Finding a picture's location (URL) in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums.  It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums.

Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums and your PC

An introduction to Picasa. describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums.  A key difference between is that :

• Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and 
• Picasa-web-albums is a Google program that you use through your web-browser and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored.
• Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.   

Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos for each person.    This means that if there are features (eg finding the URL of an individual photo) that are not  available in one program, then you can just use the other program instead.

This means that each and every picture in your Piscasa-web-albums has a unique URL, ie web-address, where it can be found.

How to find the URL of a picture in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

• Sign in to Picasa-web-albums, using the google account that owns the album that has the picture you want.   (If you are already signed in to Blogger you may not have to log in again.).

• If you are re-directed to Google+ Photos, either follow the Return link - or use the approach described here to return to Picasa-web-albums.

• Find the album which contains the picture you want to find the web-address for.
  
  
• Click on the album to open it. 
  Note:  each album has one picture, usually the first one loaded, set as the cover.   Be careful to actually open the album, and not just work with the album cover, because the URL for it is not the same as the URL for the picture.
  
  
• Click on the picture you want:  it will open in a large "photo" view
  
  EITHER:
  
  
• Click on "Full details page" in the right-hand bar.
  This opens the picture in a new browser window or tab.
  Copy the contents of the address bar in this new window - this is the URL of the photo..
  
  OR
  
  
• Right-click on the picture once you're in "photo" view, and choose the appropriate option for your browser.   In the current versions, this is:
  
  Chrome: Copy image URL
  Safari: Copy image address
  Internet Explorer: Properties > Copy the URL address shown
  Firefox: Copy image location
  

Job done!   
The web-address of the photo is now in your computer's clipboard, and can be pasted into other places where you might need to use the photo's URL, eg in adding a photo to a post, or as a gadget.

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Related Articles:

Showing a picture as a gadget in Blogger

How to put a photo into a blog-post

Understanding Google accounts

An introduction to Picasa

How to use Picasa-web-albums with your Google+ Page's photos

This article shows how to manage your Google+ Page's photo collection using Picasa-web-albums.

Recently I described how to always use Picasa-web-albums, rather than Google+ photos, to work with the images that are stored in your Google account.

One issue was that there was no way to use PWA to work with the photo's uploaded to a Google+ Page, rather than an individual Google+ profile.

And this was highlighted when Google introduced an auto-enhancement feature which could be disabled using Picasa-web-albums, but not using Google+ Photos.

However a new feature introduced to Google+ Pages means that you can work around this.

How to access Google+ Page photo albums using Picasa-web-albums

Set up a separate password for your Google+ Page..


Log out of Google / Blogger / Picasa-web-albums (if you log out of one, you are generally removed from the others too).


Log back in again, but this time using your newly created Google+ Page account.


Point your web-browser to Picasa-web-albums, using the do-not-re-direct address:   https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

Job Done!    

You can now use Picasa-web-albums  like normal, including access to features like:

• Turning off image auto-correction
• The (far nicer) PWA upload features
• Sharing your photos on any website, not just on Google+

And of course you still have access to the Google+ Photos features, like editing pictures without changing their URL.

Disadvantages / Issues

There's always one!

In this case, it's that you need to be logged into Google using a different account from the one that's the underlying Page owner.   You can use any of the other Google tools   (Maps, Blogger, probably even AdSense) - but it will be with the Google account that was created for your page, rather than with your personal account.

And if you manage multiple pages, you will need to think carefully about exactly how each one is set up, and what account you need to use to work with it.

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Related Articles:

Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums

Editing photos on-line using Google+ Photos

How to set up a separate password for your Google+ Page

Stop Google from auto-enhancing your images

Sharing photos from your Google+ Photos albums outside of Google+

How to rename picture files in Picasa

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa, to provide SEO benefits for your blog.

Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.

I recommend doing this locally and then uploading the finished versions to Picasa-web-albums before putting them into a blog, because:

• The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does.
• It lets you control the size of the uploaded file
• It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages.

Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with the Windows file system:

Each Picasa folder = one directory on your computer
Each Picasa photo = one file on your computer.

And this means that you can set various properties (eg file name) from either inside Picasa or from Windows.

How to associate keywords with photos in Picasa-desktop.

Picasa-desktop has two tools for adding keywords to photographs:

• You can enter a caption for each photo. This is basically some text, which is stored "inside" the photo, in a hidden-field that is only visible when you are using a software tool that displays the captions. (In technical terms, the caption is stored inside the  IPTC/XMP Description field inside the JPEG etc file that you have.)
• You can enter one or more tags for each photo - again, text (individual words or phrases) that is stored in the  IPTC/XMP Keyword field.

