Photo Gifts Made Easy with Picasa

Still have some people on your gift list?  There are lots of gift ideas that can be made from your own photographs.  Some of them can be ready to pick up at your local Walmart or Walgreens today, and some can be mailed overnight for an extra charge.  Normally, it takes a week or so to receive the gift.  You can even have it shipped directly to your recipient.  It’s all done online with your digital photos, a credit card, and a shipping address. What can you Order? You can order anything from simple prints of your photos, to framed or ‘floated’ wall masterpieces.  You can also order professional hard-bound books of your pictures – I love these books for special keepsake gifts.  Then there’s the fun stuff.  Photo gifts that are also useful, like mugs, tshirts, or mouse pads.  Most of the providers listed offer all of these things, but they each have their specialties.  You can check them out on their various websites before selecting one thru Picasa.  Here’s a partial list of the websites, but make sure to come back to Picasa before actually ordering!  Read on to see why. Check out the offerings at these providers, then come back to Picasa to order: CVS, Kodak Gallery, PhotoStamps, fotoflōt, Walmart FOTO.com, Lifepics, Snapfish, Walgreens, RITZPIX, Shutterfly, American Greetings PhotoWorks, Snaptotes Picasa’s ‘Shop’ button makes it easy If you use Picasa, all you have to do is select the photo, or photos you want to use and click the Shop button. ... Read more

Where Deserts Meet: Joshua Tree National Park, CA

Joshua Tree National Park is an amazingly diverse area of sand dunes, dry lakes, flat valleys, extraordinarily rugged mountains, granitic monoliths, and oases. Cholla Cactus Garden nature trail is a pleasant walk in the park. © Rex Vogel, all rights reserved Explore the desert scenery, granite monoliths (popular with rock climbers), petroglyphs from early Native Americans, old mines, and ranches. The park provides an introduction to the variety and complexity of the desert environment and a vivid contrast between the higher Mojave and lower Colorado deserts that range in elevation from 900 feet to 5,185 feet at Keys View. Few roads pass through Joshua Tree, but entrances at both north and south ends of the park connect in a cross-park scenic drive, with spur roads to specific attractions. With 813 species of plants, Joshua Tree is renowned for its plant diversity. No wonder that when the area was first proposed for preservation in the early 1930s, the name suggested was Desert Plants National Park. The park consists of two deserts: the Colorado in the eastern section, which offers low desert formations and plant life, such as creosote bushes, spidery ocotillo, and jumping cholla cactus; and the Mojave in the western part. This higher, cooler, wetter region is the natural habitat of the Joshua tree. Related to the yucca bush, the Joshua tree was named by Mormon pioneers heading west. The strange, contorted branches, it is said, made the sojourners think of the Biblical figure... Read more

Automatically Geotag Pictures with Droid

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com First, just what is geotagging?  It’s attaching the latitude and longitude coordinates to a picture, a .jpg file, so it can be placed on a map in the location where it was taken.  When a photo is geotagged, these coordinates are part of the ‘metadata’ embedded in the file itself, just like the date and time where it was taken. Read more  Read More →

Keeping a Visual Record of Your Travels

You’ve probably chosen RVing because you love the travel, or you don’t want to miss out on all the natural or manmade wonders of North America, or you just don’t like being tied down to one place.  Whatever the reason, are you keeping a visual record of your travels, or, in other words, taking pictures?  Like any other art form, picture-taking means different things to different people.  And like buying a recreational vehicle, costs vary widely, depending on the buyer’s/user’s objectives.            Why take pictures?  Are you looking to keep memories alive?   Are you planning to give a talk to the Kiwanis Club when you get home?  Or is there a big bodacious dream of having your pictures published in a table-top book or in magazines?  They are all good reasons to keep a camera with you and snap pictures.  I take hundred of pictures every month because we always seem to be on the move.  Then I download my shots onto my laptop and delete about 80 percent of them.  My immediate goal is to just keep a record of the places we’ve been, mostly to help us recollect what we’ve seen.   This may sound like I’m excessive compulsive, but I try not to let taking the picture interfere with taking in the scenery.  We’re there to enjoy our surroundings; the photo is like a bookmark in the novel.  The least important element in picture-taking is the camera.  Whether you’re using a $2,500 single-lens reflex or a point-and-shoot budget model, or even your... Read more

Do you take crooked photos?

