The thing about photos is that the caption at the bottom is very helpful in seeing what the uploader was thinking when they uploaded the photo.  The problem is that people don’t always take the time to add Facebook photo captions, especially if they’re uploading multiple photos at a time.  If I wanted to upload several photos from the same event (or are somehow otherwise related), I would love to have the ability to automatically add the same caption to all of them at the time of the upload.

I have found three methods to automatically load Facebook photo captions when you upload pictures.

Facebook’s Upload via Email feature

If you upload photos via email, the subject line automatically becomes the caption.  If you are emailing more than one photo, the subject line becomes the caption of all of the photos attached to that email.  Very cool.

Head to Facebook Mobile to find out the email address you should send updates and photos to.  Don’t share this address with anyone because anyone who knows it can then post stuff to your profile and nobody wants that!

Compose an email message attaching the photos and adding a subject line.

Check out your Facebook photo section to see the results.

The screenshot only shows one photo but they both ended up with the same caption.  So using the email feature is one shortcut making adding Facebook photo captions automatic and easy.

Desktop Application

Another way to easily add captions to multiple photos when uploading them to Facebook is to use a desktop application.  I found one called Bloom.  Bloom makes uploading multiple photos to Facebook easy.  Just highlight the photos in their folder and drag and drop them into the Bloom application.  It’s really that easy.

Then you just add the album and photo information in fields in the right sidebar.  You can either add separate photo captions by selecting them individually or you can Shift-click or Ctrl-click to highlight multiple photos and add the same caption to all selected photos.

Bloom also has many other features but for the sake of this article I’ll only cover the bulk uploader.

Picasa Uploader

There is also a Picasa plugin called Picasa Uploader that allows you to upload photos directly from your Picasa program to Facebook, captions and all.  It’s as easy as installing Picasa (if you haven’t already), installing the plugin, allow access to your Facebook account, and upload.  It even gives you the option to create a new album for each group of pictures you upload in bulk.

Facebook has its own upload function and it is quite easy to add captions after uploading, but these are a few ways to have the captions done in bulk and before the upload. As far as Picasa goes, you are saving yourself from doing the captions twice if you’ve already inserted them in Picasa.

What are some of your tips to make adding captions to Facebook photos easier?  Please share them with us in the comments!

And didn’t someone say that no photographer is as good as the simplest camera? Someone also said this anonymously – buying a Nikon doesn’t make you a photographer. It just makes you a Nikon owner.

Just like a singer has to train his voice, a photographer needs to train his eyes. Thanks to the Internet, we can become invisible apprentices to the shutterbugs who have clicked before us. A click of the mouse can take us to a lot of web resources where we can learn about photography without spending the cost of a film.

As it was with me, my lack of confidence in myself as a shutterbug-to-be was matched by my lack of confidence in my basic camera. How effective could my low priced point and shoot be?

To unlearn that, I waded into the web searching for images clicked using the same camera. In the process, I unlearned a lot, and learned a lot about angles, focus, light, and color composition. But most of all I am learning how to capture the mood of a particular moment.

There are many ways we can search for photos by camera in Flickr and Picasa. It not only makes for great lessons but it is a handy comparative tool if you are deciding between various camera models. Here are two of the very best – one that has been around and the other that has just arrived.

Search by Camera in Flickr

Flickr is a melting pot of global photographers and as a result you will get all kinds of shots from all kinds of cameras. The Camera Finder tool is great for making an open minded judgment of a photo and a camera.

The Camera Finder is like an index of all cameras that have been used to click the photos in Flickr’s database. Flickr does this from the EXIF meta-data that’s part of the photos. If you are planning to buy a camera, the trends as shown in the graph could give you an idea. You can click on any camera brand/model and check out the specs.

But as a photographer, I am interested in what my point and shooter shows for itself in Flickr.

1. On the Camera Finder page, select the brand from the dropdown and click on Go.



2. Flickr lists all the camera models by brand and make, as used in the Flickr community. Find your camera model in the list and click on that to go into the camera’s page.



3. You can search for images using keywords in the search field. Alternatively, you can explore content using the dropdown. For instance, I am learning a lot about macro photography using Flickr.



4. Clicking on the photo-thumbnail takes you into the photostream. On that page, you can check out a lot of other details (i.e. the EXIF data), all arranged under Additional Information.

Many photos, shot using a point and shoot are tagged with the Flickr Award too!