Unfortunately captions and tags aren't visible when you display the photo in your blog - unless you show your photos in a slideshow from Picasa and turn captions on.

This means that the captions and tags are possibly not used by Google in understanding what the photo is about: I have never heard of SEO experts recommending that the  IPTC/XMP fields should be keyword optimized.   For many bloggers this will not be an issue - but it is if SEO is important for you blog.

Another approach is to put the keyword(s) into the file-name, because file-name is one of the factors that Google looks at when it is indexing images.   And this has a nice spin-off for you as well - it means that they keywords are available to any file-search tools that you use on your computer, not just to specialised ones that work with images.

For a long time, I believed that to change the name of a file, I had to go out to my Windows files (using Windows Explorer or similar, and rename them there) - and then wait for Picasa to catch up with the change that I'd made in the file system.

Until one day, when I accidentally hit the F2 key, and found that it opens up a very useful dialog box indeed.

How to Change the name of a file in Picasa desktop

Navigate to the picture that you want to change the file-name for, using the Picasa-desktop software.

Press the F2 key. This opens a Rename Files window.

Type in a new name for the file, for example    concrete-pig-outside-butcher-shop-in-ireland

Click the option buttons if you want to include today's date or the file-resolution in the name  (I don't usually do this, because I organise my photos into folders according to the date they were taken)

Click Rename to save the change


Job done!    The file has a new name in your computer's file system, and is still loaded in your Picasa database.

How to Change the name of a file in Picasa-web-albums

Currently there is no way to change the name of a file, once you have uploaded it to Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos. Your only option is to rename the photo on your desktop, and re-upload it.

If you change the name in this way, you also need to change the link to the file in every place that it has already been used.

(NB If you only use your photos in one place each, then making a new copy with a different name, uploading it and changing all the existing links can be a good way to deal with copyright theives who have hot-linked directly to your photos.)

How to choose "good" names for your picture files

Early SEO advice was to use:

• Lowercase letters only (some computers don't like uppercase)
• Only hyphens between words (not spaces, underscores, etc)
• Regular characters only (no á é etc)

Today, I'm not sure if it matters so much. In most cases, it's probably more important to use rich, descriptive key words  that describe all the aspects of the photo, than to worry about how they're laid out.   But I do tend to follow the advice anyway - just in case.

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Related Articles:

How to show your photos in a slideshow from Picasa

Does SEO matter for your blog?

How to put a picture into your blog.

Understanding Picasa-desktop vs Picasa-web-albums

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

Putting a picture on your blog as a Gadget

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

The Image gadget

Dry dock in Claddagh Basin

A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use an Image gadget (previously called a Picture gadget).  

This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up on all screen and is linked to somewhere.

Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go in other places too (header, footer, etc).

Follow these steps to add a picture gadget:

1  Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.


2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet.  
(This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's already stored in Picasa.   To find the URL of a picture on the internet, you can often right-click on it and choose "copy image location")

3  In Blogger, follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, and choose the Image gadget from the list of options (you may have to scroll down to find it in the list).

4  In the Configure-Image box, enter the options you want for your picture.   These include:

• The title for the Gadget,
• The caption for the picture
  (the small words that go underneath it, usually explaining it, or where it came from),
• What should happen when a reader clicks the picture - put this into the Link field
• Where to find the picture
  (ie the file-location that you copied in step 2)
• Whether to re-size (ie shrink) the picture to fix the space in the sidebar in your current template.

5 Press Save.


6  If necessary, drag-and-drop the new gadget to the place where you want the picture to go, and press Save.

  

What your visitors see:

People who visit your blog in a web-browser, will see the picture, in the place where you put the gadget.  However pictures are not supported gadgets for dynamic view templates, so it won't be see if you use one of these.

Also, people who see your blog through an RSS reader, or by receiving emailed updates don't see any gadgets, so they will not see the picture.  

If you entered a value for Link, your visitor's browser leaves your blog and goes to the Link location:  with the Picture gadget, then there is no way to make this open a new window.   If you want to do so, then use an HTML gadget instead, get the code for the picture, and put target = "_blank"   into it:, so the code looks something like: 

<a href="YOUR LINK" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target = "_blank"><img border="0" src="YOUR PICTURE LOCATION" /></a>

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Related Articles

Options for putting pictures into your blog

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Picasa and Blogger - an overview

Getting the HTML to add a picture to your blog

Finding a picture's location in Pisasa-web-albums

Finding the URL of a picture stored in Flickr

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for bloggers

Following a blog by email

How to let another person load pictures to your Picasa-web-album

This article shows how to let another person (Google account) upload pictures to your Picasa-web-albums:   this is one possible way to work around the issues with Google's photo auto-enhance feature.

