Google’s Picasa is now on its third revision and has evolved quite a bit since it was first introduced.  It is now a program that is downloaded and has an online service that allows for sharing with the Internet community.  It allows for users to organize, edit, share and turn their photos into movies, collages, slideshows, and more.  For more on what you can do with the program you can read about all of the features on the support page at http://bit.ly/yu8F.  It has become my personal favorite method for sharing my 12 of 12.

If you don’t already have Google’s Picasa application, to get started just download the free application at http://picasa.google.com/.  Mac OS X and Linux are also supported, so don’t think you’ll be left out of the fun here!  Once through the installation process go ahead and launch the program.  When you connect your camera, or insert your memory card from you camera it should recognize it and automatically open the dialogue to import your photos.  If it does not automatically open you can import them manually.  Select all your photos taken on the 12^th and then you can sort through and select your favorites in the next steps.  You’ll have the choice to import all the photos or the selected photos.  The program will also help you avoid importing any photos you’ve already imported, preventing duplicates.  It will also give you the option to “Safe Delete” meaning it will actually move the photos from your camera/memory card to your computer. 

So now you have all your photos from the day imported and ready for selecting, sorting and tinkering.  This is when I go through and pick my 12 favorite that I’m going to share.  Selecting your favorites is simple. Use the star button on each picture that you want to include in your 12 of 12 set. As you star photos, they will be added to an album titled starred photos. You can use this album to more easily navigate your photos, bringing up only the 12 photos you’ve selected.

More advance corrections can be made just as easily.  The Red Eye correction is easily the best in the business!  Select the Red Eye tool and in most cases the application can automatically select the red eyes in the photos and fix them for you, all you have to do is accept the changes. If it does not automatically select the red eyes in the photo, manually select them with a simple click and drag over the eyes.

You can even retouch photos and take out minor blemishes.  For example my beautiful 3 year old was eaten up by mosquitoes when we moved into our new apartment, but we don’t want to remember that part of the move.  The retouching tool quickly allows me to make that correction.  Select the retouch button, and a circle select tool will pop up . You can adjust the size of the circle to match the area that needs to be retouched. This tool takes some experimentation to get the best results. The best way to use this function is to select the area that you want to retouch, leave your mouse still, and then click on that exact area one more time. This will allow for the removal of most blemishes, due to it sampling the color of the surrounding area.

Once I’ve made the simple corrections  to the photos I’ll go through and add the captions.  This is an optional step but I always choose to do it.  A picture is worth a thousand words, but a picture with a few words, must be worth a million words!  To add captions you simply type them into the area that says “Make a Caption!”, press enter,  and it will show up in the album view and slideshow views once you upload them to the web.

Optional step number two is tagging.  Tagging a photo adds a specific label that can be searched for later.  For example, I can do a search for my daughters’ names in Picasa and it will display all the pictures that I have tagged with their names.  In the example that I’m showing, I have tagged all the pictures in this set with the terms “12of12” and “Korea” so that I can look back through my photos years from now and search for only the pictures I took while in South Korea or that I used for my 12 of 12 albums.

Optional step number three is geotagging.  Geotagging is the process of adding geographic informaion to the metadata of your photos.  This means that you can also keep your photos organized by where you took them.  Picasa web albums will also display your photos on a google map which can be very helpful in many situations.  To geotag using Picasa you will need to have Google Earth installed.  First select all the photos you’d like to geotag and then click on the “Geo-Tag” button.  This will launch Google Earth and display a cross-hair on the map.  Locate where your photo was taken as best as you can and click the “Geotag” button.  There is also a “Geotag All” button that will add the current location to the metadata for all the pictures in the geotagging dialogue box.  If you are going one picture at a time, once you geotag the first photo it will automatically move to the next photo to tag.  Once you’ve tagged all your photos click the done button and you’ll be zoomed out far enough to see all the photos you’ve just tagged in a single frame and a small notification will pop up on the side as the application actually goes through and adds the data from Google Earth to your photos.

At this point you’ve imported your photos, corrected/manipulated them to your heart’s content, added captions, tags, and geotagged your phots.  Now its time to atually upload them to the Internet to share with all your friends and with the world.  To use the Picasa Web Albums you’ll need to sign up for a Google account, which you can do for free using your current email address. To upload, ensure you have selected all 12 of your photos and click on the “Upload” button.  This will bring up a dialogue box.  Here you’ll change the album name, add a discription of the album, select the size you want the pictures to be uploaded as, and set your privacy settings.  If you want to make the sharing as wide as possible, then make sure you set the visability to public.  Once complete click on the “Upload” button and the program does the rest.

Once Picasa finishes uploading your photos you’ll see a button asking to see your photos online.  Click there and you’ll be taken to your Picasa web album page.  Selecting the “Edit” menu will give you the options to edit the album properties, set the album cover photo, geolocate the album on a Google map, edit or add captions, delete the album or organize and reorder the photos.  My preference is to oder the photos so that they appear in chronological order as I took them. 

The final and possibily most important step, besides actually taking the pictures, is sharing the your album with the world.  You have a couple of options, and all of them are made eaily available on the album web page.  If you click on the “Link to this album” menu you’ll be given the hyper link  to share as is or you can choose to use your favorite URL shortener, such as http://bit.ly.  You are also given the code to embed the album on your own website.  You can also select the “Embed Slideshow” menu which will give you a dialogue box that will allow you to modify the code to display your photos as different sizes, different speeds, display captions, give HTML links for each photo, and even give you a preview of what your slideshow will look like after you embed it.

This article provides the instructions needed to get started sharing your 12 of 12 photos whether they are spent geocaching or not.  Be sure to explore all the tools that Google’s Picasa offers and have fun!  If you have questions or maybe some better tips and tricks feel free to send them to me for inclusion in future edits of this article.