at an individual file. Just double-click on one in the Light Tray. Go on. This is called the Edit View.

Edit View

That’s it. Click the Back to Library button, top left, or hit the Escape key to return to the Library view.

I’ll be back soon to show you how to improve, adjust, and just plain mess with your images in Picasa. in the meantime, how does your experience match mine? Anything else I should have noted? let me know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• [Google Picasa 101] – Getting Started (22)
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Picasa 3.0 is a free, downloadable easy-to-use photo editor from Google. If you don’t want to learn to use Photoshop (and don’t want to pay for it), but you’d like your images to look great, you could certainly make worse choices. It also has some surprisingly sophisticated options up its sleeves. More about those later.

This is the first in a short series of articles about getting the most out of Picasa. And I’m going to start right here. At the beginning.

Just to clarify something, we’re not talking about web-based editing here. There are some great options out there for that, but a local application lets you do things that are difficult, or cumbersome online. of course that does mean you need to download and install it. Panic not though, I’ll help you through that.

It also means that you need to watch that you have the right gear to run it on. Picasa is officially supported on Windows XP and Vista. Just recently they also released a beta version for Linux and the Mac. I’m sticking with Vista for this, and I’ve asked my good friend Kate to help with the Apple options. She’ll interrupt as soon as she finds issue with something I’ve said. It seldom takes long… Kate’s comments are in blue. You Linux geeks are on your own this time.

By the way, Picasa also has a product called Picasa Web Albums. I’ll get to that later, but that’s one of the ways to get the resulting images back to the web.

Download and install

So, first grab the application from here. Click the download button, and save it wherever you normally do. Then run it. Confirm that you really do want to run it.

Agree to the license, after reading it of course, and then decide where you’d like to install Picasa.

Click the Install button.

Picasa tends to be just a little intrusive, and thinks it should be able to take over a few things, so step through this next part with a little care…

The third option annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, I’m assuming you’re doing this on your home computer, in which case why on earth would you be using Internet Explorer? Need a clue? Firefox. I’m just saying. Secondly, this is a nasty thing for them to turn on by default. Choose carefully. Leave the last option ticked, and click the finish button.

None of that funny stuff on a Mac! Of course, it assumes that you’re using Safari no matter what. Everyone knows that unless you’re just messing with the Safari 4 beta for it’s Cover Flow eye candy, chances are you’re using Firefox, and that is as it should be!

Welcome to Picasa!

You have some more choices to make…

Picasa needs to know about your images to work effectively. In order to do that, it needs to scan your hard drive to find all your pictures.

The choices aren’t what I’d have wished for. As you can see, you can only choose between the two options shown. It might have been better if you could choose particular folders, in hopes of missing the ones of Aunt Bertha and her holiday in Paris. But anyway, choose. Then click Continue.

I hear ya! 

Note that later on we can control which folders to include and exclude more specifically using something called the Folder Manager, so it’s not all bad.

On the Mac it will actually integrate with your iPhoto library and display those photos as you already have them grouped, in their proper iPhoto folders.

Picasa includes a photo viewer. You can always say no, and stick with Irfanview.

Picasa is going to take a while now, and scan all the images in the selected folders. It’s best to allow it to finish, so how about a coffee?

While the scanning is happening, you have more choices to make. Firstly, despite you having just downloaded the application, Picasa wants to update itself.

Click the Yes, update now button. Picasa will close, update itself, restart, and then continue with the scanning.

Remember I said that Picasa was a little intrusive? While you were minding your own business, it installed itself as the default screensaver in Windows. If you don’t like that, change it back.

Of course, if you were hoping that you’d end up with a handy-dandy desktop or screensaver powerhouse on the Mac then you’ll be disappointed to know that you’re stuck with one little “Set as desktop” selection in the CREATE menu and that’s it.  *sigh*

Anyway, the scanning is probably still not finished, so a few more things to set up.

By default, Picasa doesn’t want to display .png files. You can fix that by going to Tools – Options, and clicking on the File Types tab. Tick the appropriate lines to turn particular file types on and off.

I particularly like that it’s happy to display RAW images, but I’m guessing most of you are unlikely to need that option.

That’s it. Once the scanning is completed you’ll be presented with what is called the Library view, and I’ll tell you all about that in the next post.

Continue Reading Google Picasa 101 series:

• [Google Picasa 101] – Getting Started
• [Google Picasa 101] – View, Folders, Toolbars

If you’re following along, let me know how you got on, and what might be different. Anything confusing I should follow up? Do you use RAW, by the way? Let me know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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• [Google Picasa 101] – View, Folders, Toolbars (18)
• How to Color Correct RGB Images Easily in Photoshop (14)
• The Challenging World Of Image Editing (8)
• How to Make Items or People Stand out in Black & White Photos (25)
• DistortIt – Free Photo Morphing Software to Have Fun With Pictures [Windows] (3)

If you could get some sort of logic applied to the opinions as well, the value would go through the roof. That’s the whole basis of BestInClass.

Find a group of experts who actually know what they are talking about, assemble their opinions, tabulate the answers, and present them in a way that actually helps you to make decisions. For free.