Picasa-web-albums and your Google account

Previously I've described Picasa desktop vs Picasa-web-albums, and noted that you can upload pictures to your PWA folders using either of the two pieces of software.

Each album and folder in Picasa-web-albums belongs to one Google account (which may or may not have an associated Google+ account).

Google now provide a tool to transfer Picasa-web albums from one account to another - but only once ever in the life-time of the album.   You cannot transfer ownership to one person now, and to another person in  a year's time (which is quite different to the way you can easily transfer other aspects of your blog to a new owners).

And Google also provide a way for an account owner to let another Google account add photos to the owners albums.

How to let another Google account add photos to one of your  Picasa-web-albums.

Log in to Picasa-web-albums using the Google account that owns the photo-albums and other related things (eg blogger administration rights), and which you want to be the main owner/administrator of your photos.
(See Stop being automatically redirected from PWA to Google+ Photos if you have difficulty staying in Picasa-web-albums.)


View the  individual album that you want to allow someone else to add photos to.


Click the Share button in the right-hand panel.


If your account does not have a Google+ Profile, then clicking the Share button opens the basic Picasa-web-sharing invitation.   In it:

• Enter the email address of the Google account that you want to give upload permissions to, and any message that you want to send them., 
• Tick "Let people I share with contribute photos".   
• Then click Share Via Email.

Standard Picasa-web-albums album sharing settings screen

If your account has a Google+ Profile, then clicking the share button open a "Share on Google+" window.  To use this to give someone permission to upload to the album:

• Remove any suggested circles
• Enter the Google account name(s) that you want go give upload permissions to.
• Click Share
• When you return to the standard Picasa-web-screen, in the right-hand-panel, click the "allow uploads" icon to the right of the name that you entered.

Google+ Profile photo-album sharing request screen

Allow shared-with users to upload pictures to your album

What the people you have invited see

The people who you have invited to contribute pictures to your Picasa-web-albums will get either an email message or a Google+ notification telling them about the permission you have given them.

When they go into Picasa-web-albums, they will see the album that you have shared listed as an album that they can see - and they will have an Add Photos link where they can upload pictures in the same way they would add photos to their own albums.

Sharing several or all your albums at once

Picasa does not seem to provide any options for this at the moment.

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Related Articles:

Understanding Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums

How to set up a Google+ Profile for an existing Blogger account - and why you might not want to

Transferring ownership of your blog to someone else

Stop being automatically redirected from PWA to Google+ Photos

How to edit a picture in Picasa Web Albums or Google+ Photos

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos.

Picasa-web-albums vs Google+ Photos

Picasa-web-albums is a on-line photo storage and management tool, now owned by Google.   It is the on-line version of Picasa, a desktop-tool.   (Learn more about PWA and Picasa here.).

Google would ideally  like everyone to use Google+ Photos.

But there are many people who store pictures in albums that are not associated with their personal Google+ accounts:  these may be for businesses, schools, clubs, etc.

So it is likely PWA will continue to exist for a good while yet.   And I am sure that Google appreciate this:  they have made a number of changes to Picasa-web-albums to make it work better both with Google+ and without it.

Options for editing pictures that are are uploaded to Google

• If you have a Google+ account, then there are two ways of editing photos that you have loaded to Google (it doesn't matter whether you loaded them using Picasa-web or Google+Photos).  
  
  Both of these options are described below.   Using the Google+ editor (option 1) doesn't need any software installed on your PC.   But it's very slow to load, offers you less control, and is currently missing some key features - and it only works if you are using Chrome as your web-browser, not Firefox or Internet Explorer.

• If you don't have a Google+ account, then Google / Blogger only provides only one way to edit photos that you have loaded to it (apart from downloading the photo, editing it on your PC and re-uploading it - which changes the URL you need to use to link to the photo).   This is Option 2 below.

Option 1:   Using Google + edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google+ account.  
(See here for what do to if you are automatically re-directed from PWA to Google + Photos)


Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.  
(Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)


Choose Edit in Google+ from the Actions drop-down menu.

This opens a new window or tab:


If you are not signed in with your Google + account, you will be invited to join.

If necessary, sign-up for Google+, or sign in with the correct account, and start again.


Now, you will be looking at the photo in the Google+ Photos picture view.   From here you can do simple edits:

• Crop the photo
• Tag people
• Rotate the photo

as well as using the other Google+ Photos features (share, slideshow, delete, zoom)


To do more changes, choose Edit (yes, you need to choose it a 2nd time) from the top menu.

