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.

Bloglovin'

I'm not really sure what I'm doing here, but you can now follow my blog on bloglovin here:
 <a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/3803341/?claim=78w8enc3wfm">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

I will make a button and put it on the sidebar once I figure out how.

....There, that wasn't so hard:)

Moving Forward into Fall

Happy Fall!

Well, I have spent the past month being stymied in my attempts to figure out the resizing and uploading from iphoto thing.  Something that should be straightforward is definitely not (at least it is not explained anywhere that I can find).  I did manage (finally!) to resize the above picture.  I did a batch of pictures, resized them and put them in a folder under the picture icon.  So far, so good.  But when I went to "choose" them, their little icons were about as big as the capital I that began the previous sentence.  Not very helpful.  I just accidentally happened to choose the right photo this time.  No way to actually browse a photo because I can barely even see it.  Sigh..........back to the drawing board.

Anyway, I have missed my online community and will be catching up with you all over the next little bit.

I made the above wreath from a thrifted grapevine wreath, some berries and grassy stuff from Hobby Lobby, and some "gifted" feathers that my visitors from earlier in the year left in my yard:)  This is my small attempt towards seasonal decorating that Cheryl recommended last October in her series "31 Days to Make a House a Home."  Very helpful stuff, and you can find the series here.

It is actually a little difficult to even conceive of fall right now.  Our temperatures are still in the nineties (yes, I said "nineties"), and it's been so long since it has rained I've almost forgotten what that is, too.  August and this year September as well are what I think are called the "dog days of summer."  In Texas it gets so hot and dry, every plant shrivels up and hunkers down, waiting for relief.  Thoughts of flowers are long gone.  My garden is all dried up, and I should be thinking of a fall garden, but it's too hot to even have the energy to plan it out right now.  On top of that, we have been in the midst of a West Nile virus outbreak this summer, so you can't even go outside in the evening without being slathered down in bug spray.

I did want to do a little recap of my garden.  Successes (meaning we got some produce to eat): lettuces, onions, zucchini, potatoes, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes (I'd give them a "C").  Failures:  sweet potatoes, peanuts, green beans, lima beans, peppers, melons, garlic.   We have now eaten all the potatoes, but I still have some onions left, and I have corn and zucchini in the freezer.

I really enjoyed working in the garden and putting up food these past few months.  I'm pretty confident I made enough jam to last us until next year:)  In fact, I am probably going to ask for a proper canner for Christmas.  My husband won't understand it, but maybe you will.

Blogger and iPhoto Woes

A while back Vee had a post where she talked about photo storage for her blog and how we should check ours and how she keeps from using up so much by resizing her pictures.  While I found the discussion interesting, it was all a bit above my head and I thought it didn't really apply to me since I uploaded my photos directly from iPhoto onto my blog.  So I went blithely on my way.

Well, ignorance is NOT bliss, and two weeks ago I got the notice that my Picasa Web Albums file was nearly full (and I have been blogging only a few months, not for years like Vee!).  So, if you too have been blogging "unawares"  here is what I have learned so far (don't laugh even though most of you already know all this).

Blogger keeps all of your uploaded photos on a Picasa Web Album, whether you knew it or not.  You get to it by having your gmail account opened and going to picasaweb.google.com.  There you will see your photos, and at the bottom of the screen it will tell you how much space you have left (you are allowed 1Mb of free space with your blog).  BTW, your photos are not really THERE, they are still wherever you left them, so if you delete them from your original file they will also be deleted from your blog!

I have been doing two things wrong.  First of all, I uploaded photos willy-nilly to the blog because I like to look at them on the preview before I decide what I will actually publish:  the idea being it is easier to take away photos I don't want than to go back and look for more photos to add.  This would have been fine IF I had gone into my Picasa Web Album and DELETED the ones I didn't use, but I never did this because I never even went to my Picasa Web Album at all.  So if you are committing this error, get into your Picasa Web Album and delete those unused photos -- they are wasting valuable space -- even though they are not really there (confused yet?).

The second error I made was uploading directly from iPhoto without resizing.  I click the photo icon when writing my post, go to "choose files" at the top, and then enter my iPhoto Library and choose the photos I wanted to upload. Easy.  BUT when I do this there is no option for resizing the photo, and my photos were uploading often around 4,000 x 3500 (resolution -- is that the right word?).  Apparently a good choice for blog/web photo size is around 800 (-- resolution?) and medium quality -- a big, big difference.

I am not opposed to purchasing extra space from picasa, but the price has gone up ($36/year for 25 GB), and I really don't NEED the extra space yet if my photos were a more realistic size.  Easy fix, right?  I simply need to resize my photos.  But HOW TO DO THIS?

I am hoping there are some straightforward answers, but the search for them has been anything but.  Pretty much any information prior to summer 2012 is obsolete.  Part of the problem is with iPhoto and part is with picasa/blogger.  As far as I can find out, you can only resize photos in iPhoto if you are exporting them.  That's not so bad, as I do want to export them to my Picasa Web Album, but I cannot find out how to do this.  There was a simple plug-in for this that you downloaded from Google, but Google has now done away with this.  Now they want you to download Picasa 3.9 for Mac, but I'm not sure I want to do that.  That seems unnecessarily complicated.

Picasa could make this whole problem a lot easier if they had a setting that you could choose that would automatically resize your photos.  They actually do have this setting -- it's just that they decide when to use it, not you.

So, I have a lot of questions.  Googling for information on this issue has not really gotten me anywhere.  I think I am going to have to break down and go take an iPhoto class from the apple store,  but that's kind of a pain because it's an hour or more away.  If you have any answers or corrections, please send them my way.  Right now I will be spending less time on blogging and more time on learning how to use my computer, which, even though I do it reluctantly, might not be such a bad thing;)  I didn't realize that this fall was going to be back to (computer) school for me!