by Chris Guld, www.Geeksontour.com It’s hard to hold the camera straight and still when you’re snapping photos out the window of a moving RV isn’t it? Here’s one I snapped this summer as we crossed Lake Champlain into Vermont: It was such a pretty scene, but this picture is unusable because it’s so crooked (that big orange road marker doesn’t help either!) Using PIcasa (a free program from Google), you can click on the straighten tool and you will get a grid of dotted lines and a slider at the bottom. Drag the slider left or right to change the angle of the picture. When the horizon lines up with the grid, click Apply. And, just a couple more clicks crops out the road marker and makes the sky bluer. Yes!  That’s more like the scene I saw. All the details of how to make your pictures look better with Picasa are included in the Geeks on Tour new booklet: Beginner’s Guide to Picasa 3.5.  Check it out … it could make a great gift for all the amateur photographers on your list!  Read More →

Geotag your photos with Picasa 3.5

Maps and photos.  I can’t think of two things more near and dear to a traveler’s heart than maps and photos.  Being able to combine the two is the ultimate.  But, being able to do it *easily*??  Well, that’s not possible is it? It is now. Picasa (the free-from-Google digital photo management program) released a new version last month.  And one of the major improvements is in the ‘Geotagging’ feature.  Instead of requiring that you use Google Earth, they have embedded a full Google Maps ‘Places’ pane right into Picasa.  Placing a photo at a place on the map is as simple as clicking on the photo and clicking at the place on the map.  I show you how to do this in the video below. Note: You can make it play in full-screen by clicking the icon in the lower right of the playback window that looks like an X . If you’re new to Picasa, or want to learn more, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be co-hosting a webinar (seminar delivered over the web) with Google on November 13.  Register for the free Picasa Webinar here. Geotagging Video: by Chris Guld of Geeks on Tour  Read More →

Go Leaf Peeping Now, Before It’s Too Late

Ahhh, wonderful fall. The waning warmth from the sun brings a welcome chill from summer heat, migrating birds start heading to their southern range, and deciduous hardwoods begin turning red, orange, and yellow heralding the leaf peeping season. Sugar maples give up the green for eye-popping reds, orange and brown tones come to the stately oaks, and white-barked aspens put on a display of vivid yellows and golds. But if its aspens that trigger your camera finger, take your pictures now, as aspens from Arizona to Colorado to Idaho are falling by the tens of thousands. Read more  Read More →

Sebastian Inlet – Florida State Park

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksOnTour.com Florida has a lot of great State Parks and, in this one you can walk to the beach from your RV site.  We highly recommend it.   We took a little walk to toast the sunset last night.  This is our last night with my Mom traveling with us.  It’s been a great 3 1/2 weeks. There was a distant thunderstorm turning the sky all sorts of ominous colors. Mom got all snug in her ‘room’ where she could watch the action. Then, this morning was beautiful.  I made everyone go for an early morning walk. Florida is so much more than Miami Beach and Disney World!  And, it doesn’t get any better for Winter weather!  Florida was our home before becoming fulltime RVers, and it’s still a favorite destination.  The post above was originally written for our personal travel blog.  I looked through my archives and found a few other posts about Florida that I thought you may enjoy. Fort Lauderdale Water Taxi Paddle the Peace River Paddle to Caladesi Island Wakulla Springs State Park I know I’m supposed to write about computer stuff, so here’s a little behind-the-scenes information.  Blogging Tools: I use Microsoft Live Writer to do all my blogging.  It is a fabulous, free application where you can write your blog posts and add your pictures, links, and maps, all offline.  Then, when you’re ready, just click ‘Publish.’  An extra added bonus for me is that I can write a post... Read more

Using Live Writer for Blogging

by Chris Guld, www.GeeksonTour.com I’ve written about Live Writer a couple of times: Article 1, Article 2. It is a free program downloadable from Microsoft, and the exceptional feature is that it resides locally on your computer and it will upload your blog posts to several different blogging systems.  I now use it almost exclusively for all my blog posts – both Blogger and Wordpress. I’m using it to create this post on RV.net’s blog and I use it to create blog posts for my personal blog on Blogger. It’s single-click easy to add a map to your blog post using Live Writer. I especially like the plugin that links directly to my Picasa Web Album for photos.  I also like that it reminds me to add labels or categories to each post.  To understand the importance of labels and categories, see last week’s post. Let me show you exactly what I’m talking about: View more tutorial videos on blogging.  Read More →

Better Photos with Picasa

Our motorhome is currently parked in Salem, Massachusetts. A little city park called Winter Island. We’re using this home base to sightsee in the area, including Boston. For our day in Boston, we decided to take the ferry. Nothing better than a boat ride to start the day, and what a great way to see Boston for the first time! See our blog post on this wonderful day. Read more  Read More →

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