Search By Camera From Picasa

After the stopover at Flickr, Picasa could be number two on your list. A worthwhile visit because Picasa Web Albums has just added the Search by Camera feature to help us out. Searching by camera models is not as much an information mine as Flickr but it’s a nice tool nonetheless.

1. Login to your Picasa Web Album account with a Google ID. Search for images with a keyword.



2. Click on Show Options which expands to display all the filters.



3. Click on Any camera – Camera Model. Enter the make of your camera as it suggests them with an auto-complete.



4. Click on Search and you get all images clicked using that model of camera. You can check out the EXIF data for each photo, which is not as detailed as in Flickr.

A Normal Google Image Search

We usually fall back to Google Search without a moment’s pause but in this case at least, the above two services come out on top.

Searching through the tons of Google Search results is cumbersome. In the post – 10 Tips to Have Fun Using Advanced Google Search for Images, I had mentioned a normal image search using a camera type as the keyword.

I had also mentioned a service like Junknstuff which lets you select a camera model for the image search. Junknstuff doesn’t seem to be working right now. Of course, the glitch could be temporary and you can check back into it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the case of photography, though no two photos can be exactly the same, the proverb still holds true. As these two tools might well prove, imitation can be the shortest path to learning too.

Do you agree with the usefulness of these two services? Do you know of another similar service that adds to your photography? Let us know.

You can look at some popular favorite places or show off your own. Like I said, Panoramio is property of Google and is awesome. I do not know how I had never heard of it before today!

Let’s take a look at how it works. Let us head on over to their website and sign up as you cannot use your Google ID.

When you get to the site, it will look like this and the sign in button will appear in the upper right hand corner.

Fill out the requested information and continue. When you have completed, you will see a screen that looks similar to this.

You can click on Upload your photos to start or you can check out the places or tags buttons at the top of the page.

Once you click on “Upload your photos”, you will see this screen allowing you to upload images:

Browse to your images and click Upload when you are done. You will see this screen asking you to tag and locate you picture on a map.

Fill in the data and click the Map this photo button at the top. Next, you will need to provide a location. Type in as much information into the box and click Search.

That will show the picture on a map like so. Confirm your location and hit Save position.

Blamo, it will appear on a map or Google Earth. Now to be a little more interesting ““ let’s travel the world and see images uploaded by other users. I clicked on Places at the top of the screen and that brought me to a random location like so:

Wow that’s a lot of images! Click on one of them to see this:

You can click on the See all photos from this place button at the bottom to see this:

That sure is a lot of images! You can browse around and open each to take a closer look. You could use this a tool to see if you want to vacation somewhere or maybe even move to that new location!

Next up you can view images on the map via user posted Tags. You will see the Tags button at the top of the interface. That will bring you to this screen:

Click on a popular tag (displayed as a tag cloud bold and big means popular!) or search for your own by typing it into the search box and hitting Find tag.

I choose Sunset from the popular tags list and brought up this amazing search:

Beautiful! Simply beautiful. Panoramio has a lot of possibilities! Do you use this or another mapping application that allows you to show your images on a map? We would love to hear from you in the comments! Do you love it or what?

We’ve talked about this in MakeUseOf before. Shankar mentioned geotagging in a post on managing photos using Picasa, and Mark talked about geotagging with Google Maps and Google Earth.

Simply put, photo geotagging is the attachment of information to your photographs to accurately pinpoint the location of the images. It’s no different to tagging with other information, but it’s handled automatically by other applications which can then show your images on maps and so on. And with Picasa, it’s really easy.

Tagging Your Images

I’ve covered how to get images into Picasa before, so refer back to the older posts if necessary. In the meantime, I’m going to give the rest of you a short geography lesson. I know it’s winter in most of the world right now, but down here in New Zealand it’s the middle of summer. A few weeks before Christmas I had to travel to a little town called Whangarei for business. That’s in the northernmost part of New Zealand. Down here, North means warm. It’s nice there.

One of the questions I often get about my photos is where is that? Photo geotagging solves this problem. So, before I post these images on the web, I want to geotag them. Start Picasa. Find the images. Ready to go.

In this case I want to tag an entire album of images, but you can also select multiple images (CTRL-Click) and tag them. If your images were taken in slightly different locations, then you need to make some decisions about exactly how precise you want to be. So, select the images:

On the bottom right of the Library view, there are three buttons. People, Places and Tags. If you’ve been following the face tutorial, then People will be selected. Click on Places.

