Gallery: Share digital photos online with Picasa

We’ve created a link to the Google’s Picasa-download page at our own website, so launch your web browser, type www.computeractive.co.uk/2174699 into the Address or Location bar and press Enter. When our website appears, click on the Picasa link to be transferred to the download page at Google website. Click on the Download Picasa link on the right. Follow the prompts to download and install the program, launch it and then allow Picasa to catalogue the PC’s hard disk – it could take a while for a big collection of digital photos. When it’s finished, select a folder from the list on the left and then click on the Web Album button. Next, click on the ‘Existing user? Sign in’ button at the bottom (don’t worry if you’re not an existing user – we’ll deal with that in a moment).

If you have a Google or Google Mail account, it can be used to sign up to Picasa Web Albums. Alternatively, click on the Create a new Google Account link and follow the instructions to create one and then come back here. At the next screen read the terms and conditions and click on ‘I accept’ and then on the big blue button to launch Picasa. Now select some photos to share by holding down the Ctrl (Control) key and clicking on each one in turn. After that, click on the Web Album button.

At the dialogue box, type in a name for the photo album, add a description and a location. Leave the upload settings as they are (though later you may wish to fiddle with these – to save hard disk space, for example) and then make sure that the ‘Public’ visibility option is selected: this will ensure that everyone will be able to view the album when it’s stored on the internet by going to www.picasaweb.google.co.uk/youraccountname (where ‘youraccountname’ is the name of your Google account). Then click on the OK button.

Picasa’s upload manager swings into action and starts transferring the photos. If it’s a typical set of holiday snaps like these, expect the upload to complete reasonably quickly over a broadband connection. When all the photos have been copied to the album, click on the View Online button. This screen shows the result: the digital photo album, stored on Picasa’s web server and complete with the descriptions we added in the previous step and a ‘cover’ – the first photo in the album.

Enlarge one of the thumbnails in Picasa by double-clicking on it. From here, click on the Caption button below the photo and type in some text, then click on Save Caption, or use the controls on top of the picture to display the previous and next photos in the album, rotate photos left or right or zoom in to see more detail (we’ll come to the Share Photo option in a moment). Since this is such a nice snap, we’re going to use it as the cover by clicking on the ‘Set as album cover’ link.

Back at the thumbnail view it might be a good idea to annotate some more of these photos so we’ll remember what was going on in few years’ time. Instead of doing it one by one, click on the Edit Captions button at the top and then click in each box in turn next to the photo that needs the caption and type in some descriptive text. When all the pictures have been captioned, click on the Done button to return to the thumbnail view.

Here are the thumbnails again with more of the captions typed in. Before moving on, check out a couple of the buttons along the top. Clicking on the Slideshow button displays the photos in an album as an unaccompanied show with each picture enlarged to the size of the browser window. To see the thumbnails at different sizes, just click on the buttons next to the Size option. Since the main point of making an online album is so that other people can see it, tell somebody by clicking on the Share Album button.

Picasa displays a sort of invitation screen, not unlike Google Mail, with fields for an email address (or addresses), a subject line (already filled in, based on the title of the web album) and space for a message. Here we’ve written to our old friend Beryl telling her about the album and inviting to have a look for herself. When the email form is filled, just click on the Send Invitation button to continue.

After a moment, Picasa returns to the main album screen and displays a ‘Your invitation has been sent’ message at the top. Over at Beryl’s computer the email message arrives and she opens it. Assuming her email account is set to allow pictures to be displayed there’s a nice thumbnail of the album cover, the message we typed in the previous step and the summary description. Beryl clicks on the View Album link to load her web browser and go to the Picasa Web Albums site.

The first thing Beryl sees is the cover of the web album we’ve created (along with any other albums we’ve made publicly available). To open an album, just double-click on it and the thumbnails inside are displayed. From here visitors can run all the pictures as a slideshow or double-click on the first one to open it and then use the arrow controls above the enlarged version to look at each one in turn. Fancy a particular photo? Click on the Download Photo link on the right-hand side, choose a folder to store it in and then click on OK to download the photo.

Picasa makes it easy to add new photos and albums. Having finished captioning the first lot of photos, make sure the album’s still open and then click on the Upload Photos link on the left-hand side of the screen. This is the upload screen where more photos can be added to a Picasa album. While we’re here, have a look on the right-hand side where Picasa displays the amount of storage available and how much is being used. To upload some more pictures, click on the Add Photos button.

Windows opens a standard file dialogue box – use it to navigate to the folder where the photos are stored, select them and then click on the Open button. After a moment, Picasa displays all the selected photos as thumbnails in the main window – there’s a Remove link under each one that can be used to delete the photo if it’s not required. Otherwise, click on the Upload button and Picasa will copy the photos from the computer to the web album, marking each one as completed when it’s been sent.

We’ve made a mistake. Instead of loading the photos into an entirely new album, we’ve added them to the existing one. To create an entirely new album, we should have navigated to the main album cover page and clicked on the Upload Photos button there. Fortunately, such a mistake can be easily rectified. With the album open and the thumbnails displayed, click on the Organize button at the top. Then, at the next screen, highlight the photos that need moving to a new album with the mouse and click on the Move button.

Picasa displays a dialogue box asking if it should move the photos to an existing album or a completely new one. In this example, we’re creating a new album called Barcelona 2005 with the same kind of descriptive details we entered back in step three. Here though, there’s one difference. This album is not going to be made public, so we click on the Unlisted option at the bottom of the dialogue box and then click on Continue to create the new album. This is marked unlisted and only people invited via email will be able to see it.

Picasa displays a dialogue box asking if it should move the photos to an existing album or a completely new one. In this example, we’re creating a new album called Barcelona 2005 with the same kind of descriptive details we entered back in step three. Here though, there’s one difference. This album is not going to be made public, so we click on the Unlisted option at the bottom of the dialogue box and then click on Continue to create the new album. This is marked unlisted and only people invited via email will be able to see it.