Showing posts with label Picasa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Picasa. Show all posts

Friday, October 14, 2016

Oh Where, Oh Where can my Photos Be?

Saturday, October 15, 2016
Cloudy with Sun
16 Celsius 61 Fahrenheit



Oh Where, Oh Where 
Can my Photos Be?


Our Dog Buddy

For those who don't know, Blogger saves your photos . I think the photos used to be saved in Picasa. Then Google discontinued Picasa. The new place for saving Blogger photos is now called "Album Archive". I have no idea why Google did this but they did. Another thing if you don't already know, is that when you start a blog, you give permission to Google to use your photos (for free). In my case, Google uses my photos and those of the hundreds of people and companies who have helped me out. How do they use these photos?  They place them on the Internet in their servers so that when someone wants to do a search for let's "Hubley Cast Iron Toys", my photos and those of other people will come up in the search results. The results will be Internet web addresses, and photos.

If that's not confusing enough, I can't find 2 years' worth of photos.  I've posed a question on a Google forum to seek answers as to where these photos might be.

Anyway, as I mentioned,Google stores my photos in a place called  "Album Archive".



Copyright Notice: Copyright © 2016 
Please do not copy without my permission 
or the respective owners of the original photos.

Above:
When I go to my "Album Archive" here is what is see.
Originally, all of the original first 5 years of blogging, had my photos titled "Old Antique Toys" or "Antique Toys". These were stored in the older storage location called Picasa. From February 2015, my photos have been stored in the folder "Blogger Pictures". I haven't  been here to look at my photos "en masse" (altogether) in about 4 years.

Above:
For the first  several years, I took photos of the toys that I bought and sold on ebay. All the photos above are all mine.Then "the roof caved in".  I was buying and reselling toys top write my blog. However, the "cave-in" happened about the 3rd-4th year.  ebay made people use their "Global Shipping" policy which became expensive for shipping from the USA to Canada. They also started charging much more as a percentage of your sales. THe Canadian Dollar went much lower in value to the US Dollar, and the Canadian Government figured that it was losing "Trillions" from people not paying their fair share of taxes on the imported toys. All these factors were enough to stop me from buying and selling anymore. As well, I never really made anything on easy and probably lost money from the buying and selling!

Above:
The above rubber toy photo is an enlargement 
of a smaller photo into previous page of photos.

I must have used Buddy's photo as my logo many times, hence the 12 images of Buddy.
By the way, Buddy is our pet poodle.

Still another enlargement from the page will the many small photos.

This is a screen-capture of a portion of my  "Album Archive". the name major is a name that I use in conjunction with another word for my Hotmail e-mail address.

An enlarged view of the "Album Archive"

 Unfortunately, the Album Archive does not identify the photos as to when I wrote the blog. So when I go to any of the folders above, all I will see is a simple date such as "January 2012". There might be 1000 photos, and I would have to cross-reference the name of my guest or company with the date of my blog.  This is not very practical or efficient for me - to takes too much time. I do have  2 back-up hard drives loaded with these same photos. On the 2 hard drives, everything is identified by the date that I wrote the post. That's more efficient, as all I have to do is match my date with the date on any post on my blog. I'm sure, that somewhere in the world, there are numerous companies offering either free storage or storage at a cost for storing my photos.


Above:
2 photos from a blog

More Search Results

, this storage feature is great because you have almost all of your photos  in 1 place. I'm still missing 2 years of photos somewhere "In the Cloud". However, it's simply not practical if I was to write a new blog and use, for example, only "fire trucks". There is no search engine to search,  not is there a way to see all of your photos at once. For Google it's useful, as they have access to all of my photos in one place. From there, their computer engineers can add these photos to their search engine.
Google can do this because to use blogger, this is one of the clauses in you agreeing to do in return for using Blogger.

It's "somewhat" fair to me, and the people who have helped me out. Everyone gets free advertising, and Google gets to use our photos. However, there is no remuneration  in the form of fees for using the photos.

In this case, for Google "The best things in life are free",for Google, and to myself and those who have helped me. Of course, I'm boasting about my website,and all of the fine photos 
that I have had the pleasure to use.

Thanks for dropping by to visit,
and as always, have a great
opart of the day or night,
wherever you may be.

Stacey Bindman
Toysearcher@gmail.com 









Sunday, July 31, 2011

Picasa - Using the Free Photo-Editing Software

July 31, 2011

Today's addition has to do with Picasa Software. I decided to download the Picasa software in order to see what it could do.  I had seen another bad photo o E-Bay, and an item I purchase was so out-of-focus that I didn't notice a part missing. People are either "lazy" or can't be bothered to present high-quality images. Furthermore, there is so much free software out on the Net, that there is simply no excuse!


Picasa Icon

I download the software to my back-up hard drive.
This helps in keeping the capacity of my main drive low 
so that I have plenty of space on there to work with.

Main Menu View of Picasa
Looks familiar doesn't it? This resembles the main menu of Aperture or Lightroom, 
and you get this program for "free"!

The "Basic Fixes" Window
This is 1 of 3 windows to photo-redit.
It's quite simple and easy to learn.

My Colour-Balance is always "off" by being red.
I should do a "custom-balance" in my camera but I don't.

The off-colour red had been fixed with the "Auto-Color" Tool.
It does a very good job!

The "Crop Tool" Menu


The Tootsietoy Re-cropped

A "Retouched" side of the truck
Quite good again, and easy to learn and work with!

The "Fill Light" command.
This tool adds light into the darker area to provide nice detail.
The bright areas remain almost the sam intensity.

The "Tilt" command exaggerated

An enlargement of 1 of 3 main menus - The "Tuning Menu"

A Sepia Effect using a command from the "Effects" Menu
I find this image too light and low in contrast.

 
So I went to the "Basic Fixes" menu, and increased the contrast

I then went to the "Tuning" menu and made the shadows darker.

Wow! 
This instalment was the fastest one that I have ever written.
The Picasa software is great if you need a quick fix.

1. It is a small-siezed file, so using it will be fast.
2. It's easy to learn.
3. You can always undo.

Be Sure to make a copy of your original image, before you work on any original image. 

I'm sure there's a way in Picasa to do make a copy or save the final image as something else, but I didn't do that. When I have more time, I'll try to remember to work on that.