Now you need to find the location where the pictures were taken. New Zealand has the advantage of a few unique place-names, but you might need to select from a few options if you are making use of a location (like my home town of Wellington, for instance) that exists in a few places.

In this case, type whangarei in the search box, and hit Enter or click the magnifying glass. Google Maps will search for the location, and if it finds it you will be presented with an appropriate map, and a question about whether the location is correct.

Generally, that’s not quite specific enough for the job. You need to zoom in closer. In my case, I need to sort out where I was sitting with that cool drink.

Click the (+) button to zoom in, and the (-) to zoom back out, or use the scroll wheel on your mouse. You can also switch between street and satellite views, or use a hybrid of both.

Unfortunately small-town New Zealand isn’t the best mapped area on the planet, so the satellite imagery for Whangarei isn’t much use. I’ll stick with the street maps.

Eventually you’ll have enough detail to decide where you need to be. Drag the small green marker to that location, let it go, and click the OK button.

The pointer will turn red, and the images that have been tagged will now have a small red pointer in the bottom-left of each.

If you are using Picasa Web Albums, you can go ahead and synchronise the images. I use Flickr though, so let me just tell you how that works.

Upload & View

Just to confirm what’s been done to the images, let me take a look at one of them in Irfanview, and show you what happened. The photo geotagging information is stored in a data area of the image called EXIF. That’s the same place that all the information about the camera settings is kept. Irfanview can take a peek at that data (and even change it if you need to). Not much to it, is there?

I use ACDSeePro to upload the images to Flickr, but you can use any of the available tools. The location data is stored in the file, not in Picasa, so it doesn’t matter. Just upload as usual, and then take a look at one of the images in Flickr. You can see these ones here.

As you can see, there’s a new item in the information section which outlines (in English, thankfully) the information stored in the EXIF.

You can edit that information here, or just take a look at it on a map. Let’s check the map out.

Flickr doesn’t use Google Maps, but you get a similar experience with the Yahoo alternative. One of the things I like best about this is the ability to see other images that have been taken nearby. Click the button at the bottom of the window. Unfortunately for me, it appears no one uses Flickr in Whangarei, and my images are the only nearby ones. Oh, well.

If you had clicked the Edit option from the information block, you would get the opportunity to reposition the image on the map, using a similar interface to the Picasa one we used. Given that you can do this online, you might be wondering why you might use the Picasa tagging tool. In my case, it’s simple. Because you are running Picasa locally, it’s adding the location data to the original images. Then the uploading choices are all yours.

One more gotcha. I found that while Picasa gave every impression it was successfully geotagging my Canon RAW files, it didn’t actually work. It needed the JPG images to work on.

That’s it. Do you use photo geotagging? What tools do you like? What’s still confusing? Let me know in the comments below.

Google have, along with a plethora of other products, been updating Picasa. The current version is 3.6. If for some reason you’ve stuck with 3.5 then most of this is still valid. For anyone with an older version, it’s time to move on. After all, the price couldn’t be better.

Picasa is available for Windows and Mac. For the purposes of this guide, I’ll be running Windows 7. Pick up the current Picasa version here. Read my older tutorials first if you need a leg-up. I’m going to dive straight into the biggest change. The other item of interest in 3.6 is geo-tagging. I’ll talk about that in another post. There’s enough here already.

Picasa Face Recognition & Tagging

The Picasa face recognition feature was actually added in 3.5, but it’s improved significantly. Just accept it and move on. If you’re familiar with Picasa Web Albums you might well have already seen this working. I’m focused on the local Picasa version here though.

What’s The Idea?

The concept is pretty simple, really. Picasa will scan your images and do two things. Firstly it will find the ones that it thinks have faces in them, and then it will do its best to find those photos which are of the same person. I’m not really much of a people photographer, so I will have to pick on my kids for the best set of examples. They’ll get me back for this later, you can be sure.

Install or update Picasa to 3.6 (I’m doing a fresh install) and go from there.

What Happens?

When Picasa starts and does its normal drive and folder scanning, it undertakes an extra task of scanning for faces.

When the scanning is finished, you’ll have an album called Unnamed people.

Start on whichever image you like. Click the Add a name box below the image, and start to type the name of the person. Hit the enter key on completion.

Picasa will compare the name supplied with those it already has, and decide if you need to add some more details.

It’s handy, if you use Picasa Web Albums, to be logged in while you do this, as Picasa can then surreptitiously lift the details from your Google contacts. I’m running this old-school, so it’s expecting to find the details locally.

