[Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums

So, we’ve covered all the core Picasa capabilities. It’s taken five posts, but it’s a big subject. We’ve gone through Installation, Views, Editing and Special Effects. It’s time to think outside the box in this last post.

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.