HELP - Dealing with Photos!

I know that I have written on this before, but it just seems to keep changing and being difficult. Apple updated its system for dealing with Pictures from iPhoto to Photos and it has taken me quite a while to figure out what to recommend to people.

First of all, I think it is always good to follow directions to update a program whenever you get that message. It will keep your computer running faster and keep you up to date. One of my clients had an iPhone with the new Photos program and still had iPhoto on her iMac because she had not updated to Yosemite. That was confusing. It is a bit clearer when you are dealing with the same program both places.

We, older people, have an outdated way of thinking about photos. Computers and digital photo taking has totally changed how it all works. It used to be that you had film with your originals and paper copies of your photos. You could hold them in your hand. You could lose them or they could get mouldy in the basement. You could put them into albums or boxes. You could pass them on to your children.

Now, they seem sort of ephemeral. Where are they really? How can I organize them and keep from losing them? It is so easy now to take pictures that we all have SO many of everything and often there are multiples or pictures that we don't want to keep, but who has time to go through them all?

SOME ADVICE

Use the 3, 2, 1 principle of saving pictures and videos that you really want to keep. Have 3 copies saved in two places and put one in a safe deposit box or offsite somewhere that you can access and update once a year, or on some regular basis.

Three copies of any picture that you really do not want to lose should be saved. One is your primary and two are back ups. 

Two copies should be on different media. Do you remember floppy disks?  Most computers today do not have floppy disk drives, so you cannot access them any more. The CD drive is going the way of the floppy drive, so it is possible that if all of your copies are saved ONLY on CD you may not be able to access them easily later. So, you could have one copy saved on a hard drive and one on a CD. Or you could save one on your computer and one in the cloud. I think I might keep one on my computer, but have two external drive backups. One of them would be my regular back up that I keep at home and one ONLY has photos and is kept in a safe deposit box at the bank or something.





One is kept offsite somewhere. If there is a disaster at your house and you lose your computer and your backup at least you will have a copy of everything that you last backed up in another location.



http://www.dpbestflow.org/backup/backup-overview#321 tells more about this and explains it as a way that ALL important files should be backed up. DP stands for Digital Photograpy and this comes from the American Society of Media Photographers, so it may be overkill for us home picture takers, but it is helpful information.

MAC
Like I said above you should always keep all of your devices up to date so that they are using the same software, especially if you want to sync between devices.

The new software called Photos does something interesting. It will hold up to 1000 photos and as you add new photos after that it drops off the oldest ones and only keeps the newest. When a photo is deleted from your phone it is deleted from all devices that are syncing to it. You can turn on iCloud storage if you want to keep photos. This will give you 5G of storage space for free. If you want more you can pay for it

What if you want to store your images forever (or as long as possible)? On the Mac help page it says:

iCloud Photo Library stores all of your original photos and videos in iCloud, but we always recommend you keep back up copies of your Library. You can download your photos and videos from iCloud to your computer and store them as a separate library, transfer them to your computer with iTunes, or store them on a separate drive.

You can go to http://icloud.com to see what photos are stored there. If you want to do something with those photos you can click on them. Once a picture is open you can share, delete or download it. If you want to do this to multiple pictures choose the word SELECT at the top right of the screen and you will be able to put a checkmark in the ones that you want to act on. 

If you don't want to spend more money on photo storage there are lots of options. You can download them to your computer and save them in the Pictures file. One thing lacking in the Pictures file is automatic organization. You have to put pictures in folders and organize them yourself. You can then save them to an external hard drive, or two. You can upload them to an online storage space. Amazon Prime offers unlimited storage space for free and so do many other places. See information on Picasa and Flickr below.

PC

There are many programs that store photos. The one that comes with your PC is called Windows Photo Gallery. Photo Gallery can find all of the pictures in your Pictures file and automatically store them in folders by date. You can then go in and do all sorts of things with your pictures. You can reorganize them into different files, edit them, give them tags or keywords so that they are easy to find.

There are other programs online and that can be downloaded to your computer that do similar things. Picasa is owned by Google and now works with Google Photos. It has an online feature and you can download a program for your computer that will sync with it. It gives you the ability to organize and edit your photos. Shutterfly, SmugMug, Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo and requires a Yahoo login).