There’s a catch, right? Well, aside from some harmless Google ads, it seems not. Come and take a look with me.

When you visit the site you’re presented with a basic options page:

Click the View Recommendations button.

An algorithm, claimed to have taken two years to develop, presents you with some recommendations, in order of preference. You’re either going to love or hate this. It’s something to do with being told by a computer what to do.

In any case, for the settings above, the recommendation was fairly clear.

Okay, now I’m a Canon guy, so I’d be fine with this, but if I had some reason to dislike the first option there are a string of three others below, including another Canon and two Panasonics.

So, a couple of things. Why should I trust the recommendations?

BestInClass has a group of experts to evaluate the cameras and provide a number of different opinions, and there is no sales bias. Doubtless there is some user bias, but that’s what recommendations are all about.

So, what if your requirements are more complex than can be captured in those initial questions?

Easy. Answer some more. On the left side of the results page is a huge list of tick boxes to narrow your choices.

For instance, the first box allows you to choose the brands of cameras you’re interested in.

The default is to search all of the available brands, but you can restrict the search to whichever brands you prefer.

Clicking the More button adds Fuji, Casio, Kodak, Leica, Olympus and Pentax to the list.

By the way, there’s no update button here. The list just changes when you release the slider.

Simple, right? Some options use a combination of live sliders and update buttons. Just have a play.

Clicking on a particular brand presents you with an Update button. Clicking that will present you with a new list of recommendations.

Time for a confession. A couple of cameras back I had the option of walking in and picking up a silver Panasonic camera, or waiting a week for the same model in black. I waited, so it would be hypocritical for me to make fun of the Color tickboxes, though I’m tempted. Pink?

Okay, so you have a resulting list of recommendations. Let’s dig into that a little more, by taking a look at the leader.

A summary about the camera is presented here, but if you need more detail, clicking on the link here, or the large image to the right, will take you to a detailed page for the recommendation by that particular expert.

You’ll see that the camera you were looking at is not necessarily in the number one spot on the Expert Recommendation page, because now we are only looking at the opinions of a single expert.

This page includes in-depth analysis, and comparisons. Pros and cons of the recommended camera are supplied (in this case the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3, which is, you must admit, a hell of a mouthful for a little camera).

Also included is a comparison chart for the recommendations.

Back on the initial recommendation page there are also links to opinions from other websites and customers, along with Amazon purchase links, and price comparisons. In all, a huge amount of valuable information.

So, is it perfect?

No, not yet. There seem to be some holes in the coverage, especially where new or elderly cameras are concerned. Don’t get me started on the fact that it’s all in US dollars, as well.

But it’s most helpful if you’re in the market. Now if only I could work out a way to get a good price for my EOS 30D.

You can also get some good comparison action from some of the competition too. Check out TestFreaks for a broader product base than just cameras, or allCamReviews for a custom Google search for cameras. Kallow provides for a rather, well, shallow look, specialising in single recommendations for each category.

Have a play, and let me know how you do. Are there some other sites you would use for this purpose?  Let me know in the comments.

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The concept here is similar, although the focus is different. 3tags is designed as a way to store and organize notes online securely. Bear in mind that it’s new, and has a fair way to go. Nonetheless, it’s both interesting and useful.

If you’re familiar with delicious (and who isn’t?) then it’s easy to think of 3tags as the opposite. We don’t want to share this information. Instead we want to ensure that it cannot be shared.

The basis of the platform is that your browser, and especially the javascript that runs inside it, are capable of high grade encryption and decryption. So you write notes locally, and then they, along with your credentials, are saved and encrypted on your PC, and then stored on the web. Even the developers at 3tags are unable to dig around inside your stored information.

Before we get into the details, just remember. It’s encryption, and it’s the web. Keep your wits about you, and don’t gamble your home, job, or children on this working properly. The risk and the decisions are both yours.

The initial screen in 3tags is somewhat sparse, but it soon fills up once you add some notes.

In order to do that, click in the obvious spot… the Add button.

Fill in the boxes to suit. This is a famous New Zealand biscuit (cookie) recipe. I’m reliably told by Google that the name has to do with the colour of the cookies, and not the folk from Afghanistan. Who knew? By the way, Google can do the metric to imperial conversions if you’d like to try the recipe.

Obviously this recipe is not exactly a secret, but you can see how the interface works. Note that you should separate the tags with semi-colons, despite the lack of instruction around that. The rich text editor works just as you might expect otherwise.

Click Save.

Your note is added to the (empty) list, along with some metadata, and the tags are all listed down the left hand side for easy location later on. Search is something that is missing currently and might be useful if you have stored a lot of notes in 3tags.

Once you have more notes in the system, the preview pane on the lower part of the screen is handy for quickly checking out the content of each note with a single click.

For more serious changes you can click the Edit button, and you can remove individual notes using Delete.

Notice that the note I added also has a link in it. That link becomes clickable and underlined for easy use.

That’s basically it. It’s worth noting that making use of the site requires your computer to process javascript at a reasonable speed, and that language wasn’t really designed for this. 3tags recommends the use of Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, purely due to the speed at which it can process the javascript encryption and decryption routines.