If you are not using Google Chrome, then you will get a message saying that the Google+ photo editor only works with Chrome, and giving you a link to download it.    If necessary, switch to Chrome and start again.

Wait while the photo editing tools are loaded  (this does take a while, perhaps even a minute or two).


Once loading is finished, the current Google + Photo editor functions are available from the right-hand bar, like this:

At the moment these are:

• Tune (brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, warmth)
• Selective Adjustment (lets you specific areas for other options to be applied to)
• Details (sharpness and structure)
• Crop and Rotate

• Black and white
• Centre focus (adjust brightness and blur around the centre)
• Drama
• Frames
• Tilt-shift
• Vintage
• Retrolux.

When you  are happy with your photo, click the Finished Editing tick box at the bottom of the right-hand bar, and the changes will be saved (this may take a few moments).


You are left in the open Google+ Photos tab or window, not returned to Picasa-web-albums.   When you go back to Picasa-web-albums and refresh the page (F5), the changes that you made in Google+ photos will be shown.

Option 2:   How to use Picasa-desktop edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

This option only works if you have Picasa desktop software installed on your computer.


Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google account.


Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.   (Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)


Choose Edit in Picasa from the Actions drop-down menu.

A pop-up window will tell you that your web browser wants to open another program (ie Picasa-desktop) to do the editing.

(The exact text is something like:   "External Protocol Request:  [your web browser] needs to launch an external application to handle picasa: links.   The link requested is ... The following application will be launched if you accept this request   c:\Program Files\Google\Picasa\Picasa3.exe ... If you did not initiate this request, it may represent an attempted attack on your system.   Unless you took an explicit action to initiate this request, you should press Do Nothing.")


Choose Launch Application.

Picasa will load on your computer, and you will be asked to confirm that you do want to edit the selected picture.   Choose Edit Image.

A copy of the picture that you want to edit is opened in the desktop-Picasa editing tools window.


From here you have access to all Picasa's standard photo editing tools (including the text tool for adding watermarks).

The photo you are working in is a copy taken from your Picasa-web-albums, it is not the same as the copy of the picture which may already be on your computer.   It is stored in a directory of your Picasa-installation called "Online Edits", not in your main My Pictures directory.   So if you choose a function like "Back to Library" you are taken to the Online Edits folder inside Picasa-desktop.


From here you can use all of Picasa-desktop's editing features, including straightening, red-eye reduction, text-editing, re-setting the neutral colour.    The only exception is the Edit in Creative Kit option:  this is still one of the options in Picasa-desktop, but if you use it, it takes a long time to load and then eventually says "Error connecting to Creative Kit... error 500" - and explains that Creative Kit has now been discontinued.


When you are finished editing, to put the edited photo back into the same Picasa-web-album that it came from, with the same file name and URL:

• Make sure that you are logged in from Picasa-desktop to the same Google account that you were using initially.   (Picasa-desktop remembers your sign-in details from the last time you used it - if it's different from what you need, just choose sign-out from the top-right corner, and then sign in to the correct account when asked.)     AND EITHER:

• Choose Share on Google+    (if you are using a Google + account)
• In the sharing-details window that opens, change the Album-name from Online Edits to  the album that the photo came from originally and choose Upload
  
  OR
• Return to the Online Edits folder / library
• Save the changes using the Save icon
• Choose Enable Synch from the Sharing drop down.
• Wait for the changed photo to upload.
  
  (I think Google have some work to do here - you can only control synching for the whole album, not for individual photos.   I expect this to be improved in the future.)

Job Done:  your Picasa-desktop-edited photo appears back in your online Picasa-web-albums with the changes that you just made, and any existing links to it (eg from your blog posts) will show the changed version of the picture.   And you can put the edited picture into your blog posts or other websites in the usual way.

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Related Articles:

Introducing Picasa and Picasa-web-albums:   an overview

Stop automatic redirection to Google+ Photos

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

What is Creative-Kit, and how to use it

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums.

Update:

In mid 2013, Google Plus replaced CreateKit with a new photo editor (which only works on computers running the Chrome web-browser).    Therefore it is no longer possible to use Creative Kit. 

Picasa-web-albums still has  a link to Creative Kit.   But this does not work, and PWA now has other options for editing pictures that have been uploaded to it via Blogger or otherwise.

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A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit

In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC.

Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger.

Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc).  Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service.

Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, watermarks, etc).   The tool  had some serious fans, and a quirky culture which saw them show messages like "packing the lunch" "watching the flowers", "chasing butterflys" while Picnik was loading.  The type of messages that are funny the first few times, but quickly get tedious. And people using Picnik via Piscasa-web-albums often found that it was very slow.

