Where to put the pictures once you have them. 

Once you have all those great digital images of the cat bouncing around on the Christmas tree, and the kids screaming for joy over the wrapping paper, you’re going to want to share those images. A web photo album might be a good solution. 

Web albums are a much better option than trying to email everyone your digital images. Once completed, you can email everyone a single link to the web album, and the relatives and friends can download the pictures they like from a single area, very easily. 

Downloading Picasa and installing is very easy for the Windows XP and Vista users. If you have a Mac, there are now two solutions which can be found on the Picasa Help Center area, one is using iPhotos, and loading to the Picasa Web Album area from that software, and the other is a direct loader if you don’t use iPhotos. I’m told there is going to be a full version of Picasa for the Mac sometime in the future, but right now, that is just rumor-ware. 

Once installed Picasa searches your computer for images. You can control the areas Picasa is allowed to search in the 

File->Add Folder to Picasa Dialog. 

Yes that is a bit confusing, and should be renamed, but whether you are adding a folder or removing one from the search list of Picasa, the command dialog is the same. 

I took the time to show you that functionality in this article, because, honestly, that is the hardest option setting to find and use in Picasa, the rest is really easy. 

Once you have Picasa downloaded and installed, and your Image areas being searched, the layout and folder areas are created for you. You can make different album areas however, and then upload those albums to the Internet. The Picasa services gives you 1-Gig of free space on the web for your images and videos. I have not heard of a limit to the number of Albu

ms you can have, so make as many or few as your image collection requires.  

Once you create a web album, you can set that album to be Public, Private or even set it to have a password. 

Quick overview of Picasa’s Albums, Folders and Collections

We need to stay focused on our task for this article, because Picasa simply has too many good options and getting side-tracked is easy. However, we should go over some basic vocabulary; this will make the rest of your explorations into Picasa easier to understand as well. 

• Collections
• Folders
• Albums

Collections are the Gray Bars in the side-menu area with the arrows. Clicking on the arrows, expands the Collection or Opens it. 

Folders in Picasa are created by the folders the program finds on your hard drive. If you create a new folder under your Pictures directory (and put image files into that folder), you can expect to find a new folder of the same name in the Folders Collection of Picasa the next time you open the program. 

Albums are collections of pictures you have created inside Picasa. An Album is a “Theme” or group of images which you create by selecting images from your other folder areas. 

When creating an album, the same image can be used in several Albums, but Picasa doesn’t really like duplicate images inside physical folders. Albums are really simply a list of images, not the “physical” images themselves. So the same image in several Albums is not a duplication of that image, simply multiple references to the same image. 

Why? Well, for many reasons, the first one being disk space. It is assumed by Picasa’s program that you “want” to make albums for sharing with others, if the program made copies of the physical files for every album you wished to create, your disk space would be eaten up in a very short time. However, if we only are making lists of these images, then we are free to make many more Albums, while not eating up our available hard-drive space. 

Digital images can be very large. 

Create a New Album with selected pictures. 

With the vocabulary out of the way, we want to put together an Album from our collection of holiday digial images, and then upload that album to a space on the Internet where family and friends can view, download, print and share these images. 

With that goal in mind, I’m going to create an album in the following Flash Tutorial, and then I’m going to add pictures to that album. 

Not so hard, and adding images to our album is just as simple, we are going to find an image we want to add, right click on the image, and add the image to the Album we just created. 

You can also simply drag the image over to the album, but I find it easier to right-click and choose the Album name. 

TIP: We can also hold down the Ctrl key, and select several images at once, then right click on one of the selected images, to add all of the images at the same time. 

Log into your Picasa Account

If you have a Google account already, then you have a Picasa Account as well. If you don’t, then you can create an account by going to the Web area in the top menu bar, and signing up. Again signing up is free, and mostly painless. 

Once signed up, we just log in, and we are ready to put our album on the Internet. 

Create your Web Album by Uploading your Local Album

This is really the easy part. We just choose our Album and click on the Upload button. 

By default our Web Album is going to have the same Properties (name, description, date, etc) as our local album. 

Change the Settings of your web album

We have several options for our albums. We can let anyone who comes across the album on the Internet see it, we can set it so only a list of people can see the album, we can also put a password on the album, and email our friends and family the link address, and password. 

For family photos, and holiday pictures, I prefer to just make the album public, and then, if I wish later, change the album to private. Then I send out invitations to the album. Putting in a password is a bit much and for some of my older family members, I might as well not put the pictures up if I’m going to make it difficult for them to see, cause they are not going through the ordeal. Your millage (and family) may vary. 

Let people know your web album is ready to be seen

As shown in the tutorial walk through there are many options for sending out invitations to your web album. You can use the Picasa invitation, or just copy the URL address of the web album and paste it in your own email. Link to it from your blog or Myspace page. 

Post pictures from your web album into your Myspace and Facebook area.

Once the album is uploaded, each picture will have a link beside it, on the right, which you can copy and paste into your Myspace area, or your Facebook area. If you have a blog on Blogger, use the Blogger button at the bottom menu of Picasa, for fast uploading to that website. 

Have fun this season! and as always, if you have questions, jump into our forum area and we’ll get you answers.