Helpful article on Photo Storage
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8467289/cloud-photo-storage-comparison-dropbox-icloud-flickr-onedrive-free

So, what am I going to do?......  Someday when I have lots of time I am going to organize all my photos. I think I will get two hard drives. On both of them I will upload ALL of my photos. On my computer and my phone (and iPad) I will have the same set of the most current photos in the photo program so that I can look at them and easily use them. Then once a year... September?, January?, my birthday? I am going to get the second hard drive from the safe deposit box (or where ever I decide to save it) and update BOTH hard drives and keep just the current year on my computer, phone, and iPad. Someday..... but then I still have VCR tapes waiting to be converted and cassette tapes that need conversion. 

Ten Tech Skills That Everyone Should Have: Part One

This post is based on a blog that I read online a while ago. I thought it had some helpful tips, so I have edited it and added a bit of my own stuff. It was written by someone who was thinking about what students need to learn about using technology in school. We are all long passed school, so I wonder how many of these skills you feel comfortable with? Here is the URL of the post it is based on:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.fr/2012/01/10-tech-skills-every-student-should.html

Do you know how to do an

effective Internet search?

Common Craft videos are a great, simple and fun way to learn things about technology. This one is about searching. It does have some extra words on it to protect people from downloading and using it because they make their money from people who subscribe to use the videos.

Common Craft Video on Web Search Strategies

Do you know how to create, edit, and save

documents, spreadsheets and presentations?

These are common uses for computers. Almost everyone knows how to create, edit and modify documents. There are many people who are unsure of themselves when it comes to spreadsheets or presentations. Most people use Microsoft Office to create documents, spreadsheets or presentations. 

There are other low cost and even free options now. Open Office is a free product that is very much like MS Office. You can download it for free and try it out. When you save your document you have to tell it that you want it to be a .doc so that anyone can open it. Otherwise it is automatically an Open Office document and can only be opened with that program. When I downloaded the newest operating system to my Mac none of my Intel programs would work. MS Office was one of the casualties. I have downloaded and used Open Office and it takes the place of word just fine. I have not tried it for presentations.

Another possibility is Google Drive. It used to be called Google Docs and was upgraded to Google Drive. The difference is that you can download a program to your computer so that you can access your Docs even when you are offline. A future post will have more about Google Drive. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation software and some other things. All of your documents are automatically saved and you can even share them with other people and work on the same document collaboratively.

Open Office

Google Drive

Do you know how to get help when you need it?

Recently I have learned that you can find answers to almost everything by just going to Google and typing in what you want to know.  I am soon going to do a post on maintaining your computer and so just to be sure that I don't miss anything important I am going to go to Google and type "computer maintenance". In the first page of links I will probably find links to some very helpful pages. The main problem with this approach can be that you do not understand what they are trying to tell you. If that is an issue here are some links to other sites that may be helpful.

This site is a lot of fun. It is posted as a letter to your parents where you send them videos about things that they may need to learn. You fill in all of the blanks and then press the PREVIEW button at the bottom and it takes you to where you can watch the video. This is a great way to learn and there are lots of choices of videos.

TechSupport help

Can you type?

For the longest time I have been told that "soon people will not need to type because they can just talk to their computers." This has been possible for a long time and maybe sometime we will get used to doing it. Until then it really makes a difference in how fast you can get something done if you can type. Here are a few free programs you may want to try:

Kiran's Typing Tutor

Learn to Type Free

Key Blaze Typing Tutor Software

Typing Tutor - This one has games

If you want to pay for a great program my favorite is Mavis Beacon. There are many others. Just do a Google Search!

Mavis Beacon

Do you know how to use Social Media

(Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc...)?

There is so much to learn in this area. It is like an explosion. The Internet used to be static, meaning that it basically stayed the same. You could not change anything on the Internet. Now everything has changed. You have the power to add, comment, post, and change many parts of the Internet. The most popular is Facebook. Many people have gone to using it as their main way of communicating with other people. There are also many more. I am adding links to many of them. It is not the purpose of this post to explain how to use them all. If you would like me to write specifically about one of them or a part of one of them (more than I have in other posts) please let me know.

