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This article is about how you can stop Google from automatically "enhancing" pictures that are loaded in Blogger - even if you do not have a Google+ account.

Google has started automatically "fixing" new pictures as they are added to your blog

In May 2013 Google added the Auto-Enhance and Auto-Awesome features to Google+ Photos. These are meant to make your pictures look better, ie more like those which are taken by professional photographers.

These features are turned "on" by default. And because:

• Photos loaded using Blogger are stored in Picasa-web-albums, and
• Picasa-web-albums and as Google+ Photos actually have the same collection of photos - yes, even for accounts that do not use G+,

the effect is that auto-enhance and auto-awesome are applied to all images loaded through Blogger's post-editor, header-picture loading tool and gadget-picture loading too;.

Why is this a problem

In many cases, these features work as they are intended to, and the illustration that is shown on your blog is more attractive than the one you uploaded - it's brighter, clearer and loads faster.

But there are some situations where the effect of the auto-enhancement is not good. These include:

• Pictures with some transparency - which is auto-corrected to either light grey or black
• Pictures that are intended to be dull / dark / shady - these are automatically lightened.]
• Pictures that are loaded at a certain photo quality - are automatically downgraded to a lower quality (which is fine for viewing on screen, but not so fine if you actually want to use your blog to share high-quality photos).

Blogger users who have a non-white background, and who deliberately upload images with a transparent background so their blog background will "show through" the image have been particularly annoyed by this.   And I have been less than impressed by the faint grey "wash" added to the background of some of my diagrams - for example:

The left-hand picture was auto-enhanced, the right hand one was not

How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you use Google+

If your blog - and the account you use to post to the blog - is linked to your Google+ profile, then you can stop your photos from being changed by:

• Opening the Google Plus settings tab.
• In the "Photos" section, un-ticking "Automatically enhance new photos"

This stops the auto-enhance and auto-awesome tools being applied to any new photos that you upload from now onwards using Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums or any Blogger feature that lets you load a picture (the post-editor, the header widget settings, the picture gadget settings).

Alternatively, you can turn off the auto-enhance and auto-awesome changes that are made to specific pictures by by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.

How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you do not use Google+

There is currently no option in Piscasa-web-albums to turn off the auto-enhance feature.
This means that if you load photos to either Blogger or Picasa-web-albums, using a Google / Blogger account that is not linked to a Google+ profile, you cannot stop auto-enhance from happening.

Some people have suggested that the way around this is to:

• Temporarily link the blog to a Google+ profile (either your own one, or one that you create just for the purpose - eg "Mr John Smith")
• Turn off the auto-enhance feature using the Google+ procedure listed above
• Fix up the damage to any pictures that you loaded through Blogger or Picasa-web-albums between mid May 2013 and today by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.
• Unlink the blog from the Google+ profile.

However I do not believe that this is entirely correct:   my tests suggest that whether or not photos are auto-enhanced is controlled by the settings on the Google+ account that is used to upload the pictures, no matter whether the blog is attached to a Google+ profile or not.

(I've been testing this a lot because I have a number of blogs that are linked to Google+ Pages that are in my personal profile, but which I generally post to using a different Google account that has a more generic name like "Editor, Table Quiz Helper", and it's own separate set of Picasa-web-albums:   I want to be able to hand these accounts on to my successor when I leave the community groups that they are for.)

Currently, the main options that I have identified and recommend are:

• Making a Google+ profile for the Google account that you use to upload the pictures, or

• Giving your Google+ account permission to upload pictures to the Picasa-web-albums of the Google account that owns the blog.   

The 2nd option is tedious, but more line with Google's terms and conditions for use of Google+, while still letting a separate non-individual Blogger account own the underlying blog and supporting pictures etc.

Other Options

If you really do not want to use even a minimal Google-plus account, then your options are limited.

Use another picture host

You could load the pictures that you want to use in your blog to another picture-hosting service (eg Flickr) - however doing this means that you posts wil not have a thumbnail image.

