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Monthly Archives: August 2010

Drag’n’drop upload images to your Flickr Gallery using Flickr uploader

Every time I copy images/ from my Canon IXUS 970 IX camera to my computer I use   – it works perfect for me, especially with the many options to organise, tag and manipulate the images in a very nice way. When it comes to / however I have a feeling that seems to be a more “serious” site. Here I will tell you about how you can easily copy photoes from “one world” (Google Picasa) to “the other” (Yahoo Flickr).

How do I copy my photoes from Google Picasa to Flickr?

I asked my self this question, and googling a litle lead me to a soloution: Flickr Uploader application for windows. It is free (ofcause) and works very easy! The reason why you should consider this at all is if you like for instance the way you can tag you photoes in Google Picasa – and when you then share your photoes you will have such info as tags, geo tags, descriptions inside the photoes for other people to enjoy.

Simple description (see screenshoots below)
  • You ofcause need to have a (free) Yahoo identity/account and when you do you can download from http://www.flickr.com/tools/
  • Having downloaded and installed Flickr Uploader you can start up your Google Picasa application
  • Now you can actually just drag’n’drop directly from Google Picasa to Yahoo flickr uploader! Very easy!
  • When you are done – click upload inside Yahoo flickr uploader! The rest is easy!
Nothing is perfect…

I must however admit that not every piece of information survives the transfer between Google Picasa and Yahoo flickr gallery… I was suppriced to discover that apperently the geotags from Google Picasa was not picked up by Flickr…! I would love to hear from you, if you can explain this to me…

Anyway – try it out, and if you feel like looking at my Flickr site you find it here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38942406@N00/sets/72157624659090233/

My photoes inside Google Picasa

Flickr uploader uploading images to my Flickr account

Flickr offers you to put some information to be shown along the image

One of the uploaded images - but heh! Where is the geotagging? :-(

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The getimage.aspx of Dynamicweb CMS finally can crop as I always wanted it to!

Being a heavy user of Dynamicweb CMS I am very happy to discover that the latest version of the software has made the utility for cropping/scaling images work as I (IMHO) always have wished it to do! It is now possibel to specify both with and height and having the image fit inside the area keeping the aspect ratio of the image! Hurra!

You do know , right?

When you have a design to implement using Dynamicweb CMS and you have a list of items with images – say thumb images, Dynamicweb offers a nice utility which can ensure that the thumbs will have a given dimension. The images are cached on the server, so it is not using unnessesary resources of the server if you use the utility.

The getimage.aspx utility of Dynamicweb CMS

The utility can be found on any Dynamicweb soloution here:

http://[hostname]/Admin/Public/getImage.aspx

Enter the URL above and you will get a nice wizard which will dynamically produce what you need inside your . You can see the wizard above.

What makes things work for my needs!

To ensure that an image fits inside a container with known dimentions you need to:

  • Enter the dimensions (width/height)
  • Select the cropping offset: “Keep aspect ratio”

Try the utility by entering a path to an image – you have to start from “/files…”. When that is done, simply press OK and you will get a preview under the “Results” tab, as you can see below.

The Results tab of the getimage.aspx Dynamicweb utility

Using the Image URL in your templates

When you are happy with the results you should copy the “Image URL” path (highlighed with blue in the above image). The URL for my example is:

/admin/public/getimage.aspx?Image=/files/billeder/300×80.jpg&Format=jpg&Width=200&Height=100&Crop=5

If I were to use this path inside a template, I simply would replace the “/files/billeder/300×80.jpg” with a template tag like “<!--@Ecom:Product.ImageLarge.Clean—->”.

I hope this has helped you! I really find this improvement nice!

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Merging the information about friends on facebook to your Picasa contact database

If you use to handle your images you might have spend time tagging information about people on the images. Today I discovered a nice free utility which can merge information about your friends from with the contact data keept within Google Picasa, giving you more correct tagging information inside your local Picasa albums.

Go download the utility: “Facebook Contacts for Picasa”

You need only do a few simple things to do the merging job. First of all you will need to download the “Facebook Contacts for Picasa” from SourceForge.

Run the utility!

When you have finished downloading the utility, simply run it. You will get the screen below:

image

The steps to follow inside the utility

  • Get the facebook contacts simply by clicking the button “Get Facebook Contacts” and identify yourself (log in – may be nessesary).
    That will get the information about your friends from facebook and put them in the list to the left (blured in the image above).
  • You then need to locate the “contacts.xml” which Picasa uses. It should be somewhere within “Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2”. I found mine here: “C:\Users\Sten\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\contacts\contacts.xml”. Be sure to make a backup of that file – the contacts.xml file.
  • Press the “Get Picasa Contacts” to fill out the dropdown box to the right of “Merge With”. That dropdown will contain the local contacts which you may allready have created.
  • Manually go through the list to the left – the one from facebook. The Utility may or may not have found a match. So I suggest that you go through them. This feature has however a strange behaviour! It seems that after each time you manually select a contact from the “Merge with” list, you have to save it… Hmm… It however seems to work, though not as I expected.

    I expected that going through the list and choosing which person from facebook to merge to which Picasa contact, the relation was remembered and all of the relations then saved after I had finished them all and pressed save…

You are now ready to Save the data to the Google Picasa contacts.xml file! But as I suggested above, do make a copy of the contacts.xml before saving!

If everything went okay you should now have more accurate information inside your local Google Picasa gallery! You can now tag people using those data inside your picasa library.

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