Bones Guides - Getting Started with Digital Photos

So you've got this sweet new digital camera, what the hell to do now? Well, this guide is designed to give you some insight on saving, sharing and editing your new digital photos. Here's the basic list:

• Picasa (Software for your computer)
  
• Flickr (Website for showing photos to family, friends)

A couple of notes before we start.

1. Picasa is a free download from Google. No cost, no premium, free. Picasa has a very simple method for emailing photos when you tie it to a Google Gmail account. What is Gmail? Gmail is a free, web-based email account similar to Hotmal, Yahoo, etc. Its the best in my opinion because you really never have to delete anything. If you need one, email me and I'll send you an invite to setup a Gmail account.

2. Flickr is also free, however it ties to a Yahoo! account. If you have a Yahoo! account, cool, if not its free as well.

3. This presents an interesting angle. You will end up with a Yahoo! and Gmail account each with its own email address. Consolidation is the key, especially for the future. My suggestion is to get the Gmail and stick with it. This will open up all the doors with Google and make it real easy to send pics from Picasa. Even if you have the Yahoo! email address, send an email to everyone in your Yahoo! address book that you're changing email. You don't have to do this, just a suggestion. If you're just getting established or have an ISP email (@insight, @earthlink, @comcast, @roadrunner, etc.) I suggest switching the web-based email as you may change ISPs more often.

4. Use a card reader to download photos from your camera. It makes it easier and removes the need to rely on the photo software that comes with your camera. You can pick one up at Circuit City or Best Buy, or online at Newegg.

Ok, enough of the distractions, let's get going with the apps.

The first thing in organizing the photos is get them centralized in the My Pictures folder in My Documents. This will help in many ways for future adding, editing, keeping track, etc.

Picasa

Download Picasa

The install for Picasa is pretty simple. Follow the menus. On one screen towards the end you'll be asked to scan your entire computer or just the My Pictures folder for pics. Suggest selecting the option (bottom option) for just the My Pictures folder. Also, go ahead and select all the checkboxes on the last screen. This will put a little icon in your status bar at the bottom of your Windows screen next to the clock (see pic).

Picasa has a great interface and its help file included with it (accessible by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard) is extensive to get the ins and outs of the app.

When Picasa starts up, its going to crank through and look for pics. When it finishes, the first thing to do is to go to View > Sort Folder List By > Name. This will sort the images by folder name. Next, go to Tools > Folder Manager. This will pull up a menu that looks like this:

There are three options for each folder: Scan Once, Remove from Picasa and Scan Always. I suggest setting everything to "Remove from Picasa" except for the My Pictures folder. This will make it easier to see the new photos you add to the My Pictures folder when you pull them in from your camera or card reader.

Editing photos is easy as well. Just double-click on any image and you can play. The red-eye reducer is very cool. Just click and drag around eyes and it will take the red out.

For emailing, after you've got your Gmail account setup, go to Tools > Options. Click on the second tab, labeled "Email". Select the "Use my Gmail Account" option and hit "OK". Now, when you click once on any image and the menu comes up in the lower portion of the screen, you can hit email and it will bring up the option to email directly from your Gmail account.

Ok, at this point we should be setup to 1) Transfer photos, 2) View & Edit photos and 3) Email photos. The next step is sharing photos through the Web with Flickr...

Flickr

www.flickr.com

The basic setup of Flickr is to have your presence on the Web to share and showcase photos. Kind of a homepage for your photos.

After logging into Flickr, you'll be directed to your Flickr start page. The right side of the screen will provide options to Upload Photos, view Your Photos, checkout Everyone's Photos or edit Your Groups. Once you've determined which photos you'd like to send to Flickr. Click the "Upload Photos" link.

The Upload page will allow you to select individual photos on your computer. This is easy enough. You can go a step further and download the Flickr Uploadr. Suggest doing this simply because it does a great job of optimizing photos as they are uploaded. Once you download and install the Flickr Uploadr, it will ask you to login to your Flickr account. The interface will look like this:


With the Uploadr installed. You can simply drag and drop photos into the app and hit the upload key. This will allow you to upload and optimize with one click. Simple stuff.

You can organize the groups by adding tags which are basically keywords for photos. In addition, you can group photos into sets. One thing to note, you can only create three sets in the free version of Flickr.

Notice the blue button at the bottom that says "Go Pro". This is an ad to upgrade to the Flickr Pro account. Its the best $25 you can spend for your digital photo collection. Its $25 a year, 12 months. This ups your monthly upload to 2 gigabytes. That's a ton of photos. More photos than I could even take at the Masters. Its a no brainer. Just wish they had an affililate program for my referrals.

With the Pro account, you can also create unlimited sets of photos.

One thing to do in Flickr is to click on the "Your Account" link at the top right. Next, click on the link below the headline that reads "Your own Flickr web page". This will let you setup a web page to email to all of your friends and family. As an example, mine is http://www.flickr.com/photos/legend393/. This makes it easy to have a central web address for all of those you'd like to share photos with be able to see your stuff. (Please, no porn or Mike Davis photos).

Well, that's the basic setup. Alot to go over. I hope this helps. I'll continue to edit this post and tweak it as I get feedback from friends and family. Enjoy.

Happy New Year

This blog will be similar to a Seinfeld episode, no direction and pretty random. Part ESPN, part Dummies guide, part shopping, part nerd and more. Hopefully it will be entertaining.