Minimise the damage

If you make sure that pictures which you load have a white background (or whatever colour background your blog has) instead of being transparent, then the impact of auto-enhance will be a lot less.    I have found that if you use a .png file rather than a .jpg, the background is white instead of transparent.   (This is fine for me, because I use white blog backgrounds.)

Wait for things to change

A very simple fix would be for Picasa-web-albums to use default values of "No" instead of "Yes" for auto-enhance and auto-awesome, or to set these up as settings in the PWA profile.

Another option is that Google may improve the enhancement algorithms (ie rules which control how pictures are "touched up").

Fingers crossed, one of these will happen soon.

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Related Articles:

Post.snippet and post.thumbnail - how they are derived from your blog post

How to add a picture to your blog, using the picture gadget

Making a Google+ profile for the Google account that you use to upload the pictures,

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos.

Picasa-web-albums vs Google+ Photos

Picasa-web-albums is a on-line photo storage and management tool, now owned by Google.   It is the on-line version of Picasa, a desktop-tool.   (Learn more about PWA and Picasa here.).

Google would ideally  like everyone to use Google+ Photos.

But there are many people who store pictures in albums that are not associated with their personal Google+ accounts:  these may be for businesses, schools, clubs, etc.

So it is likely PWA will continue to exist for a good while yet.   And I am sure that Google appreciate this:  they have made a number of changes to Picasa-web-albums to make it work better both with Google+ and without it.

Options for editing pictures that are are uploaded to Google

• If you have a Google+ account, then there are two ways of editing photos that you have loaded to Google (it doesn't matter whether you loaded them using Picasa-web or Google+Photos).  
  
  Both of these options are described below.   Using the Google+ editor (option 1) doesn't need any software installed on your PC.   But it's very slow to load, offers you less control, and is currently missing some key features - and it only works if you are using Chrome as your web-browser, not Firefox or Internet Explorer.

• If you don't have a Google+ account, then Google / Blogger only provides only one way to edit photos that you have loaded to it (apart from downloading the photo, editing it on your PC and re-uploading it - which changes the URL you need to use to link to the photo).   This is Option 2 below.

Option 1:   Using Google + edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google+ account.  
(See here for what do to if you are automatically re-directed from PWA to Google + Photos)


Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.  
(Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)


Choose Edit in Google+ from the Actions drop-down menu.




This opens a new window or tab:


If you are not signed in with your Google + account, you will be invited to join.




If necessary, sign-up for Google+, or sign in with the correct account, and start again.


Now, you will be looking at the photo in the Google+ Photos picture view.   From here you can do simple edits:

• Crop the photo
• Tag people
• Rotate the photo

as well as using the other Google+ Photos features (share, slideshow, delete, zoom)


To do more changes, choose Edit (yes, you need to choose it a 2nd time) from the top menu.

If you are not using Google Chrome, then you will get a message saying that the Google+ photo editor only works with Chrome, and giving you a link to download it.    If necessary, switch to Chrome and start again.



Wait while the photo editing tools are loaded  (this does take a while, perhaps even a minute or two).


Once loading is finished, the current Google + Photo editor functions are available from the right-hand bar, like this:



At the moment these are:

• Tune (brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, warmth)
• Selective Adjustment (lets you specific areas for other options to be applied to)
• Details (sharpness and structure)
• Crop and Rotate

• Black and white
• Centre focus (adjust brightness and blur around the centre)
• Drama
• Frames
• Tilt-shift
• Vintage
• Retrolux.

When you  are happy with your photo, click the Finished Editing tick box at the bottom of the right-hand bar, and the changes will be saved (this may take a few moments).


You are left in the open Google+ Photos tab or window, not returned to Picasa-web-albums.   When you go back to Picasa-web-albums and refresh the page (F5), the changes that you made in Google+ photos will be shown.

Option 2:   How to use Picasa-desktop edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

This option only works if you have Picasa desktop software installed on your computer.


Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google account.


Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.   (Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)


Choose Edit in Picasa from the Actions drop-down menu.



A copy of the picture that you want to edit is opened in the desktop-Picasa editing tools window.


From here you have access to all Picasa's standard photo editing tools (including the text tool for adding watermarks).