In 2012:

• Picnik announced that they were closing down their separate photo hosting service, and moving the product to Google+.

• Google's announced that they were were closing Picnik, and using Picnik's engineers to “continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products."   (ref:  closure announcement).

Today, the original Picnik photo-hosting-and-editing service is most definitely closed.

The Picnik photo editor has been either replaced with or re-badged as "Creative Kit", and is available through Google+.  They may have intended to make it available through Picasa-web-albums too - but as I noted in previously, this feature isn't working. Possibly this is about selling additional storage space:   Picasa-web-albums are available to any Google account, while Google+ Photos is only available to named individuals.   So each person can have lots of Google / Picasa accounts (with free storage on each one), but only one account Google+ account.

How to access Creative Kit today

To start creative Kit, so you can edit a photo with it:

• Go to Google+, and log in to your Google account that has Google-Plus enabled.
• Go to your Photos page (which may be on the left-sidebar, or under the More tab on the left sidebar if your screen is small)
  

• Go into an album, and open the photo you want to edit.
• On the menu at the top of the screen, click the Edit button.

This opens the photo inside a window with photo-editing tools. The screen just looks like another set of options within Google-Plus, but actually you are now inside Creative Kit, and you can use it to edit your photo.

When you are finished editing, choose the Save button from the top-left hand side. This give you an option to apply your changes to the current file, or to save a new copy of the file.

• If you choose Replace then any places (eg blog-posts) that link to the existing photo will now link to the edited photo.

• If you choose Save a new copy then your existing file is not changed and a new copy of the file will be made in the same folder as the existing one but with a slightly different name.

If you upload pictures into your blog-posts inside Blogger, then the picture files are stored in Picasa-web-albums LINK. If you have Google+ enabled for your account, then you can access these photos directly through either Picasa-web-albums or through Google+, even if you have not linked your blog and your Google+ profile. So you can use the Creative-kit method of editing these pictures, even if you didn't load them via Google+.

What features are available in Creative Kit

At one point Picnik used a "fremium" approach: Basic features were free for everyone to use for free, while people needed to sign up and pay a subscription to use the Premium ones. This has changed, though,and now features are are all free.

At the time of writing, the features include:

Basics

• Black and White
• Bocal B&W
• Boost
• Soften

Camera

• Lomo-ish
• Holga-ish
• HRD-ish
• CinemaScope
• Orton-ish
• 1960s

Colours:

• Tint
• Vibrance
• Duo-Tone
• Heat Map 2.0
• Cross-Process

Touchup

• Blemish Fix
• Shine-be-Gone
• Airbrush
• Sunless Tan

Google Plus Exclusives

• Daguerreotype
• Reala 400
• Green Fade
• Magenta Fade
• Polaroid* Plus
• Sun Aged

Troubleshooting / Where to get help

Creative Kit uses Adobe Flash Player. If Creative Kit doesn't work inside Google+, try installing a newer version of Flash Player.

If that doesn't help, try:

• Clearing your cache

• Clearing Flash shared objects
  These are data files are created by the Creative Kit on your computer, like cookies.  To clear them, go to Abobe's Flash Player help web site.
  The Settings Manager that you see is not just an image; it's the actual Flash Player Settings Manager. Scroll through the list of sites and select www.picnik.com and www.gstatic.com.
  
  Click the Delete Website button for each, and confirm the deletion.
  
  Open the Global Storage Settings Panel. Check both of the following boxes:
  - Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer.
  - Store common Flash components to reduce download times.
  
  Once you've cleared your local shared objects, clear your browser cache again.
  

• Using a different browser, eg Chrome or Firefox.

• Disabling ad-blocker or flash-blocking extensions

For more assistance, there is a Creative Kit help-centre in Google:
https://plus.google.com/100432630524345907101#100432630524345907101/posts

Is Creative Kit just Picnik with a new name?

Most probably: the controls and features are very similar, and the press-releases seem to tie up. There is one screen that names both while the photo-editor is loading in Google+>Pictures.

But on the other hand there's no official confirmation either, and there are some product differences. It's possible that Google's engineers were simply inspired by the former Picnik colleagues to create similar controls, and that the underlying photo-editing tool is different. Who knows.

What we do know is that many of the much-loved Picnik features are available in Creative-Kit, provided you're willing to load your photos to a Google+ account.

TL;DR

You can edit a photo in Creative Kit by uploading it to your Google+ account, then choosing the Edit button when you are viewing it.

This may be the same Picnik photo editor that was available in Picasa-web-albums until 2012. Or it may not. Either way it lets you crop, re-colour, apply lots of filters etc for free.

