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How To: Import photos from your iPhone to your PC in 3 easy steps using Picasa

July 17, 2009 By James View Comments

If you go searching on the web for the best way to import photos from your iPhone, most likely the answer you’re bound to find is iPhoto. Which is great if you have a Mac, but what about us PC users out there?

Well, as an admitted Google fanboy I have to say that Picasa handles importing photos from your iPhone just as well, if not better than iPhoto.

Once you have your iPhone connected to your computer just follow these three easy steps.

Step 1: Open Picasa and click on the import button

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If your iPhone was already connected Picasa will detect that as the correct device to import from.

Step 2: Confirm your device, choose which photos you want to import and execute

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Step 3: Enter your info

Enter a folder name and location and description of your photos. Also select what you would like to do with the photos once they’re copied onto your hard drive.
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That’s it! Rinse. Repeat whenever you want to grab your photos off your iPhone.

Also, if you’re not familiar with Picasa, it integrates perfectly with Picasa Web and allows you to flip a switch and sync your offline albums to your online Picasa account. No uploading necessary, it’s all done in the background for you.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: google, iPhone, pc, photography, photos, picasa, Tips

Email Full-Resolution Photos from Your iPhone

July 11, 2009 By James View Comments

If you “Copy” photos out of your gallery and then paste them into the body of the email instead of the “Email Photo” button in the Camera app, you can email the full-resolution version of the photo.

In the gallery the first two images are screenshots of ways to copy images from your gallery and the second two images are examples of the resolution you get when you mail a photo and the full-resolution you get when you copy/paste a photo into an email.

Note: There is one caveat to this which can be a little convoluted. It seems that copy/pasting a photo does some sort of mucking around with the exif data. If you save a full-res photo onto your computer the thumbnail orientation is off, 90° CCW. But if you open that same image on your computer it looks fine. However, uploading that to your WordPress site will show the photo as off 90° CCW as well. Thanks to Jon at Geek Stuff I figured out the workaround for this is to open the full-res photo with your image editor and just re-save it. Not the most effecient process in the world (and this may be a non-issue uploading to Flickr or PicasaWeb but it’s definitely an issue with WordPress) but at least it is an option to share your full-res photos with everyone via email.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: email, iPhone, photography, photos, resolution, Tips

Awesome Time Lapse Video of the Milky Way Galaxy

May 19, 2009 By James View Comments

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Time lapse video of night sky as it passes over the 2009 Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas. The galactic core of Milky Way is brightly displayed. Images taken with 15mm fisheye lens.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, galaxy, milky way, photos

Amazon’s Kindle 2 Photos and Price Point Leaked?

February 6, 2009 By James View Comments

If these images are for real, I may have to seriously consider coughing up $360 on February 24 for a new Kindle 2.  Living in NYC and commuting everyday, I’ve always thought the Kindle was a bit too bulky to consider for my everday commute, but the Kindle 2 seems to be a huge improvement.

Traveling on the subway everyday, you can see a microcosm of technology down there.  Since their initial launch, iPods/iPhones have always been popular with commuters, for pretty obvious reasons.  It’s the perfect subway music device.

Books are another big favorite on the subway, but I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Kindle on the subway.  I’ve seen Nintendo DS’s, PSP’s, Blackberries and Sidekicks, but no Kindles.

I think there is still a ways to go on the price point (ideally around $199), but I’m curious if this new, sleek design will be the push commuters need to make the switch to e-reading.  And, let’s not forget, it’s green too!

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: amazon, kindle 2, photos

Flickr’s 3 Billionth Photo: DSC_2672_1

November 4, 2008 By James View Comments

The photo sharing site flickr reached a milestone yesterday when someone uploaded the site’s 3 billionth photo.  The photo is a shot of a door on an abandoned house in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.

All the hard core flickr loyalists who have been around since the beginning probably took a shot to their ego to find out the photo was uploaded by a relative newb that doesn’t even have a pro account.

According to Webware.com Garrett Ryan Smith, the photographer of the photo, has been using flickr for only a few short days.

“I have been using Flickr for less than a week now,” he said. “My future sister-in law had her first child last week I had my camera with me and took a round of photos…We figured this would be a good way to share the photos with everyone across the United States and also with a family friend serving overseas.”

“Since Katrina hit I have been back to New Orleans numerous times and still cannot believe what it looks like three years later, especially in the Lower Ninth Ward area,” he said.

I have a pro account at flickr and I also have a large amount of storage on Picasa Web.  I generally upload all my photos to both.  

Most of my photos these days are family shots that I like to keep private and share with only certain friends and family.  While I like the community features on flickr better than Picasa Web, I find that for creating albums and sharing them with friends and family I am starting to prefer Picasa more and more, for a number of reasons.

One being it’s great integration with the desktop photo manager of the same name, Picasa.  Both Picasa and Picasa Web have had quite a few updates to them recently that have given them much more functionality and cool toys to use while file and saving your pictures online, including automatic album synching and face recogntion. 

For now, I’ll probably keep uploading my photos to both but I’ve definitely been a longtime advocate of Picasa and you can’t argue with the fact that they’re catching up with flickr with certain new community features.  What’s your preference?

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: flickr, google, photos, picasa

Facebook Reaches 10 Billion Photo Milestone

October 16, 2008 By James View Comments

A pretty huge announcement came in the form of a post on the Engineering @ Facebook’s Notes section of Facebook yesterday.

We recently hit a really cool milestone, our users have now uploaded over 10 billion photos to the site. Now, that’s a big number, but we actually store four image sizes for each uploaded photo, so that’s over 40 billion files. 

To celebrate, we got a bunch of cupcakes and handed them out to our engineering and operations groups. One of our engineers calculated that if we had gotten one cupcake for each of our photos, and lined them up side by side, the line could reach halfway to the moon. 

Some other cool stats about the over 10 billion photos hosted on Facebook:

  • 3,456,271,892 of the photos are of incredibly drunk people.
  • 1,982,120,427 are of minors that look like street walkers.
  • 4,398,284,589 are of attention whores/cougars.
  • 163,320,042 are of people who think their baby is the cutest baby on the planet.
  • 3,050 are of normal people who actually use Facebook for networking.

It’s all true.  I’ve done my research.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: facebook, photos, Web Apps
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