important tips

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog. Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.   And it is still available for you to use on your computer, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive. For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, 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 t...

This article explains what has happened to Picasa-web-albums, why it is now re-directing to Google Album Archive, and what you can do about it. Back in July 2013, I described how many people who started  Picasa-web-albums  were being immediately re-directed to Google+ photos and what they could to to return to using PWA again without being re-directed . Quite a few things have changed since then   In particular, Google have: Changed their strategy around Google+ Released Google Photos and retired Google+ Photos Changed the Picasa-web-albums re-direct to go to Google Photos instead of Google+ Photos Stopped supporting Picasa ( announcement ) Stopped supporting Picasa-web-albums ( announcement ) Released a new tool called Google Album Archive , which gives you access to photos, photo-albums and data about photos that you created in Blogger (and other Google tools) - which isn't available in Google Photos . Changed the re-direct on Picasa-web-albums, so that it g...

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and manage shareab...

This article describes how to get a link to one ore more photos from your Google Photos collection, using the Shareable Link controls.   It also explains how to delete shareable links that you have made in the past Google Photos is a tool for managing picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . Shareable Links are a new type of linking introduced in Google Photos, which let you easily share one or more pictures at the same time.   You can email them, or use them in tools like Facebook. When someone opens a shareable link, they see a display with the date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and all the pictures that are included in the same shareable link. If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find the URL for the photo, instead. How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Pho...

This article shows how to change the date associated with a picture in Google Photos. Update- August 2015 There is now a feature to change the date of individual pictures or videos in Google Photos. To use it: Navigate to the picture / video you want to set a new date for Click the "information" icon (small "i" currently near the top-right of the photo viewer screen) In the right hand panel, hover your mouse over the item in Details which has a picture of a calendar beside it. Click on the pen icon which appears while you are hovering Enter the new year, month, date and/or time (in 24-hour clock) for your photo or video. Click Save. Job Done!   You have now changed the date stored with your image or video. There are still some photos that you cannot see through Google Photos (eg ones uploaded directly through Blogger with some settings, or shared in Google Hangouts).   For these you need to use the date-editing features in Picasa-web-albums, which are described belo...

This article gives a brief introduction to Google Photos, and how it relates to both Blogger and Google+ Photos. Google's recent announcement  of Google Photos opens the door for Blogger to make some improvements to how it works with pictures. Why? Well Google+Photos simply wasn't a way forward.   Too many Blogger users chose not to "upgrade" their Google accounts to Google+ accounts, so it wasn't possible for Blogger to force Google+ features on everyone. And that was even after they removed the rule about one G+ account per person, and allowed Google+ Pages to be turned into stand alone accounts with their own passwords. However Google Photos is basically Google+ Photos, without the need to have a "plus" account, and with some other nice features, like Free picture and video storage (any number of pictures, provided they aren't "too big"),  Image recognition and search Sorting pictures by date, but giving options for you to grou...