As I said, it’s all pretty new.  I found a few unexpected wrinkles. For instance, it didn’t seem to like me coming back and adding more tags to a note after I had created it. Your mileage may vary.

You may also want to check out T.J’s article about TaggedFrog which is also about online tagging.

Let me know how you get on with both 3tags and the Afghans. Do you use any other websites that store your data with encryption? Are you familiar with an easier/safer way to organize notes online.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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We also covered this area in 6 quick ways to jazz up your photos.  Varun also recently covered AndreaMosaic.

But if you have a large number of images stored locally, and you run Windows, then Foto-Mosaik just might be a better bet for you.

A photo mosaic, just in case I’m racing ahead, is an image made from tiny copies of a lot of your other images. All will become clear.

But first you obviously need to go ahead and download and install the application.

Once it’s installed, you then need to add a large (the larger the better) number of images to the database Foto-Mosaic needs to do its work.

Click on Add pictures, and name the database something useful. You can also change the folder used to store the database if you wish. Click Next.

Foto-Mosaic can extract the necessary images from pictures of movies. We’re sticking with pictures here. Next.

Browse to the images you want to use. In my case I’ve taken the folder that contains my screensaver images. I’ve also told it to use any subfolders it finds there. Don’t mess with the resolution settings this time around. Click on Show Preview even though it slows things down. Next.

Your chosen images will flash by one by one in the preview window…

… and progress will be shown down below. If you have a lot of images, or they are very large, you might need a coffee. For those of you who are numbers geeks, the process averaged 4 frames/second, and the 12,000 images produced a database of 370MB.

Two more things…

First, you need to browse to the image you’re creating the mosaic from. This is the image from which the software is going to build a new picture. Then you need to tell Foto-Mosaik where to put the result.

I used an image I have on Flickr, but at a higher resolution locally:

With a detailed section consisting of the man’s head and shoulders:

Then click Next yet again…

and select the database you just created. Would you believe Next?

Time for some options. The first is the number of tiles to use. The more the better, within reason.

The second option is the orientation of the resulting image. It should be the same as the original image normally.

The third option is the size of the tiles to use. The defaults are a good place to start.

The last option is how many times to use the same tile. You can experiment later, but stay with the default of 5 for now.

Umm… Next!

A number of analysis steps take place, and then the final image is constructed.

This next option determines how much of the image is made of the tiles, and how much is overlaid by the original image. I left that off for now, but you can adjust the slider back and forth and hit the Preview button to see the difference it makes.

Next again, for the last time.

The image has been built, and you can close Foto-Mosaik. Just for a change of pace, click Close.

If you browse in Windows explorer to the location you chose for the image, you can open it and take a close look.

My first result looked like this:

A closer view revealed a fairly grainy attempt.

I adjusted the number of tiles from 1,000 to 10,000, and the results were much more acceptable, though the resulting file was accordingly rather large.

The details are still pretty bizarre.

Just because it was so much fun, I then re-ran the same process with the repetition option set to 100, instead of 5.

Obviously your results will depend entirely on your raw material.

So, how did you go? If you gave it a try, how about uploading the result somewhere, and posting a link to it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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If you’ve ever fiddled with fonts before you’ll know that constructing them is not the simplest thing in the world. Truetype fonts are essentially vector representations of the characters within them, and creating them is a little….well, let’s say….laborious.

Kabir discussed how to make a text font just a few days ago, and has listed a few great tools to help out, and you can learn a whole lot more about fonts there. Go ahead and do that if you like. The rest us are going to cheat, and use YourFonts instead.

The process here is well laid out and fairly simple. You do need just a few things to help out though. If this was a cookery blog, this would be the list of ingredients. Please check your pantry first.

• A printer, able to print a Letter or A4 sheet
• A scanner, able to scan the above page at a reasonable resolution
• A fine marking pen in good condition, preferably black

So, jump in to YourFonts, and follow the steps to make a digital signature using your handwriting:

1. Print the template from the site, either as a PDF or an image. PDF is the preferred method.

2. Complete the template. Read the notes, and fill out all the boxes, taking care to stay within the lines. Take note of the little ticks on the side of each box, and work out where the tops and bottoms of the letters go.

There’s no need to fill out the second page unless you plan on being unusually thorough, or to use a language other than English.

At the end of the first page there is a large block for your signature. Take some care if you plan to use your official signature here.

I took the liberty of bullying persuading my daughter Sophie to provide me with handwriting samples. The good work is hers. The fault is mine.

3. Now a test of your versatility. You need to scan the resulting sheet, and save it as an image on your local machine. 300DPI is best, and further details are available on the web page. Note the suggestion not to upload a picture of your pet at this time. The resulting file needs to be a .jpg, .gif or .png.

4. Upload the image by clicking on the button on the web page.

Give the font a name, and complete the copyright information as you wish. Hit Upload.

Depending on the server load it might take a little while for YorFonts to create a digital signature. Progress will be shown on-screen as the template is uploaded and then the font generated.

