Picasa Instructions

1. You will need Picasa on your computer. It is free. It is from Google. To get Picasa, click here to go to the Picasa web site. Download Picasa.
2. Picasa is a program that organizes your photographs and provides tools to manipulate your images. In this class you may use all of the tools available in Picasa, but you will be especially interested in these tools:
a. ROTATE - in case you picture is sideways or upside down.
b. CROP – used to eliminate parts of the image you do not need or want to include.
c. STRAIGHTEN - This tool really helps! It does what it says. And many time your picture was not taken on the level. Or at least mine aren't!
d. CONTRAST – bump it up and see what happens to the way your picture looks. It will probably be better. You can bump up the CONTRAST several times if you want. Any changes you make to your picture (those listed above and all others) can be easily removed. You will see the button that does that when you look at the Picasa page.You can add other changes as well but they will be covered later.
e. EXPORT to a specific size (storage and physical size set in one procedure.

3. Things to remember when using Picasa:
a. Make sure you have a copy of your pictures BEFORE you start working in Picasa. If you take your own pictures, Picasa will want to “import” your images from your camera or card reader. It will also offer to erase those images. DO NOT DO THIS. Quit Picasa and copy your images to a permanent location (on a CD, or a separate hard drive, anywhere safe). Then reopen Picasa. Picasa will copy your pictures to a folder. You will be asked to name the folder and select the location where it will be stored. Pay attention to the default location so you can find your folder. Or better yet, on your personal computer, put the folder where you want it. Picasa organizes images into Albums and Folders. They are shown on the left of the Picasa screen. Albums are arranged by the earliest date of an image imported at a specified time. You can also create your own albums and folders within Picasa. Remember these are merely organizing tools of Picasa and do not represent “real” albums or folders on your hard drive.
b. You can select pictures to be part of a group. You will do this when you Export your pictures to redo their size (the major task you must accomplish before you can start working on your web site). There are several methods
i. Star a picture by clicking on the Star button on the bottom of the Picasa page. It will automatically be placed in a folder called star. Then you can select all the images in the star folder.
ii. Control click more than one picture After selecting in this way you can Export.
iii. Hold pictures. This is often the best technique. Select an image. Click Hold at the bottom of the Picasa window. This puts a small image of the picture in the “Holding Tray” at the bottom of the window. You can then review the “held” pictures, click (Control Click) the images you want. Then Export.
c. EXPORT
i. This is the command you use to export your images AFTER you have worked on your images. When you export, set the size to 480 and leave the setting “Automatic” alone. This will reduce the size of your images for the web. Select the images to be exported using the techniques described above. Click the Export button at the bottom of the window. You will be asked to name the folder to which you want to export the images. I suggest naming it “reduced???” (you replace ??? with your word!). Make sure you place that folder on your pen drive. Now you are ready to begin placing the images in this folder on your web site pages.