Don't want to put your photos into Google+? Bad luck, there's no other way to use Creative Kit / Picnik on them at the moment. Find another on-line editor instead.

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Related Articles:

Creative-kit works with pictures accessed through Google+, but not Picasa-web-albums

Adding a picture to a blog post

Introducing Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums

How to show pictures from Google Plus in any website

This article shows how you can make a slideshow of all the photos from an album in your own Google Plus Photo collection, which can be shown on a website or blog.

Sharing a photo album from Google+ Photos

Google's help-pages note that you can share a Google Photos album using a link - and is a good option for showing your photos to people who are outside of Google+.

But what are the options if you want to show a Google Photos album, not just an individual picture, in your blog or website?

• Put the link in your website. But that just gives bland, boring text, like click here to see my photos.

• Put one picture in your website, labelled "click this photo to see the rest", and link it to your Google Photos album. But that just shows one photo - and it takes people away from your website when they go to view your photos.

• Load each photo from the album individually to your website. That's fine for 2-3 or even 10 photos. But what if you've got dozens or even hundreds - it could take hours!

A better option is to use an embedded slideshow.

To do this, you need to get a small piece of HTML code from Google, and put it into your site. Then when someone looks at your site, the code runs and they the see a slideshow made of the photos your album at the current time.   This means that the pictures on the other website are automatically updated when you change the album in Google Photos (eg when you add, change or remove pictures).

Unfortunately there is no tool to make this type of slideshow code in Google Plus Photos at the moment.

But there is was a very simple work-around which gives you get the code that you need, using existing Google tools.  

Update: 

The feature described below was removed from Picasa-web-albums three days after this article was published.    I'm currently investigating other options.

Using Picasa-web-albums to get the slideshow code

If you have loaded pictures into Google Photos, then you can manage them using either Picasa-web-albums (ref: What is Picasa vs PWA?) or Google Photos.

So, to get the embeddable slideshow display code for a photo album:

• Log in to Google with your Google+ account

• Go to Picasa-web-albums using the do-not-redirect link: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1   (more about this link)

• Navigate to the album that you want to make a slideshow for.
  NB  you need to be viewing the album, not the page of all albums, to get the correct code.

• Make sure that the security for this album is set to at least "anyone with the link".

• Choose Link to this Slideshow and then Embed album from the right side bar

• Set the options you want for your slideshow.
  The alternatives explained in detail in How to make a slideshow of from Picasa-web-albums

• Copy the HTML code that is provided

• Install it into your blog or website in the usual way
  (Ref:  options for installing 3rd party code in Blogger).

What your readers see

Readers using a regular web-browser with Flash enabled should see a slideshow of your pictures - like this:

Readers whose device (eg cellphone, tablet) isn't able to show Flash graphics will most likely just see a black square instead of the album - possibly with a message telling them why this is happening.

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Related Articles:

What are Picsasa and Picasa-web-albums

How to put 3rd party HTML or Javascript into your blog

Understanding Google accounts

Putting a Picasa-web-albums slideshow into a blog post or website

How to use Picasa-web-albums, without being re-directed to Google+ Photos

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos.

What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums?

If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos.

When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:

 "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums."

But if you do something in Google+ photos, this top banner message disappears, and the only way to get it back again is to close and re-open Picasa-web.   This is tedious - it's a waste of time opening one website just so you can re-direct back to another one.

How to skip the re-direction message

To use Picasa-web-albums, without being sent to Google+ photos, you just need to start it using this link:    https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

I'm going to put it into the sidebar of my blog very soon, so I have easy access to it.

Is there a problem with using Picasa-web instead of Google+ Photos?

You might wonder if there is a problem with using the old Picasa-web-albums instead of Google+ Photos.

In short, the answer (for now anyway) is no, there is no problem - and I don't expect there to be one anytime soon.

Why?

You still only keep one set of photos in your Google account.   It just happens that Google now have two pieces of software that can access these photos.   One is Google+ Photos, and the other is Picasa-web-albums.    And they both work on the same underlying pictures and photo-albums.   So it won't cause you to run out of space, or to have duplicate copies of your photos.

And Google still need to maintain Picasa-web-albums because there are a substantial number of Blogger users who choose to be anonymous:   Google+ photos simply will not work for them, because it absolutely depends on having the photos associated with an individual, named persons profile.   (And I'm pretty sure that there are no easy ways to transfer ownership of photos from one Google+ profile to another, either, in the event that you want to transfer ownership of your blog.)

Of course we don't know if this will last forever - but my best guess is that you can safely keep using Picasa-web-albums for a good while yet.