5. Take a look at the result on-screen, and see if it resembles your handwriting. The only real problem we had was that the ‘p’ on Sophie’s signature wandered too close to the bottom of the box, and was accordingly chopped short.

If you have some issues, backtrack and if necessary reprint the template and work your way through it again. Don’t scan it upside down!

6. That’s the end of the complicated part. Click the download button to save the font to your computer, and copy it to the font folder, which is generally c:\windows\fonts, at least on a Windows machine.

Fire up your word processor, or something that uses/displays fonts, and ensure that it works correctly.

That’s the first part finished. Now to use the new font for an image…

I’m using Irfanview for this, but any application that allows you to place text in an image should do the trick. I guess it’s only fair that I use Sophie’s images for the demo.

It’s fairly obvious that you can use this process for more than just signatures on images. You can add titles, or descriptions, notes. Whatever.

First, find and open the image you want to decorate.

Use your mouse to draw a frame in the image where you want the text to appear.

Choose Edit – Insert text into selection from the menu, or press Ctrl+t, and add/edit the text to be inserted.

Click on Choose Font, and select the font you installed, along with appropriate size, style and colour for the image.

Click OK to add the text to the image. Be prepared to undo and redo this a few times until you have what you want. Remember to resave the image, probably with a different file name, just in case.

That’s it. Oh, except for a bonus treat. Because Irfanview is able to batch process these changes, as I described in my borders article, you can add signatures to a whole directory of images at the same time, on the proviso that you want them to be in the same position and colour. Also, if you have renamed the files, you can use the same process to automatically put titles of all the images in the images, picking them up automatically from the file names.

So, is that useful? Do you have a handwriting font? Are you aware of any easier way to add a signature to digital photos using your handwriting? Can you think of anything else to use it for? What software would you use to achieve this?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The site has been running for about a year, and went public a few months back. Since then they’ve been adding capability to the product. It’s looking good. They even have a scanning service to convert all those old prints into a digital stream.

I like the layout of the site. I’m not so sure about some of the things that happen on the page. For instance, in Firefox 3, Ctrl-Tab doesn’t work any more, and neither does the scroll wheel on my mouse, at least in the main part of the page.  I’m running on Vista if that make any difference to you.

Membership of the site is free, but requires the usual collection of personal information to get in. After you’ve got through that, click the blue Create button and then New Capzle to get started.

You can add an impressive stack of stuff to your Capzle. But it’s easier to do than to describe, so let’s get started.

First, the content. Click the button, and choose the directly option. You can try out the stacked and blogging settings later. The idea here is that you are creating a timeline, and putting items in place on the line.

Capzle wants you to have the files with you, so if they are on Flickr, for instance, you’ll need to download them first. Browse to the files, select them all, and upload them to the site.

The most common use of Capzles is to capture a sequence of events, so you’re going to be forced to put up with my trip to Melbourne for Christmas. No one ever said it was easy.

Now you’re in edit mode with an untitled Capzle in place. Let’s set a few things. Top left in the menus is the Add Title & Description option. Go ahead and click that.

Set the title and description as you please. You can choose from what must be the wackiest font list I’ve seen in a while, and colour it as you please. You can see that the title in the main area changes as you tinker. Eventually… hey, pay attention… eventually you’ll get sick of fiddling with that.

We’ll go through and set some more things, but first we should have a look at how the result is going. Click the I’m Finished button, top right, and you can preview the result. You can click Edit Capzle to return to this design view any time. Go on, you deserve it. This is the view other folk will see of your work, but with more controls in place.

In preview mode you have a control panel in the centre of the page, and you can also use your mouse to move around. Try holding the mouse over an image, and clicking on it.

The control panel consists of six buttons. The magnifying glass controls the size of the images, as you might expect. The four centre buttons are used by holding the mouse button down over them, causing the stream of images to scroll to the left or right. The final button is for the soundtrack volume. More on that later.

Back to design mode now… We need to change some more settings.

Just quickly… the Tags and Categories section in the menu will let you set some metadata for your show, and make it easier for other folk to find your work.

We’re now heading for the Design Your Capzle option.

That’s where we make some sweeping changes to the look of the production. You can choose from a substantial list of themes in the list. As a photographer I don’t want anything too overpowering back there, but if you’re the day-glow-pink-bling type you can find something in here too, I think.

You can also click the design it myself tab at the top and make more controlled changes if you like, including the choice of a single colour background or some sort of gradient. You can also upload a background image if you are possessed so inclined. Fiddle with this until you are happy with the result.

The playlist option lets you choose a background track for your visitors to enjoy while they look at your shots.

Click the upload button, choose one or more tracks, and upload them.

It’s worth noting that the dialogue that displays states I certify that I have the right to upload this content and that it does not violate the terms of use of the Capzles website. I’m pretty sure that, at least where I live, that statement precludes the uploading of the latest hit by your favourite artist, but obviously your mileage may vary.

Two to go…

Set the privacy level of the Capzle in the next section. Be a grown-up, and consider whether anyone will be offended by what you’re doing. Good.

Now the best part. Share the Capzle. There are essentially two ways to do this.

