MacMost Now 549: Sharing Photos With Picasa

Another great way to share photos is with Google's free Picasa service. You can use the Mac application to upload photos and then share them with friends or embed a slideshow on your own web site.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. In today's episode let's use Picasa to share photos online.So out of all the online photo sharing services, Picasa's probably the most underappreciated. It's Google service so it's part of your Gmail account and Google profile. So if you already have an account, you have Picasa. All you need to do is go to picasa.google.com and maybe go through a couple of steps just to add Picasa as one of your services and then download the Mac application so you can upload photos. So the application is a pretty simple application. It gives you access to your existing albums or allows you to create a new one. Here on the description, say whether it's public or unlisted, and then you can drag photos to it. Now you can drag photos from the finder or you can drag them directly from iPhoto. So for instance, let's create a new album here. I'll bring up iPhoto, and I'll just drag the photo right there from iPhoto into this area here. Do a couple of them. Then I've got the album name here, I can put a description, I can make this one public, then I can add a caption for each one of these photos. It shows what I'm signed in as. It allows me how to pick, what, you know, how to scale those photos. I can also you use the plus button here, to add some files, and I can even go and browse and then using Snow Leopard, I can use the Media Browser and actually delve into my iPhoto Events that way as well. So when I'm done adding photos, I'll just simply hit the upload button, and then it will create that album, and upload the photos to it. So when it's done, I can go directly to viewing these photos or launch Safari for me and go to this album here, and I could see it here online. With the photos online, of course I can send this URL to anybody I want through the share button here, and it will allow me to send an email out. People then can download these photos. You can even log in as this User ID for this account. I can upload photos directly from the web browser here. And I can also edit the information for that particular album. Now if I make the album private, save the changes there, and only people that have permission, can see it. So what happens there is when I share, I would use their Google account here and then they will get permission that they have to log in to their Google account in order to view that album. Anybody else wouldn't be able to see it. Now back here in the application, I can see this existing album and it lists the albums there, I can then add more photos to that album pretty easily using the same application here. One of the big advantage of Picasa and other web sharing photo services have is the ability to publicly share your photos and have them all gather together in one big place like Picasa here, and so you can search other people's photos. So say, if I want to find photos of waterfalls, I can search for waterfall, and it will come up of photos other people have taken that they've tagged or put waterfall in the description. I could do the same with my photos, I could put tags and descriptions and then people can then search and find them. Picasa also have a slideshow functionality, and so if you're looking at somebody's photo album, you can click on slideshow and then browse through it or just play through it. And check this out, you can even embed a slideshow so you can upload some photos to Picasa and then set a slideshow up here, and then copy this HTML, and paste it in your page and it will give you a little flash app that puts a slideshow on your webpage or blog. There are a lot of other features as well, like you could use videos instead of photos, you could also map out where the photos were taken, things like that. So a lot you can do with this free service from Google, so go check it out it's a much better alternative than constantly e-mailing photos to friends to share them. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

MacMost Now 549: Sharing Photos With Picasa

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information