Settings

Tech help Tuesday

These slides are provided for learners at Noosaville Library finding their way around basic settings in Android and iOS devices. 

Click on this symbol below to enlarge the Slides on your screen
Use the arrow key to advance to next slide.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2014/09/settings.html

Pictures all in a row

Line them up

Are you sometimes frustrated when inserting pictures into your Blogger blog?
Do you have difficulty getting them to display horizontally?
There is no gallery function similar to that in Wordpress so one often resorts to having images one under the other and centred. I have previously resorted to using photo software to combine images then uploading as a single image.

This week I've found some easy instructions to load images into a table with no borders.
I've saved the instructions from How to line up pictures horizontally into a blank unpublished page on Blogger. I also added a screen clipping of the instructions to that page. Now when I want to line up some images, I have the code to copy and proceed.

• Copy the code to a new post, it will create a blank table with three cells.
• Upload the individual images and post to the page, below or above the inserted table.
• Resize to small and use Properties to rename images.
• Use the HTML editor to copy all the information for each image found between the <a href> and < /a> tags from the images and replace that information in the table data for each previously blank image.
• Save and check the Compose page to see that images have been replicated within the table. 
• Delete the original images posted on the page, save and preview. It may be necessary to adjust the size of the pictures in the code to get the best result.

The three images above were made with some my favourite tools for creating original blog pictures.

• The Library Currants picture was made in Notegraphy (web, iOS and Android)
• The globe was created in Sumopaint (web and iOS)
• The brick wall HTML sign was generated in Wordswag (iOS)

********************

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2014/09/pictures-all-in-row.html

It's a Snap!

Organising photos

Time to get down to some serious organising. Our first digital camera back in 1997 did not serve to improve our photography techniques but did indeed provide a sudden upsurge in the number of photos we took.  Suddenly we had photos on a computer and we followed some basic conventions in naming and grouping them into folders.

As the years passed with new cameras, phones and other digital devices, our world became flooded with digital imagery and in our busy lives some organisation fell by the wayside. The addition of cloud storage has resulted in photos being scattered across multiple places. Add in all those years of print photos to be scanned and this looks like a mega task, but a step by step process will get it done.

Improvements in image software combined with more sophisticated methods of digital storage and retrieval systems all provide for an improved experience once image files are well organised. A systematic review along with an approach that will better facilitate search is needed. I have some ideas to guide the process.

• The more information there is about a photo, the easier it will be to find it again by search.
• Adding metadata is the digital equivalent to writing on the back of a physical photo and the best information on the back of old photos were the dates, names, places, events and comments. Now tags can be added too.
• Backup and off site storage is crucial, no one wants to lose years of photographs in flood, fire,  or some other unexpected disaster such as a computer crash.

Review

1. Make a master list of locations of photos to be sure all are processed. 
2. Decide on file naming conventions year, month, date; event, series or person e.g. folders by year, then events in that year. Consider batch renaming functions to process folders of images about an event.
3. Right click properties on an individual photo to enter basic metadata - use the photo gallery editor in Windows to add further comments and for the facial recognition software embedded in it. Highlight all photos in one folder to add a generic comment e.g. for wedding or other event photos this is a quick method to add detail about the event to all the photos in one go
4. Consider names, date, time, places, source, photographer and other comments
5. Do some quick edits to fix lighting, focus, orientation, crop or one of a dozen other edits: use free software. 
6. Work on and complete one folder at a time. 
7. Backup each time a batch is finished.

Some useful tools

Free software

• Irfanview
• XnView
• GIMP
• Picasa

Free web apps no need to download software

• Pixlr family 
• PicMonkey
• iPiccy

Mobile metadata editors

• PhotosinfoPro - iOS app, excellent for adding metadata
• Photo editor- Android, edit images and metadata

And I'm underway, Day 2 and facial recognition of known people done. Bulk metadata added to comments field in three separate folders.  All those albums to be scanned, arrgh... to be done slowly.

Windows Photo Gallery

Windows photo gallery is part of the Windows Essentials free suite of tools

Open picture in Windows Photo gallery

  

Toolbar - simple metadata entry options, includes quick find by person after facial recognition applied.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/its-snap.html