First off you can click the Send to Friends button, and get Capzles to do the heavy lifting for you. I’m not fond of that option, purely because my paranoia kicks in. I don’t want to send the Capzles folk a list of my friends’ email addresses. it’s not them. It’s me.

The other option is to grab the URL for your Capzle, and send it to them yourself. I’d do that.

So in the end, we’ve fairly easily constructed a complex timeline. You might have noticed though that what we finished with isn’t a slideshow in the traditional sense. Navigation is the responsibility of the user. That’s great for your friends at school or work, but it’s not going to work for Granny. She’s just not a Web 2.0 girl, and you know it. So think about what works best for you audience.

Visitors have all the main controls at their hands, but they can’t edit any of the info. That’s just as well, because they missed out on the trip, right? So they’ll be jealous.

The Capzles folk tell me that both an automated play option and a Flickr import are in the wind. I look forward to both options.

I’m curious. Do you prefer this approach to a standard slideshow? Who would your audience consist of? What other options have you tried?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Enter the slideshow. I’m old enough to remember when it was common for folk who had been on an overseas trip (and everywhere is overseas from New Zealand) to return, get their slides printed, and bore their friends and neighbours to death with hours of images projected on a sheet in a dark room. I know. My father was a member of the inner circle.

Thankfully those days are largely over, and most of you don’t have, or want, access to a slide projector, to say nothing of the slides themselves.

The Internet can provide you with a way to release your slideshow tension, without the sheet, without annoying the neighbours, and with a whole lot more multimedia capability than Dad could ever manage.

Flickr is the most likely place to have your images, so let’s start there. and see how to create Flickr slideshows. It’s best to bear in mind that flickr’s focus is the images themselves, so they don’t manage some of the things that slideshow specialist sites can handle, but the capability was upgraded last year and it’s quite thorough now. And hey, you’re here already, right?

You can, if you wish, create a slideshow of your entire photostream. Unless you have a severely limited stream of images though, this isn’t the best of plans. Instead, create a set, order the images in the set as you wish, and then create a slideshow for the set. Share the slideshow, and invite folk to watch it.

Easy, right?

A short note on flickr jargon. A set is an array of images of your own, collected together on whatever basis you like. A collection is an array of sets. For instance, I have a set for each of the suburbs of Wellington that I’ve taken photos in, and a Wellington collection that pulls them all together. A group is like a set, but contains images from a number of different flickr members. We’ll stick with a set for this.

The easiest way to create a set is in the Organizer. I hesitate to spell it that way, but never mind… You’ll find it in the main menu in flickr. This thing is a little difficult to screenshot, but you should be able to see your images, in reverse chronological order, along the bottom of the page.

If you have tagged the images, then you will be able to enter appropriate terms in the search box to filter the choices shown. Otherwise you’re going to need to scroll to the right with the arrows. In either case, once you see the images you want to put into the set, drag them into the main area of the screen.

I’ll wait politely while you do that. Done? Great.

Now click the Add to set button at the top of the page.

Change the name of the set from the default new set, tell us all about the details of the set, below, and click on Save. Try to think of a better subject, and much better title, and fundamentally superior details than I have managed here. Good. Your friends will thank you.

Click the flickr icon, top right, to return to your normal view of the flickr site. Click the arrow to the right of You, and click on Your Sets.

Click on the set you just created.

Nearly there. Click the Slideshow button, top right.

That’s it. The slideshow is created, and up and running. There are various options on the slideshow screen for setting options such as fullscreen, enlarging images (called embiggening!), showing titles, and playing in reverse. Just slide the mouse over the top right of the page to see them.

You can share the slideshow from here, or share the set itself from back at the set view. From here, click Share. You’ll see a URL you can copy, a piece of HTML you can imbed in your web page or email, and an option to email a link to the slideshow to your friends, assuming that you still have some after all of this.

It’s a good idea to construct, by whatever means are the easiest, a start and end slide. These days, scrawling the details somewhere and photographing it is pretty painless. Otherwise there is plenty of software that will add titles for you. Please don’t apply them to all the slides though. That gets old very quickly.

Now it just might be that while flickr slideshows are the simplest option, they might not meet your requirements, so here are a few alternatives that offer a little more pizzazz. There are a huge number of slideshow sites out there now. I’m not pretending to know all of them…

flickrSLiDR – allows you to embed your Flickr photo slideshows easily in another webpage.

Flickrin – lets you embed a rectangular block of images in your blog or website, based on your user name or some tags on the photos. Here are some based on ‘Wellington”.

Capzles – I’ve discovered this site only recently. This site lets you compose a timeline (like a slideshow) and then add a soundtrack to it. More on that one soon.

So do you how to create flickr slideshows? using what? Do you look at slideshows?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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In the digital age, watermarks are defined in a different way. There are basically two types, used for different purposes.

Visible Watermarks

Visible watermarks are simply pieces of text or images which are overlaid on the main image either for marketing purposes or to discourage unauthorised copies. Sometimes these watermarks are also used for censorship.

