Using Picasa with Picasa Web Albums

Jess had some trouble figuring out how to get his Picasa Web Album to show up on his blog, so while posing my pictures from July 4th 2005 this weekend (yes, I am *that* far behind) I decided to take notes. It dawned on me that this might be useful to all the folks out there to whom I've pitched Picasa, so I decided to turn my notes into a quick blog entry. Here's what you do:

Step 1: If you don't already have a Gmail login, you'll need one (this means you'll need to sign up for Google's email service). A Gmail login gets you far more than just a great email service. Your login will serve as a login to everything Google offers the general public. Go to Gmail.com and sign up.

Step 2: Download Picasa, install it, and point it to your pictures. You can read more about Picasa or download it here. Picasa is a great application for managing the photos you keep on your home computer.

Step 3: After you've installed Picasa and pointed it to your pictures, you're ready to go. Choose the pictures you want to put on the web. You can hold down CTRL while you click multiple photos to select as many photos as you want:


Any picture that doesn't have the blue-glow-highlight will not be uploaded, as I've indicated with the thumbnail at the top right.

Step 4: Once you've selected the photos you want to put on the web, click the Web Album button at the bottom of the screen:


The follow up dialog is pretty self-explanatory. You'll need to log in to Picasa Web Albums using your Gmail login before you can continue.

Step 5: Wait for your pictures to finish uploading. Status is indicated with a progress bar:


Note that while you're uploading the photos, the ones that have finished uploading will have a green arrow in the bottom right corner indicating that they have been uploaded. The ones that don't are still waiting to be uploaded.

Step 6: Now that your photos have finished uploading, switch over to your Picasa Web Albums page. The easiest way to do this is to click the link in the top right corner of Picasa:


Step 7: At this point, you can either A) email the pictures to people or B) embed the photo album into a website or blog. To do A, click on the "Share Album" link in the top right and just send an email. This is a much better way to "email" photos than to attach the photos to a regular email. Why? Because the email is super small since it doesn't actually contain the photos. It just has a link to your online album. If A is all you want to do, you're done. If you want to do B instead of or in addition to A, continue to step 8.

Step 8: Copy some HTML code, and paste it into your website. Click the "Embed in Blog/MySpace" link on the left hand site of the page:

Copy the text that shows up using CTRL-C, or right clicking and selecting "Copy". Then go over and paste that in your web page. Here's what that looks like in Blogger. Note that you first have to click the "Edit HTML" tab:

And that's it! Save everything and the results will now show up on your web page. If you're using Blogger, you can click on the "Compose" tab (next to the "Edit HTML" tab) and you'll see something like this:

When folks click the picture or the link below it, they'll be taken to the web album.

Doing all of this may sound like a lot, but after your second or third time this will seem like a cakewalk - guaranteed. In a matter of minutes, you can get your photos online and sent off to your family and friends, without overflowing their email inbox.

Cyd, I expect to see some photos of Jersey very, very soon.