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Related Articles:

Transferring your blog to another Google account's ownership

What is Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums - a basic introduction

Creative-Kit photo editor works from Google+, if not from Picasa-web-albums

Options for showing photos in Blogger

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

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Sept 2013 update:   Creative Kit has now been totally discontinued.   Use either Picasa-web-albums or the Google+ photo editor instead.

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For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago.

This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful.

But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message:

We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting
may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble:
[t1]   Click for Assistance»

Waiting never solved the problem for me (trust me, I tried), so eventually I tried the help-link, which went to this Picnik help page.

After following lots of the instructions, I finally found this helpful line in the Adope Flash Player re-installation instructions:

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, Adobe® Flash® Player is built-in but has been disabled. To enable Flash Player, follow the steps in this TechNote

Which sounded hopeful - it's only recently that I've switched to use Chrome all the time, so maybe this was the problem.   But it didn't help - despite what they said, Flash was enabled in my setup.

Eventually, it occurred to me that since I have a Google Plus profile, my albums are now accessible via the Plus interface too.   So I went there, chose Photos, found the album, opened a photo, chose creative kit ... held my breath for a few seconds ... and the editor opened up and worked nicely.

I'd still like to get this working from Picasa, because it just looks so much nicer from the small screen that I use a lot of the time.   Suggestions are very welcome!


PS   Thanks to Hardeep of Widget Craft who used the picture that I'd made as the thumbnail picture for How to Edit Your Blogger Template in one of his articles, and thus inspired me to start putting my own name onto the image files I make.

Crop and re-size photos stored in PIcasa, without HTML

Some very interesting info from David of Blogger Xpertise about controlling the display of photos from Picasa by manipulating the URL.   What he's found is nothing that we couldn't do with HTML, but I have a feeling that it might point to some other possibilities using Picasa's URLs.   Ref:   http://blogxpertise.blogspot.com/2012/05/tip-automatically-cropping-square-and.html

Picnik is ending on 19 April 2012

The first list of Google application retirements for 2012 includs Picnik, a photo editing tool that was accessible via Picasa-web-albums (and perhaps from other places too) - it was an effective, though slow, way of adding a watermark to pictures.

I'm sure that PWA has a replacement tool for doing this ... don't have time to research what it is right now.

Backing up picture files from Picasa-web-albums

Google Takeout (called Takeaway in some places) lets you backup your Picasa-web-albums, Gmail contacts, Circles, +1s and lots of other things, into one single zip file, which you can then store in a safe, off-line place.

It might be a way to move the photos in your blog to someone else if you're transferring owership of a blog.

1. back them up
2. extract them
3. sent the pictures to the other person
4. they upload them, and re-establish the links from the blog to the new location.

Still dreadfully tedious, but better than nothing.

Putting a slideshow from Picasa into your blog

This article is about how to put a Picasa slideshow into your blog, using Picasa's slideshow tool.   

It also looks at the security issues that may be involved in doing this, and suggests some ways around these.

Picasa, Albums and Slideshows

Previously I've explained what Picasa is and how it is used by Blogger as the default place to store uploaded pictures.

You can also use Picasa in more complicated ways.  You can put a set of pictures in a separate "album" (Picasa's word for a user-defined group of photos), and it will give you the HTML code to use to show these photos in your blog (or any other website).


There are two ways of doing this:

• Link to the album:  clicking on the link takes your visitor away from your website and into Picasa-web-albums, where they can use the PWA tools to look through the pictures
• Link to a slideshow:   this scrolls through the photos that are in the album at the time, right inside your website.  Here's an example of a slideshow:
  
  

This article is a step-by-step guide to the second option, is showing a Picasa-web-album in your Blogger as a slideshow.    A similar approach will work for other websites, thought the details will vary slightly.

How to insert your slideshow

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home), and log in with the Google account that owns (or you want to own) the album.    Note:   you may need to use this trick to stay inside Picasa-web rather than being automatically re-directed to Google+ Photos.

1. Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
   (and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
2. Choose an album by clicking on it.
   The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools.
3. Under the Edit drop-down (the one in the album, not the edit menu in the browser), check that Visibility is set to either "Anyone with the Link" or "Public on the web"
4. Click on "Link to this Album"  (currently it's in a small font, 3/4 of the way down the right-hand sidebar - this may change if Picasa changes its interface)
   
5. Click on "Embed Slideshow"  (currently this shows up underneath "Link ... " - and only AFTER you've clicked link...)
   This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Fill in the details you want
   (slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
7. Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
8. Go to Blogger and log in with a Google account that has rights to edit the the blog - note that this doesn't need to be the same account that owns the Picasa album.
9. You can put the code that you copied into your blog in the same way you would adding any other 3rd party HTML to it.

