Task #5: Picasa Soup!!

Library Lady Says: Add three cups finely diced vegetables (celery, onions, carrots, cabbage, or any desired combination) to one pound of Picasa and six cups brown stock. Cook about 30 minutes. Serves Six. 

Picasa, eh? Is Picasa a tuber?

Hee hee! Nope. But Picasa may contain tubers... 

Huh?

Whether they're of your pet, your children, your award winning sweet potato mash, or your Hawaiian vacation, everyone loves to show off their photos. And that's what Picasa is all about!

Picasa is a photo sharing website. Photo sharing is the process through which we publish or transfer digital photos online thus enabling us to easily share our photos with friends, family, and anyone else we so choose! Although people have been scrapbooking and creating slideshows of their memories for years, centralized digital photography only went "online" in the first part of this decade.

†Think of Picasa like one, giant, communal, online photo album. Their goal is to make it easy for you to organize and edit your digital photos, then create online albums to share with friends, family and the world. There are many different photo sharing applications to assist with the upload and display of photographs and videos--Google's Picasa is one such tool.

You can upload photos to Picasa in as many ways as you can dream of: from the web, your mobile devices (like your cell phone or Blackberry), or from your home computer. And you can share these photos in many ways, too: on their website, through email, by posting to outside blogs, and eventually in ways we probably haven't even thought of yet.

You can keep your photos private, or you can share your photos publicly. You can organize your albums, edit individual pictures, crop, zoom, retouch, add tags, browse other public albums and download their pictures... you name it! Simply put, Picasa is like greasing a pan: it's the butter that makes getting photos from one person to another as slick a process as possible. 

But I've already got all of my digital pictures of that luau party stored on my computer. Why would I go to all the effort of putting them on Picasa? Isn't that just extra work?

If you've made the switch to a digital camera, you might have already discovered it's all too easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer volume of photos and videos you shoot with that itchy trigger finger. And while traditional print photo albums are great, 20 or 30 or 50 of them are not so great (especially for those of us forced to sit through all 476 pictures of that "amazing Hawaiian sunset"...)

Part of this solution is to make the process of organizing photos or videos collaborative. Using Picasa, it's possible to give your friends and family permission to view your online albums and to collaborate with you--add comments, notes, and those all important tags to the photos they like. Friends and family can flip through your pictures at their own leisure, making copies of those they like, and skipping over those they don't. 

Oh, okay! I get it! So I can give people the ability to 'ooh' and 'ahh' over my photos and videos online, and then they can add their own descriptions and messages?

Yes! And all this information--these tags and comments and notes--turns into data that in turn makes it easier for others to find your pictures and similar pictures later on, since all this info is also searchable.

So let's take a minute to explore Picasa web-albums. Try out the Search feature using the search term “cooking” and see what you find. You may be surprised... 

Whoa! Wait a minute! I just did that search and I got a bunch of pictures that had absolutely nothing to do with cooking?!

I know! Weird, huh? Actually, not so weird when you think about it. That's because of those all important tags, added to the photo by the person who originally uploaded the image, and those who have commented on it since. It's the user who decides how they want to label (or tag) that photo. And as a picture can mean something different to everyone, you can end up with some pretty interesting tags. A picture of a lobster, for example, could produce the tags "butter" or "allergic reaction" or "things that pinch"--none of which are necessarily related to the other!

Does this mean if I upload my pictures to Picasa, anyone can see them and anyone can print them and alter them?

Good question. No, that's not what this means. The photos on Picasa have been uploaded onto the website by people like yourself, meaning the photos on Picasa are owned by the individuals who put them there. You can choose to make your pictures public or private, but only public photos can be printed, saved to someone's computer, or edited by others. It's a matter of copyright. 

Excellent! 

Your Task 

To complete this assignment: 

1. Go to Picasa Web Albums and sign in with your Google account information (the same email and password you use to log into your blog). 

2. Take some time to explore the site. When you've finished exploring, use the search box on the top right to find an image that interests you. Any image, any topic. 

Ooo! Anything?

Yup! Anything. Within reason of course... 

3. Are there tags assigned to your photo? If so, make note of them. 

4. When you've found a picture you like, click Share on the top left of the page:

5. Email the picture to training@bpl.on.ca. In the message box, please include your full name (first and last). 

6. Finally, go to your blog, log in, and write a post answering the following questions:

• If there were tags assigned to the picture you sent me, what were they?
• What did you think of Picasa?
• Will you continue to use this application?

7. Click Publish Post.

For the teacher's pet: If you have digital photos of your own, try creating your own online web album. Add tags to the photos you upload. If you're brave, download Picasa 3 to your own computer and edit your prints using the software's various editing tools. It's amazing what you can do!

† Information courtesy of Picasa, and YCL TwoPointOh Exploration.
† Lobster image courtesy of Joe.

Further Reading:
Picasa and Picasa Web Albums Help pages.
Google for Seniors: get acquainted with free Google applications, by Jolanda Ligthart.


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