Many stock photograph sites use visible watermarks to prevent the theft of images, and butcher the images to the point where they are not worth attempting to purloin. Some sites show thumbnails without watermarks, and then surprise you with crosshairs in the larger versions.

A local one I sell images through in New Zealand, mychillybin for instance, does this. (A chillybin is a thing you take with you to the beach to keep your cold drinks in)

Some folks like to add either informational or annoying watermarks to images on photo sharing sites such as Flickr. Personally I find this as annoying as people tagging buildings in the city streets, but I can understand the motivation.

Invisible Watermarks

At first glance this seems patently absurd. What’s the point in a watermark you cannot see? But there is technology available which can insert information into an image which cannot be seen, but can be interrogated with the right software. You can’t prevent the theft of your images this way, but you can prove that the image that was stolen was yours, which is almost as good.

I’m going to stick with visible watermarks today.

Tagging your images

So how can you add watermarks to your images? Easy.

You can do this either online or using an application on your PC. The online options tend to be easier. The offline ones tend to be more comprehensive.

Online, one of the simplest options is PicMarkr.

Upload up to five of your images from your PC, or grab them from Flickr first. You can optionally resize the images as well, but if you have a way to do that before you upload them, the whole thing will be much faster.

PicMarkr can apply text, image or tiled watermarks.

Insert the required text, change the font colours and transparency if necessary, and choose which corner of the image you want the watermark in. I’d be ever so grateful if you didn’t put them in the centre. I’m sticking with the Kiwi spelling, by the way. I hope you can keep up.

Click continue.

You can download the images again, or move them to Flickr.

Browse to the image you want to use for a watermark. Bold and simple is best.

Click the Upload button.

Decide on the location within the image for the watermark, and click Continue.

Download or transfer the results.

I’d be reluctant to use this one unless I was feeling awfully paranoid, or had a desire to get into marketing in a big way.

Tiled watermarks are repeated in a pattern all over the image. You again have the choice of text or image, and it all works the same way as the options above.

Alternative sites providing similar functionality include:

If you prefer to apply tiles to your images offline, there are a number of options. I usually fall back on my friend IrfanView, but there are many options, including a not-for-free pro version of PicMarkr just for Windows.

A word of warning. It’s very easy in Irfanview to accidentally watermark an entire folder of images, overwriting your original files. No, I haven’t done that. My sins are far greater. But I’ve seen it done. Copy your images to another folder, and only overwrite those ones. Do it now!

You can easily apply text watermarks this way, with a great deal more control over the font, placement, colour, alignment and transparency.

Just fire up Irfanview and browse to the images you want to deal with. Hit the ‘b’ key on the keyboard or choose File | Batch Conversion from the menu. Select the files to which you want to apply a watermark, and then click the advanced button. If you saw my post on adding borders to images a couple of weeks ago then you might have already been in here. This time we want to take a look in the “Add overlay text” option.

As you can see, there are a number of options that you can use to set the watermark up exactly as you want it.  Let’s work through them quickly.

X-Coord and Y-Coord are the offset, in pixels, from the start corner. Margins, if you like. Width and Height are the size of the usually invisible box the text sits inside. Start Corner is the same as the alignment options we set in PicMarkr, except that there is, thankfully, no centre option.

Add your watermark text in the box, appending date, time and a copyright symbol if required.

Irfanview has one outstanding feature that might be of use to you here. It uses placeholders and can change the watermark for each image. As a simple example, you can put the text ‘$N’ in the text box, and each image will be watermarked with its own filename. Click the Help button for more info.

Adjust font size, colour and alignment as you please, then click OK to return to the advanced settings page. After checking that you haven’t inadvertently left any other options turned on, click OK again to return to the Batch Conversion page.

Take a moment to think through the options you’ve chosen, make sure you’re not overwriting anything you shouldn’t, and click Start Batch.

That’s it. You’re a star.

Metadata

One more note. Another way to tag your images with your information is through the use of metadata. You can’t see that in the image itself, but many photo viewers can show you the information. I’ll cover that another day, I promise.

If someone has stolen your images, would you know? Take a look at TinEye to see. It’s not the most comprehensive tool out there, but for instance when I ask it to look for my most popular image on Flickr, it tells me that four other websites (none of which I authorised) are using the image.

What else do you use? And what sorts of watermarks do you add? What sorts of unauthorised adventures have your images been on?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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In any case, after waiting for a reasonable period, and knowing that the fault wasn’t going to correct itself, I needed to speak with the helpdesk. They were hoping that I could pass on some important information such as my login, account number, date of birth, that sort of thing. I managed the birthday part, but the rest of it was beyond me. I had two copies of the necessary information. One set was in Clipperz, and the other set was in an encrypted container, the password for which was in… You guessed it… Clipperz.

So, Clipperz – The Password Manager

I did some earlier research and decided that Clipperz was the online password manager that works the most like I want it to, and it has some interesting ways to deal with web links. The site is free, but does badger you from time to time to donate some of your hard earned cash to the project.

Online Password Managers – also called OPMs, use a variety of techniques to keep your security information safe. The primary requirement of course is that you trust them in two respects.