What you see in the Post Editor:

If you put the slideshow into a blog-post, the the way that the post-editor currently works with code means that the slideshow is not visible while you are editing the post.   This means it's easy to accidentally over-write or delete the code.

One way around this is to put some "marker text" before and after it.

For example, I've put in <hr /> and <blockquote> </blockqoute> statements before and after the code just underneath this paragraph.   While I'm in the editor, all I can see is a pair of parallel lines, with nothing between them.   But (because you're visiting the blog after it's published) you can see a slideshow in between.

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This makes the code look like:

<blockquote>
<hr />
<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&amp;hl=en_US&amp;feat=flashalbum&amp;RGB=0x000000&amp;feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F105223767362417288786%2Falbumid%2F5439615839989953921%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCK7yg5XUpNHZtAE%26hl%3Den_US" height="192" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288"></embed>
<br />
<hr />
</blockquote>


What your visitors see - and can access:

The steps above puts a slideshow of the photos in the album at the current time into your blog post.

You can use the examples above to get an idea of how these slideshows work:  they have next, play / pause, and previous buttons, and you can toggle captions on/off.   The top example has auto-play ON, while the second one has it OFF.

On important thing to note:   when your visitors click on the slideshow itself (anywhere but on previous / play / next buttons), they are taken to the place in Picasa-web-albums where the album is.

From here, they can get to ANY other albums owned by the same Google account that are either Public or Visible to Anyone With the Link.

This may or may not be a problem for you - but it's something that you should be aware of.  It certainly was a problem for me initially, and I had to go and get a slideshow in a Google account with no personal pictures to make the examples in this post.   

If you are not willing to live with this level of security, then I suspect (am yet to confirm) that using the RSS feed provided by Picasa with Blogger's own slideshow gadget may be a better approach.   This will only work in places where you can put a gadget - although it may be possible to use a 3rd party service that converts a feed into Javascript to make code that can be put inside a post.    Or totally different solution is to put your pictures into a PowerPoint slideshow and display it in your blog.

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Related Articles

Picasa & Blogger - Part 1, What is Picasa?

Picasa & Blogger - Part 2, Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

Showing a PowerPoint presentation as a slideshow in your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

Hosting pictures outside of Google/Picasa

This article is about how to use pictures stored outside of Picasa-web-albums in your blog. It also looks at the risks and issues you might face if you do this

Where does Blogger usually store pictures

When you put a picture into a blog post, it is usually stored in Picasa-web-albums, the on-line part of Google's photo management tools.

For example, the picture at the start of this article was uploaded from my desktop, and so is stored in a folder in the Picasa-web-albums associated with my Google account.

I can see it here in the album:

Alternatives to Picasa-web-albums:

There are many other on-line photo storage and sharing options, eg Photobucket, flickr - and you can even use Google Docs which can now store files of all types.

For example, this photo (creative commons licensed, with no known copyright restrictions) is stored in flickr

To insert it into the post, I:

• Copied the URL of the picture in flickr

• Used the standard Picture icon on Post Editor toolbar in Blogger, and chose the "from URL" option, and pasted in the URL

But because the photo is hosted elsewhere (in this case in flickR), it is not put into Picasa-web-albums.

Instead the code for it points to the location in flickR where it's found:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" /></a></div>

Hosting photographs elsewhere is one way to work around the size restrictions which Google has placed on Picasa-web-albums accounts.   (Another is to link you blog to your Google + account).

You do need to make sure that the security options for the account and/or album that they're placed are set up so that at least anyone with the link is able to read the files.

Be aware that a photo that is stored outside of Picasa-web-albums cannot be used as the thumbnail for your post:   if all the illustrations in a post are stored elsewhere, then the post simply will not have a thumbnail.


Risks and Issues:

Disappearing Photos:
When you don't control the files that pictures are in, there is a risk that the pictures might "disappear" if whoever is hosting them (flickR in the above example) decides to move them or even just change the structure of their URLs.

There is, of course, the same risk with PWA, but since you need to be signed in to put a file into Picasa, Google knows that it's yours and can email you and let you know about upcoming changes.  flickR, on the other hand, has no record my setting up an URL to the photo, so cannot give me any warning.

Integration:
Picasa/Google have various tools for showing slideshows in blogs.  The specific features that any photo-sharing tool has change from time to time, but by using the tools from Google there is more chance that the will definitely work well with other Google tools, like Blogger.

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Related Articles: 


Applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting HTML from a 3rd party into your blog

Putting a slideshow into a Blogger post

Picasa - a basic introduction

Understanding post.thumbnail, the picture used to summarise a post

Creating a button that links to your blog.