In this case, my daughter Sophie is not yet in the list, so I’m prompted to add some more details.

Click the New Person button and add whatever other information you would like for this person. Click OK.

And that’s it. Continue through your files, adding people as necessary. You’ll notice that those names you’ve already added will pop up as you start to type the names again. Just choose them from the list.

Alternatives abound. Firstly, you can right-click the image and choose Move to People Album, and then select the appropriate person from the list. If that appeals, you can also select multiple images (using CTRL-click) and then right-click to assign them all at once.

Presumably there are some people in the images you don’t recognise. There are two options. For most of mine I called my wife into the room and asked her. The downside to that was that she forbade me to use her likeness in the post.

The rest you can deal with by clicking on the small black cross at the top right of the image. You will be asked to confirm that you want to ignore that person. Note that using similar language with your spouse is discouraged on health grounds.

Cleaning Up

In the course of all of that, you’ve almost certainly had some automatic assignments taking place. That is, the Picasa face recognition engine has guessed who the person is in some of the images. In my case (and I was using three siblings and their mother!) the guesses were mostly right on the mark.

In any case, you need to confirm or decline the auto assignments. Take a look at the last few images in the album for any particular person.

If you have any auto images, they will look like this. A small orange triangle at bottom left, and two buttons; a tick, and a cross.

Click the tick to confirm that the assignment is correct, or the cross to decline.

Either the buttons will disappear, or the image will be returned to the Unnamed album.

Work your way through any others.

After the manual and auto tagging is complete, you’ll be able to see the names of people in the images, and be able to search on the basis of the names.

One other nifty trick is the ability to create a collage or movie presentation from the images of a particular person. Nick, for instance:

Somehow my other son, David, has escaped entirely. I’ll catch up with him later”¦

So there it is. If you can get just a little organised with this, it’s certainly going to be easier when it comes time to embarrass the small people on their birthdays, right?

I’ll be back soon with a post on geo-tagging.

How are you finding Picasa? It’s been a while since I wrote about it, but I continue to be impressed. Any problems? Tips? Let me know in the comments.

There are things that Google does well and some things they do really well. Picasa is one of the ones they do really well and if you do a lot of image viewing and editing on your computer then you should use Picasa by default. It takes image viewing and editing to a completely new level and offers a lot of other features apart from letting you look at your photos.

Here’s five Google Picasa tricks and tips, the ones I found really good and ones which I am likely to use often.

Resize Images Properly For Frames

I am in the habit of framing a lot of my good pictures for the walls but other image editing programs can’t seem to get the photo resized properly. Even if you specify the exact size you want, the picture still seems to be too big or too small. Then you have to start cutting it down (if it’s too big) or having big gaps in the frame (if it’s too small).

But with Picasa, you don’t have this issue. When you resize an image, it gets the new measurements exactly right, straight away.

Just go to the photo then press the print button. It will then give you a variety of sizes available.

They give you the opportunity to add a border to the picture, under “Border and Text Options“. Choose how many copies of the picture you want and it tries to put them all on the same page (depending on the size). Then choose your desired size and off it goes to the printer. Very easy.

Turn Your Photos Into An Instant HTML Webpage

This one is extremely useful if you would like to upload your photos to a website but you are not too sure about your HTML skills. This is even easier than the Web Album Generator which I wrote about in December 2007.

Choose the pictures you would like on your page by clicking on the first one then using your left and right arrow keys to choose the rest. Then go to Folder–>Export As A HTML Page and you will then be asked some options:

Make your choices and then you will be asked what type of page you would like :

After making your choices, Picasa then very quickly makes the page and opens it in your browser. If you like what you see, save the page to your computer by going to File–>Save Page As in the browser menu :

Send The Photos Directly To Blogger

Now that I have started using Blogger again, this one will become especially useful for when I quickly want to send my snaps to my blog.

Just double-click on the photo you want to send to your blog and press the BlogThis! button at the bottom.

This opens up a window to log into Blogger (if you’re not already logged in).  Log in with your Google account and when you are in, you will get size options and then the opportunity to write some text next to your picture.

Then press “Publish Post” as you would do in any normal Blogger post.  The image will then instantly appear on your blog page. No waiting required.

Turn Your Images Into A Collage – Then Into A Desktop Wallpaper

This one is really cool. We have already covered how to make a collage on computer before but the Picasa method is really quite easy.

Again, highlight the photos with your mouse then go to Create–>Picture Collage. Your images will then appear as one of the collage styles and you will have options to try out other ones.