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

YouTube

Flickr

Picasa

I have run out of time for this posting, so I will have to do the second five in the next post. Let me know what you think I may have missed and what you want to learn about!

Save those Photos and other things from Fire

In Austin, Texas this week we are dealing with fires that are out of control. I read somewhere this morning that over 800 houses have burned down. That makes me sad and thoughtful. Two weeks ago my son's apartment in Chicago burned down (http://www.indiegogo.com/Dan-Friesen-Fire-Relief-donation page set up by his brother has links to news articles about the fire). When Dan's apartment burned I did not think about it much. I was concerned more about him and did not apply it to myself. Now that much of Bastrop right outside of Austin is burning I am starting to think about me, especially since it is so smokey outside. What have I done to think about dealing with fire?

There are lots of websites that offer help with what to do in general - http://www.statefundca.com/safety/safetymeeting/SafetyMeetingArticle.aspx?ArticleID=43, but this post is about how technology can help you.

As I write I am backing up my computer. I have a small hard drive that plugs into my computer and keeps a copy of everything I have on it. I think I may start carrying that in my purse. It is very small and has so much information on it. Even if I lose my computer I would still be able to get a new one and put back on it the things that I have stored. Even better much of what I have is actually saved on servers somewhere else. Any time I need to go to a website and log in I am usually saving things on "the cloud" (or actually some computer somewhere). Even if my house burns down and I lose my computer and my hard drive I can still get to those things.


That brings to mind two programs which are extremely helpful:  Flickr and Picasa. I will talk about Flickr today and Picasa tomorrow. Both of them are Photo saving websites where you can upload your photos for FREE. If there is a disaster you can still get your pictures back using any other computer.

http://www.flickr.com/ 
Flickr allows you to upload 300 mb each week for free. When you have gotten to that limit you must wait until the next week to upload or you can pay $25 annually for a pro account. When you upload a picture here the program automatically resizes the file to several different sizes so that it is not too large for the web.

One of the first things you want to do is to set up your privacy settings. After you have logged in you can find this by clicking on your name in the right top corner. You can choose to share your pictures or to make them private. If you make them private they will not show up when someone does a search. There are also very detailed settings in your account where you can allow some photos to show and others not, or maybe allow them to show, but not be copied or printed.



When you open up Flickr you see a greeting in a different language each time! The program starts out on the Home page where you can either go to your Photostream to see all of your pictures or to Upload Pictures or Video where you can do the uploading.

There is a lot you can do with your photos in Flickr which I could talk about on a different post. You can organize them into galleries and sets and you can mark them with lots of information like locations, names of people and tags.

Since the focus of this post is on saving important things in a fire the main thing is this: If you upload your pictures to a site like Flickr can be retrieved.

If something happened with all of your photos they will still be on Flickr. You may want to download another back up copy of all of them. This is not easy to do in the size of the original, but it is possible. If something like that would happen you may need to use a third party piece of software to do the whole download. If you want just a picture at a time it is not a problem.

Tomorrow I will look into Picasa and compare the two. There are other Photo saving and sharing sites so if you know about one that should be mentioned please comment.

Embed Code

On Flickr, YouTube and many other sites you get the choice to use "embed code" in order to put any media (picture, video or audio) on Facebook or another website. Here are the steps for using the embed code:

Go to the site that has the picture or video you want to use. To find the embed code choose SHARE. You will be given a choice to post to various places or get the link to copy and an embed code (on Flickr it was called HTML or BBedit code). Copy the embed code.  

Go back to the page you want the media to be on. To go back to the place that you want the picture to show up, choose EDIT HTML or whatever you need to do in order to edit the code. You can guess where you think the picture should go by looking at the code on the page. It includes the words that are on the page, so if you do a search (CTRL-F or F3 on a Mac) for those words you can paste the code directly into the HTML. Here is an example: (I searched for the words "Here is an Example:)

When I pasted the code into the HTML on my blog this is what actually showed up!
Now you can save, publish or preview to see that the picture or video that you wanted to show is now on your webpage.

The reason to use embed code is that the picture STAYS on the site where it was originally and you just put in a pointer to that place. When someone looks at your page the computer automatically gets the picture or video from the other place and puts it on your page.

Tomorrow we are back to Facebook!