Saving your Photos from Fire Two-Picasa

Picture downloaded from Picasa from Jeremy King

Yesterday we talked about Flickr as one place that you can upload your pictures. Having all your precious photos online somewhere means that they will not be damaged if there is an earthquake, flood or a fire. Today I will talk a little about Picasa.

Picasa works a little differently than Flickr. It actually has two parts. One is a program on your computer and the other is online file space.

You start with Picasa by going to http://picasa.google.com and downloading a copy of the free program. It puts a program on your computer that can automatically look for all of the pictures on your computer and display them into the one program. It does not actually move any of the pictures, but puts a pointer to them so that you can find them all in one place. So far all you have is a program that helps you organize what is already on your computer.

The thing I find most irritating thing about Picasa is that it automatically goes and finds all of your pictures, so when you open it up you see a scrolling window on the bottom left side that automatically finds and categorizes all of the graphics on your computer. You can set it up to only look in certain folders for pictures.

First go to Tools>Folder Manager

In the Folder Manager you can indicate which folders you want Picasa to look for new pictures. Now when you open the program it will only collect and display the new photos you wanted it to find.

Picasa always leaves the original of your photos the same as it was. It is a program for organizing and editing your photos. When you open a picture and do some editing of it the original is not changed and when you save it a second copy is saved so that the original stays the same.

The next thing that you can do with Picasa is to upload your pictures to a web album. This web album works like Flickr. You can choose to upload the pictures you want there and you can make them public or private. The photos that you have not uploaded yourself are NOT on the web and will be destroyed or lost if your computer is damaged.

In order to upload any pictures that you want to save find the picture or folder from the left side menu and at the top of the window that appears choose SHARE. You will be given a choice to share these pictures publicly or privately.

When you have uploaded them you will find them at http://picasaweb.google.com. From here you can either search everyone's public photos with the search at the top of the page or log into your own album. Your online web album also has privacy settings. Here you can allow people to see your images, but not download them or even keep them completely private so that only you can see them when you log in.

Picasa recommends that you make a back up copy of all of your pictures using TOOLS>BACK UP PICTURES in order to be sure that you are actually saving all of the originals. The program automatically resizes the photos when you upload them so that they do not take up too much space. You can set it up so that your original sizes are uploaded, but it will take a lot of room and you may use up space quickly. If you lose your external hard drive in a fire you will be happy to at least have the smaller versions saved.

Because Picasa is a Google program it has a connection to Blogger and so any images that are posted to a blog are also posted in Picasa online. All of the images from this blog can be found in the Picasa album from this blog.

There is some fantastic information here that goes more in depth. https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/faq

There is so much more that you can do with either Picasa or Flickr, but this should give you a start saving your precious photos. Picasa is made for editing, organizing, sharing and creating things with your photos.

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.