Friday, June 28, 2013
Talking about Blogger and iPhoto Again
Kara at The Scarlet Thread 7 asked me a question about uploading pictures from iPhoto. I was going to send her a lengthy email, but it is so difficult to find any information about this online, and the little I know took me such a long while to cobble together, that I thought there might be other bloggers who find this useful, so I'm putting it here instead.
On blogger, when you are composing a post and you click on the icon to import pictures (just to the right of the Link icon), the "choose files" option shows up at the very top, separate from the other options which are listed in a column on the left. Click on it. To find your iPhoto library, scroll down towards the bottom of those options and you will see Media as a category. Under the Media category is Photos. Click on that, and that should be your iPhoto library. You should be able to choose a picture and upload it directly. That's how I did it for a long time.
HOWEVER, I don't do it that way anymore because in iPhoto there is no way to resize the photo without exporting it, and my pictures were so large it used up all my free space on picasaweb (which is the online site where blogger stores all your blog photos). You can access your picasaweb online account (which you have if you have a blogger account) by being signed in to your blog and typing in picasaweb.google.com on your search bar at the top. Also, your picasaweb sign in and password are the same as your blog. If you get on your picasaweb site and scroll to the bottom, it should tell you what percentage of your space you have used up. If you are not resizing your photos, it's probably a lot.
This is what I do now. I download my photos from my camera into iPhoto. I do any editing of the photos there in iPhoto. I also created albums for my blog photos in iPhoto. I use the name of my blog plus the year (i.e, collectedyarns2012). I put my edited photos for my blog into the afore-mentioned album. Then, WHILE I AM IN THAT ALBUM, I export any photos I'm about to use in a particular blog post. To do this, I click on a photo I want to use in my blog post. Next, I look on the top bar and see the word "FILE". Look underneath "FILE" and you should see "Export." Click on that. My box says Kind: JPEG, Quality: Medium. I leave those alone and where it says "Size" I choose Medium.
Under file name I choose album name with number, and then I click "export."
At that point your resized photo should be sent to a file on your computer under "Pictures." Initially you will have to name your file. My picture file name corresponds to my iPhoto library album name except I add the word "resized" (collectedyarns2012(resized), for example). I download each photo this way, and I manually change the number at the end of the photo name so that I keep going within that file 1...2....3....4....5 etc.
THEN, when I'm ready to write a new post, I go into my blogger dashboard and download my photos. I still click "choose files". On the left hand size, under Favorites I click on Pictures. My file "collected yarns2012(resized)" should come up. I click on it. There are different ways to look at the photos, but when I find the one(s) I want, I click on them, hit the "choose" button, and they are downloaded into the blog post. Again, I do this one photo at a time.
All this sounds complicated, but after a couple of times it will go really quickly. As an added bonus, you blog photos will be much better organized.
Also, there is a way to change the size of photos while you are in picasaweb. Please see my earlier post, especially the comments from VirginiaC, for more information. I found this link helpful as well. Also, Amazon has some books for iPhoto that might be helpful, although I have not yet forked over the money to try any of them. If you are Mac user and are close enough to a Mac store, they do offer tutorials on iPhoto. I have not yet availed myself of this but it probably could have saved me a lot of headaches.
I make no claims to be anything other than a rank amateur, but I will try to answer any questions you may have. And if you have anything helpful to add, please do so.
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Hmm. I'm right there with ya. I'm so not techy though. I use Iphoto still (except when I take pictures on my camera; then I use Bluetooth to put them right on my desktop).
ReplyDeleteThe thing is ... about resizing photos. I click on the photo after I've loaded it into the blog post. A bar pops up that lets me change the photo's size. I can pick small, med., large, x-large. I like large b/c then the photo is nice and big, but it doesn't overlap the text in my sidebar.
So that's how I resize. I never go look in Picasseweb. I don't really understand what it is, or its purpose. Is it free if we have blogspot? Somehow, we've started paying $2.49/month on our credit card for some online photo storage (for my photos) and we need to get that cancelled. I guess that's not picassaweb. If you can tell me more about my relationships with picassa, I'd love that! Should I stop using Iphoto? I get frustrated with it b/c if the time stamp isn't set right on my camera, it moves my recent photos around, trying to make them chronological. It's a headache. And sometimes it crashes or loses photos. I have too many photos. ugh. Thanks for your help.
M.K., I'm going to answer your questions here because others may have the same issues. You are choosing how large (or not) your photos appear on your blog, but you have not actually been resizing your photos. I don't understand all of it, but photo size somehow depends on your camera and its resolution. Online photos don't need the same resolution as a photo would need if you were printing it in a book, for example, but modern cameras take really high resolution photos (I hope I'm using the right terminology here). Before I began resizing my photos, a photo uploaded to my blog might be 4000 x 6000 or greater, when really I only need it to be 400 x 600 or less. The first photo takes up a HUGE amount of room. The second photo takes up much less room, but I can post it on my blog in any size (small, medium, large, x-large) with no discernible difference in quality. The size I post it in does not change the resolution numbers.
DeleteYou DO have a picasaweb account because that is where google (blogger) stores all your photos for your blog. That $2.49 is very likely going to pay for your blog photo storage because they give you so much free, and anything over that you have to pay for. I ran out of free room rather quickly, which was the impetus to learning all this stuff to start with. However, since I have been resizing my photos, I went from using 98% of my free storage to using around 5% now, despite adding many more photos. I did go in to picasaweb and change the size of some of my large photos using VirginiaC's directions linked above, but I never did get them all resized. I also deleted photos in picasaweb that I had downloaded but never used.
A caution here: don't delete any photos you have published in your blog, or they will also be erased from your blog.
If you go into your picasaweb account and look at your photos, it will tell you the size. They are not all consistent-- I'm not sure why -- but you will see they are WAY larger than you need them to be.
As for iPhoto, I think the problems are we are learning to use it "on the fly", so unfortunately I have done everything wrong from the beginning and now am having to figure it out. My consolation is I think it is definitely a mental challenge and is keeping my brain stimulated, even if under protest. Again, I am totally an amateur and my apologies if I have given you any false information.
Oh -- one more thing. Did you know, when you click on the little photo icon, in a blog post, and you see the "Choose files" option box ... if you look over on the left, in the column of choices over there, you'll also see an option to search for a photo in your picassa web albums. That might be a way to get to those photos easily. I did that once or twice; I forget why. You can also choose "from this blog" to find a photo that you've used often on your blog.
ReplyDeleteThis was so interesting! There are so many ways to do the same thing, aren't there? Love that there are a number of viable ways to accomplish the same task. I am just so excited to get my Picasa use back down to 1% after all these years of blogging, I could do a jig. I had wondered if it would be possible and it was. Took me awhile, though.
ReplyDeleteAh -- this was helpful, Angela! My son understands these things a bit, and he changed my camera's setting from 8.1 to 3.1, so all my photos from now on, will be small enough to store on Picassaweb, without paying. But he could not tell me how to change the size of photos ALREADY on Picassaweb, which would really help me -- I could cancel that monthly charge! So I'll check out the link, and go do that until I'm down UNDER the minimum free amount of storage. Then I'll be sure all new photos are small. Thank you, thank you!!
ReplyDelete