This is part 5 of the series where I'm teaching you how to use the Free Photo Organizing and Editing App called Picasa. If you need to catch up, check out my Picasa Series recap listing here and you will see the previous articles. Today we're going to be looking at Creating Web Albums for sharing photos.
When you want to share photos, your first inclination might be "let me email them." After today, you should instead say, "let me create a web album". Picasa lets you upload your photos into online albums that you then invite others to see. (emails with enormous attachments are really bad idea) Google gives a generous amount of online storage for free - 1 GB. Besides that, if you fill it up and need more storage, it is a ridiculously little amount (something of the order of $5/year for 20GB)
Let's say we want to share some new listing photos with a client. If you saw the previous tutorial, you would have learned about starring photos and then selecting only the starred photos. This is a very good thing to know how to do. Now we are ready to upload. Notice at the top right of the window shows whether or not you are signed in to Picasa Web Albums. You need a free google ID (simple to get if you need) - if you don't have one, it will prompt you for the basic info to create one.
After you have identified the album to upload by selecting it in the list then go to the bottom of the window and click the "Upload" button.
You'll notice that all of the default settings on the Upload dialog are already good to go (in most cases). Here's some thought on the choices in case you were wondering. The Size option defaults to 1600 pixels and is a good choice (you can opt for 'original size' but it takes more space and isn't required if your purpose is to share for onscreen viewing). The Visibilty option I either set to "Anyone with the link" (does not display on "My Public Albums" page) or "Public" and is seen on your Public Picasa page. If you are doing home listings, Public would be a good choice, you start it off private until client approves and then change the setting later if you want.
Once you have the photos online, you are ready to share them. Notice the "Share" button. You can then send invitations out for people to see.
At the bottom of the figure above you can see that it sends out a nice looking email invitation with thumbnail preview. You can optionally send out your own email message by copying the URL on the album page or you can create an embedded slideshow by clicking the HTML code that is also available. Maybe you would like to put the slideshow on a blog post?
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