Firstly that they are what they say they are, and will actually treat your passwords in the way they promise to.

The second requirement is that their solution is actually as secure as they say it is, to ensure that your secrets are not divulged to anyone else.

Don’t confuse what’s happening here with saving passwords in your browser. That’s a whole different subject.

Joining up

There’s no requirement to supply an email address, so you can be as anonymous as you like. Logins are based on a user name and a passphrase. That’s just like a password, but you are encouraged you to use something significantly longer. Choosing the phrase is out of the scope of this post, but the longer the better, in general. Clipperz indicates the strength of your phrase as you add it. (All of the info used for these screenshots is false. Relax.)

Adding cards

Once you’ve logged on, you’re presented with a card view. It’s empty the first time you hit the page, but each card relates to a particular set of information. For instance, your Yahoo address, login, password, etc. You can add and change the fields to suit your purposes.

Click Add new card to start. The first thing Clipperz wants to know is what type of card you want to create. A Web Password is the most common, so let’s start with that. Click the button next to the type of card you want. Click the Create button.

Each different card type defaults a different set of fields. You can use those supplied, or add some of your own. The confusing box at the top is for the title of the card, though it doesn’t say so anywhere. So change Web password to what you actually want the title to be. Webmail perhaps.

Fill in the other fields just the way you might think. Notice that the password field shows up as a row of stars unless you click the unscramble link below the field. If you don’t yet have a password, you can click on the button with the key to have one created for you. There are some options in the password creator to select required length, type of characters and so on.

Click the Save button to return to the list of cards. Every time you save something in Clipperz your data is locally re-encrypted, and saved back to the site.

To make use of the cards you’ve added, just click on the card in the list, and if necessary unscramble the password. Normal physical security rules apply here. No one should be standing behind you, for instance.

Direct One-click Logins

One of the unusual features in Clipperz is the ability to create a clickable link for a web page that will log you in without you having to type anything else. The site uses bookmarklets to capture the necessary code from the pages to login on your behalf. It’s a lot safer than it sounds, but I won’t go into that this time. You should take a look though. You can use complex (and therefore safer) passwords with ease using this feature.

Keeping Your Passwords Offline

This is the part of Clipperz that I like the most. With a single click you can create a fully encrypted local copy of your data that’s just as secure as the online one. An HTML page containing encrypted code that replicates the copy at the site.

There is one restriction on the use of the offline copy. It’s read-only.

I lied about the single click, too. It actually takes two. Click Data from the main menu, and then click the Download link further down the page.

Choose to save the HTML page that is created. Browse to the page and open it. Voila!

So how secure is Clipperz?

The idea is that your information is encrypted using javascript code, on your browser, and then sent, encrypted, to the website. Clipperz doesn’t have your passphrase, and cannot decrypt your information. It’s called Zero-Knowledge. They don’t know, so they cannot tell.

Is it safe? It’s a lot safer than storing your passwords in the normal fashion with websites, and plenty of people do that.

If you’re a security nerd, look up the specifications yourself. You can review the source code as well.

Clipperz has 20,000 subscribers and over 250,000 stored passwords.

As always, do your research, and decide for yourself.

Details, details…

It’s cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac and Linux PC), though obviously you need a browser that supports JavaScript. You can import and export the data. Works best with Firefox. You can run the site in a sidebar. Granular sharing is reportedly due soon. Nothing to install, no maintenance.

Other Pasword Mangers

- Using Keepass to Secure Your Online Accounts
- PasswordSafe
- MashedLife – Securely Store Your Passwords Online

So I’m interested. What’s your strategy? How well does it work? Have you ever been stuck without the passwords you need? Like the ones to lock the kids out of the Net?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But for many of us, photographs largely live online, ready to be admired and/or criticised by the masses. For some situations, a virtual border or frame is a substantial improvement. Restraint is advised though. Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should.

I’ve got two easy online methods to have yourself framed, and one for those who prefer to be offline now and then.

Picnik

Picnik is a thoroughly friendly free site which allows you to add your images from your local machine, or from other image websites, and then edit the images online. It’s not Photoshop, and doesn’t pretend to be, but if you want a quick, thoroughly visual way to make changes, it’s hard to beat.

Picnik supplies you with five types of frames in the free scenario, and a few more for those willing to fork out cash. You can adjust the effects easily for the frames, and in some cases stack the frames on each other for a more comprehensive effect.

For instance the Drop Shadow border tool lets you adjust the colours of both the shadow and the background, including the option to pick colours from the image itself. Once you add the capability to mess with the distance, angle, size and amount of fade, you have a fairly comprehensive tool. The other free frame options are border, rounded edges, matte and Polaroid.

Easy, quick, and friendly, as I said. You can upload and download between your computer or numerous other sites such as flickr and Facebook.

Pikfix

pikifx is a similar sort of beast. I prefer the picnik interface, but I like some of the pikifx options.

Large files seem a little problematic. I had to upload this one from my PC three times before it would work. Pikifx wants to decrease the quality of the previews to increase the speed, and I must admit to preferring that I see the best possible representation of the image at all times, though I understand the trade-off. Doubtless your broadband speed will determine your settings in here.

