It's insane. To post photos from my camera to the I&C blog, which is Wordpress, I currently have to
1. Load photos from camera to iPhoto, where I wind up with 1200X1600-sized images, which swamp the I&C page.
2. Copy desired photos onto the computer desktop, where they're still gigantic.
3. Upload those photos from the desktop into Blogger, which sizes them correctly.
4. Dump all the old desktop photos in the trash, so I won't get confused later.
5. Copy desired photos from Blogger onto desktop.
6. Upload the now-properly-sized photos from desktop into the media library at I&C.
7. Copy and paste the title of each desired image into the draft of a post.
8. Copy and paste a bunch of image code from an email Joe the Renaissance Web Guy sent me weeks ago into the same post.
9. Cut and paste the image title into the code and adjust the alignment (right, left, center).
Nine simple steps. NINE. Simple. Steps.
Purgatory should be good and empty today.
9 comments:
I started using Google's free Picasa software some months ago. It took me a while to get used to it, but I've come to love it. It would make everything through step 5 in your list considerably simpler. It also gives you some really effective and easy-to-use tools for tinkering with the photos. For those of us who don't know and don't want to know a lot about serious graphics programs like Photoshop, it's great.
The difficulty in getting used to it is not that it's too complicated, but that it does so much for you that you aren't always sure what's going on, or where your pictures are. Also, it wants to help you with ALL your pictures, so by default it brings every image it can find on your hd into its library. But anyway, if you want to invest a few hours in the hope of saving more later, it's worth a try. More info here:
http://picasa.google.com/
Hm. Thanks, Maclin. I've used Picasa some, but not found it that helpful -- I spent ages trying to figure out how to resize a photo with no success, largely because this "photo tray" thing of which they speak doesn't seem to show up on my screen. It was after several hours of reading Picasa "Help!" articles that I hit upon uploading things into Blogger -- that seemed straightforward by comparison.
Dunno why . . .
That's a perfect example of Picasa's oddities. I struggled with that, too--I couldn't believe that feature was missing. And it isn't--it's part of the export function. I'm guessing the rationale is that you're resizing it because you want to send it somewhere else, so it provides this function that makes a copy which is optionally of a different size and resolution, leaving your original intact.
Part of what's quirky about the program is that the designers seemed to have sort of thought back a few steps from specific operations and asked "what does the user really want to accomplish here?" I thought this was really weird when I finally discovered it, but have noticed that in fact I always want to do those things at the same time--resize & send elsewhere.
But I don't know why the tray wouldn't show up on your screen...
I've found that the little Microsoft Paint program that comes on your PC (if indeed you're using a PC)works simply and well for doing this sort of thing.
Open file, click "image", then "attributes", adjust and save.
Are you using a Mac? I find it hard to believe that iPhoto would not offer a way of resizing images, or that there is no other software, even free software, available on the Mac to achieve this. Maybe you need to find a Mac nerd to help you simplify this process.
Yeah, I think I need a Mac nerd. I'm using a fairly old iMac with which I've never been entirely happy. I've had a succession of used Macs over the last fifteen years or so, and each successive one is always juuuuuuuuust slightly less obsolete than what it's replacing, and juuuuuuuust enough incapable of doing what I really want to do to drive me juuuuuuuuuuuust a little crazy.
One of my husband's colleagues is a Mac guy and just helped us resolve some disk-space issues which had been plaguing us for a long time. I'll have to hit him up for photo help. One problem is that my OS is obsolete enough that I can't run the latest versions of things like iPhoto, or even the Wordpress program I'm using for I&C. I think Joe the Web Guy, patient and kind though he is, must throw up his hands in despair every time I email him with some glitch that wouldn't even exist if I were working on something other than a dinosaur -- the Wordpress photo uploader, for example, doesn't work at all on my computer, so I have to add images by hand, which takes ages. For a while I wasn't using images at all, just linking to them, because adding them was such a pain.
On the other hand, the fact that I'm a technological idiot who stares at the screen and the buttons and can't put two and two together doesn't help much, either . . .
Thanks for all the input. I really do appreciate it. We'll figure something out. Meanwhile, this blog will be all about photo resizing.
Really, this part is the easiest. Copying and pasting in image titles and code is the tiresome bit.
And resizing photos this way does mean that something happens on this blog, which I've otherwise more or less abandoned, alas.
I have found the latest versions of Wordpress to be very cooperative when it comes to uploading photos into a blog entry. Especially with the right plugins. Have you read this helpful "how to" article from Wordpress?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Photoblogs_and_Galleries
Yes. This I know. The problem is that my OS will not run even the next-to-last WP program competently, let alone the latest one.
All this is a breeze on my husband's brand-new laptop, where I click a button, and wah-lah, we have uploadage. On this computer, no. We're talking about a probably 7-year-old iMac here. Maybe it's even 10 years old. It does not say "Wordpress" and "upload" in the same sentence. Alas.
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