Do you take lots of photographs and videos of your pets? If you want to share these with your friends and family you could try emailing them, but you’ll soon find out that the large file sizes make this impractical. You could compress the files first, but before you do, you should know that there is a better way. Let Google Picasa do the work for you! Instead of emailing large files to people who may not welcome the large download or not know how to handle the attachments, you can put your photos and short videos online. Then you only have to email a link to your online photo albums, not the photos or videos themselves. This is easier and quicker for you and the recipient. When your friend receives your email all they have to do is click on the link and they can instantly see your online album containing as many photos and videos as you want to share.
As an example, see how Dog Rescue Newcastle uses Google Picasa to showcase photos and videos of rescued pets available for adoption: http://picasaweb.google.com.au/DogRescueNewcastle
Picasa is a free photo sharing website and application. It allows you to catalogue all the media (photos, video, etc) on your hard drive, edit your media (crop, remove red eye, rotate, etc.), then upload them to the web so others can see them. You control who can see your photo albums.
To get started with Picasa go to the Google Australia home page http://www.google.com.au/ and click on the Signin link at the top right of the page to create a Google Account for yourself (if you don’t already have one).
After your Google account is established, return to the Google home page and click on the more link along the top of the page (above the big letter “G” in “Google”).
This will display a pull down menu from which you should select Photos.
Follow the instructions for downloading and installing Picasa to your computer. Then you’ll be able to copy your photos from your computer to your Picasa website.
Guest Author: After a long career in IT, Terri now divides her time between bookkeeping for the family business and volunteer work with Dog Rescue Newcastle.