This is an example of the grunge border tool. You can see from the list that the options are more comprehensive. The settings within each of the tools covers a lot of ground as well, but the same rule applies. That capability comes with a less friendly interface, I think.

Both picnik and pikifx are happy to work with images on your behalf without either payment or sign-up, and that’s nice. Of course if you link to your flickr account, or one of the other options, then you’re no longer quite so anonymous.

Irfanview

If you’re more comfortable with an offline option, running Windows, and you’re not looking for anything more than a plain border, then Irfanview provides a solid option. Let’s face it. Sometimes the simpler solution is better, and the last thing you want to do is to overpower your image with an impressively complex border.

Irfanview can also batch process the borders, so if you have an entire folder of images to put black borders around, this is seriously painless.

Unfortunately the border option is a little hidden. People are often a little surprised when I show them. You need to open the application, browse to the folder containing the images, and select an image. Once you are viewing an image, either choose the Batch Conversion/Rename option from the File menu, or hit the ‘b’ key on the keyboard.

Select the files you wish to apply borders to, tick the Use advanced options and click the Advanced button.

The options here are nothing short of bewildering. There’s one important thing to remember. If you’ve been in here before, then Irfanview will remember the settings from that session. So if you increased the contrast of a group of photos previously, check that you’ve turned the option off now, or you’ll have a batch of seriously eye-popping images. On the other hand, if you want to, you can apply a bunch of other changes at the same time as the borders. Just make sure you want to do that.

The borders are set up in the confusingly named Canvas size option, so tick that and hit the Settings button.

The settings shown are the default ones. Three pixels on each edge of the image, and Model T black. Adjust these options as you please, and tap the OK button. In the more recent versions of the application, you can also use negative numbers in the pixel spaces, which trims the edges off the images rather than adding a border. Useful, but not something you want to do by mistake.

Back in the Advanced dialogue, note that there are some options there relating to overwriting files, and creation of subfolders. I’m certainly hoping that you would have backed the images up before using this for the first time, but take some time and care with these settings to be sure you have the behaviour you want. note also that when you get back to the main Batch Conversion page there is a section on the left which lets you select the output location.

Click OK again to return to the Batch Conversion page, and when you are happy with your selections click on Start batch to begin adding borders to your images. Enjoy.

Does anyone have another favourite way to achieve border bliss? Tell all.

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Tagging

Everything on the web is about context, and Flickr is no exception. If you provide tags for your photos then people can gather more information about the photograph, search on the tags, and find your image when they need one that meets specific requirements.

You can tag images for your own purposes, but if you want other folk to find them, try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and use tags that people might use in a search.

More tags are generally better, within reason. Where two or more terms might be used for the same thing (silverware, cutlery) use them all. Where different forms of the same word might be searched for, try to cover the ground (buttered, buttery, butter).

You can use multiple word tags as well, but the effectiveness usually drops off pretty fast.

if you have trouble thinking of suitable tags, try running through a list of different sorts of tags, such as place, time, objects, colours, events, people, actions… and then pick up any text that might be in the image, perhaps on signs.

Groups

An image can belong to any number of groups, and Flickr contains a scary number of the things. It’s sufficient to say that there is a group for almost anything you can think of, and many things you would rather not. For example, I’m involved in a group for images that are both blue and rusty. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find people with similar photographic interests.

You can search for groups easily, and you can generally join a group on the spot. Mostly the group owners will let you see the images that are in the group without joining, but you’ll need to join the group to add your own images. The exception here is that if you receive an invitation on your photo then you can add the image without going to the hassle of joining.

If you can’t find a group to join, you always have the option of starting one of your own. Be prepared to get involved in inviting other images and members, or you’ll have a very small group.

Sets

A set is a lot like a group, except it’s all yours. It’s just a way of assembling a number of your images together on some basis or other. Common uses for sets are to showcase your most popular images, or to put all the photos from a single event in one place. Flickr members with children often create a set for each of the people in the family. Or you might have sets for photos taken in different places.

The advantage with regard to getting noticed is that when a searcher finds one of your images, there is a link on the page to all the other images in the same set.

If all this set business gets a little cumbersome, there is also a facility in Flickr to create sets of sets, called collections.

Uniqueness

It’s very easy with a digital camera to take a few dozen very similar images. It’s also easy to upload them all to Flickr, and if your intention is to keep a record, or back up your local storage, that’s fine. But if you want people to be interested in your photographs, consider wandering through all thirty eight pictures of your cute nephew, and upload just the best two or three.

The image itself

If there are three billion images in flickr then there must be at least a few million opinions. Mine is just one. Make your own decisions.

However, as a general rule, most folk prefer images which are correctly exposed, have some compositional value and contain interesting colours, patterns, events or ideas. If your image doesn’t have any of these then it’s going to be difficult to get anyone interested in looking at them. So give it some thought before hitting the upload button. Of course it’s not clear that I’m in a position to say this. Blue and rust, remember?

So that’s my five pieces of advice to get your images noticed in Flickr. Do you have anything to add?

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