Once the collage has been made, there is an option to then make your creation into a desktop wallpaper.

This will make my girlfriend jump hen she comes home and finds me on the desktop!

Turn photos into movie slideshows with music then upload to YouTube

I was at a wedding on Saturday and the bride & groom’s friends wanted to show a slideshow of the bride and groom at various stages of their relationship. But the software program they were using to play the show from their laptop constantly stopped working. Looking at how Picasa easily makes movie slideshows with music, they could have used this instead.

Granted, this is not going to make anything Oscar-worthy but if you are just looking for a way to show photos along with a bit of music (or no music if you prefer) then this works perfectly well.

Put all the photos you want in the slideshow into its own folder. Then in Picasa, there are options at the top of every folder.  One of them is Create Movie Presentation. Make sure the pictures are in the correct order in the folder as you want them to appear in the slideshow (just name them picture1.jpg, picture2.jpg…..or something similar)

Clicking the “Create Movie Presentation” button puts the pictures in the folder into a straight line with a screen above it so you can view what you have created.

On the top left hand side, you also have the option to add music. Just navigate to the music file’s location in your computer and choose it. Then underneath, choose your “transition style” which is how you want the images to change on the screen. Do you want them to fade out? Or cut from one to the other? Pan and Zoom? There are quite a few choices there for you to choose from.

You can then press the green “play” button for your slideshow to start. Go full screen for maximum effect. At the end, if you are really pleased with your slideshow, Picasa even gives you the ability to upload your creation to YouTube so everyone else can see it.

So those are the five features that jumped out at me. I did want to do the geotagging of my photos from Picasa to Google Earth but for some reason it didn’t work for me. Picasa told me to download Google Earth first but I already had it! So perhaps when I finally get that feature to work, I may write about it in a separate article.

We have done quite a few Picasa articles on MakeUseOf in the past. Here are a few to get your Picasa fix :

• Jim’s Five Part Introductory Series To Picasa – Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five.
• Ten Tips To Manage Photos Better Using Google Picasa – Shankar
• Send Your Photos To Your Picasa Web Album With An Email – Saikat
• How To Use Facial Recognition In Picasa Web Albums – Tim

Which features of Picasa do you like the best? Let us know in the comments.

Picasa

In Picasa Web Albums, Google has integrated a newer technology that I think you’ll be amazed with at how well it works.  In choosing which website to use to host my photographs, this feature may be a game-ender. Watch how it works, try it for yourself, and see if the facial recognition feature doesn’t turn your head too!

I would like to introduce you to what facial recognition is, show you its benefits within Picasa Web Albums, and give a quick tutorial on how to use it with your own photo albums.

What is facial recognition?

You may have seen facial recognition used on your favorite cop or investigative television show.  They may have used it to identify some suspect from a huge file of photographs.  You may be wondering, what is it and how does this work?

Well, Wikipedia defines facial recognition this way: “A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source.”  Well done with another good definition!

Basically, facial recognition technology attempts to identify people’s faces by comparing facial features in photographs.  As we will be seeing in this article, Google has put this technology to use in Picasa in order to make tagging people in your albums a lot easier.

How does it help me with my Picasa web album?

How many pictures do you post in your Google Picasa Web Album?  For those who have many hundreds of photos, tagging people in each photo can be a real chore.  However, if you want to be able to quickly find specific photographs containing specific people, tagging becomes very necessary.

So how exactly does facial recognition help in this endeavour?  Google’s Picasa Web Albums can scan your photos of what it believes are faces, allow you to identify a person you know in the photographs, and scan the rest of your photographs for the same person allowing you to quickly tag them also.  Basically it saves you from having to tag each individual photo by hand by suggesting other photos with the same people in them.

Cool!  So how do I get started then?

It’s an easy, two step process!

1. Enable “name tags” in settings:

Click the “settings” link on the top-right menu of Picasa Web Albums, click the “Privacy and Permissions” tab, check the box labeled “Use name tags to name people in my photos” (you’re faced with a few viewing options once you check the box), and click “save changes.”

2. Apply the name tags

Choose which album you want to apply name tags to then click the “add name tags” button:

Then begin applying the names!  The technology guesses which faces belong to the same people but make sure it guesses right.  It gives you several suggestions:

But you can also choose from the list of already used names if the suggestions are wrong:

There you have it!  The cool technology we see on those cop shows has come to help us organize our photos!  Try it!  You may actually come to finally enjoy the process of tagging your photographs!  Who would have known?