The past two days, I've introduced you to the Free Photo Organizing and Editing App called Picasa. If you need to catch up, check out my blog archives list for September and you will see the previous articles. Today were going to be looking at uses for the "Export Tool"
How many megapixel camera do YOU have? I have a 9 Mexapixel camera. However, my normal daily shots are at 3 mexapixel setting. This means that the width of the photos are about 2000 pixels across. For me, that works just fine for my general photo library. My hard drive is already nearing capacity and I'm constantly having to purge stuff. If I had each JPG photo at 5 megabytes plus, we'll forget that! The 3 megapixel shots are around 1MB each. To each his own but that's just my opinion on that subject.
In any case, when you use graphics on the web, you often need to downsize a copy that's a more appropriate size. Let's take for instance MLS photos. In the MLS that I work with, you can upload files of very large size BUT the MLS immediately downsizes the photos to a 540 pixel width for storage (your MLS probably does something similar). Maybe you can relate to this: feeling like MLS photos take such a LONG time to upload! Well, reason being is perhaps you are uploading a 5 or 7 megapixel photo. Now that you are using Picasa, do this instead: Export a copy and upload the smaller output size.
First of all you need to select either a whole folder or specific files. Next, click the Export button. In the figure below, you can see what the export dialog box looks like. There are just a few things to know about it. First, the "where" part. The browse button lets you pick a base folder and for me I choose "My Pictures\Exported" (which you can create this base folder if you need to). In the text box right below on the export dialog, you can type a secondary subfolder on each export that you do. I usually type a short-name reference to the address of the listing. Finally, you need to choose the output size. you can either use the slider bar for typical resolutions (e.g. 640, 800, up to 1600) or you can type any value you want in the text box.
The reason that I like the "Exported" base folder is that I know that all the subfolders are COPIES of the originals. Once in a while, I'll go in and purge all these files out since they are not the originals and can be deleted. Also, when you export files, your logical next step is to browse and find these files for other use. For instance, with the MLS upload, you will browse and select the files you need. This standard location of "My Pictures/Exported" location is always very easy to locate
Now I know all of you bloggers like to use graphics in your blogs. When you insert a graphic, you can type whatever size that you want it to be "displayed" at - however pay particular note to that word: displayed. Let's say you have a 2000 pixel graphic but you are displaying it at 350 pixel width. The web server still stores all 2000 pixels and that EQUATES TO a large file SIZE! The user has to download a much larger file than is necessary and this means time. If you have several graphics this can be painfully and noticeably obvious (a bad practice as you can see why). So consider your ActiveRain blog. Graphics will for the most part be one of two ideal sizes. Up to half the blog width or the full blog width. So if you measure the full width possible of a blog post in its minimum size you get 824 pixels. So good sizes might be 800 pixel for a full width graphic and 350-400 pixel for a half width graphic. Now that you know how to export in Picasa, you can use this knowledge to downsize your graphics for use in your blog. I would recommend exporting to a folder named like Exported\AR or something easy like that so you can quickly find the graphics when you are ready to upload.
Finally, one additional feature available in the export command is the watermark feature. Inside the export dialog, you can turn this option on and then type the text that you want to use in your watermark. It will place the text in the bottom right of each exported photo. This is a simple and quick way to to a whole batch of photos with watermarks.
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