The photo you are working in is a copy taken from your Picasa-web-albums, it is not the same as the copy of the picture which may already be on your computer.   It is stored in a directory of your Picasa-installation called "Online Edits", not in your main My Pictures directory.   So if you choose a function like "Back to Library" you are taken to the Online Edits folder inside Picasa-desktop.


From here you can use all of Picasa-desktop's editing features, including straightening, red-eye reduction, text-editing, re-setting the neutral colour.    The only exception is the Edit in Creative Kit option:  this is still one of the options in Picasa-desktop, but if you use it, it takes a long time to load and then eventually says "Error connecting to Creative Kit... error 500" - and explains that Creative Kit has now been discontinued.


When you are finished editing, to put the edited photo back into the same Picasa-web-album that it came from, with the same file name and URL:

• Make sure that you are logged in from Picasa-desktop to the same Google account that you were using initially.   (Picasa-desktop remembers your sign-in details from the last time you used it - if it's different from what you need, just choose sign-out from the top-right corner, and then sign in to the correct account when asked.)     AND EITHER:

• Choose Share on Google+    (if you are using a Google + account)
• In the sharing-details window that opens, change the Album-name from Online Edits to  the album that the photo came from originally and choose Upload
  
  OR
• Return to the Online Edits folder / library
• Save the changes using the Save icon
• Choose Enable Synch from the Sharing drop down.
• Wait for the changed photo to upload.
  
  (I think Google have some work to do here - you can only control synching for the whole album, not for individual photos.   I expect this to be improved in the future.)

Job Done:  your Picasa-desktop-edited photo appears back in your online Picasa-web-albums with the changes that you just made, and any existing links to it (eg from your blog posts) will show the changed version of the picture.   And you can put the edited picture into your blog posts or other websites in the usual way.

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Related Articles:

Introducing Picasa and Picasa-web-albums:   an overview

Stop automatic redirection to Google+ Photos

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums.

Update:

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A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit

In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC.

Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger.

Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc).  Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service.

Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, watermarks, etc).   The tool  had some serious fans, and a quirky culture which saw them show messages like "packing the lunch" "watching the flowers", "chasing butterflys" while Picnik was loading.  The type of messages that are funny the first few times, but quickly get tedious. And people using Picnik via Piscasa-web-albums often found that it was very slow.

In 2012:

• Picnik announced that they were closing down their separate photo hosting service, and moving the product to Google+.

• Google's announced that they were were closing Picnik, and using Picnik's engineers to “continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products."   (ref:  closure announcement).

Today, the original Picnik photo-hosting-and-editing service is most definitely closed.

The Picnik photo editor has been either replaced with or re-badged as "Creative Kit", and is available through Google+.  They may have intended to make it available through Picasa-web-albums too - but as I noted in previously, this feature isn't working. Possibly this is about selling additional storage space:   Picasa-web-albums are available to any Google account, while Google+ Photos is only available to named individuals.   So each person can have lots of Google / Picasa accounts (with free storage on each one), but only one account Google+ account.

How to access Creative Kit today

To start creative Kit, so you can edit a photo with it:

• Go to Google+, and log in to your Google account that has Google-Plus enabled.
• Go to your Photos page (which may be on the left-sidebar, or under the More tab on the left sidebar if your screen is small)
  

• Go into an album, and open the photo you want to edit.
• On the menu at the top of the screen, click the Edit button.

This opens the photo inside a window with photo-editing tools. The screen just looks like another set of options within Google-Plus, but actually you are now inside Creative Kit, and you can use it to edit your photo.



When you are finished editing, choose the Save button from the top-left hand side. This give you an option to apply your changes to the current file, or to save a new copy of the file.

• If you choose Replace then any places (eg blog-posts) that link to the existing photo will now link to the edited photo.

• If you choose Save a new copy then your existing file is not changed and a new copy of the file will be made in the same folder as the existing one but with a slightly different name.

If you upload pictures into your blog-posts inside Blogger, then the picture files are stored in Picasa-web-albums LINK. If you have Google+ enabled for your account, then you can access these photos directly through either Picasa-web-albums or through Google+, even if you have not linked your blog and your Google+ profile. So you can use the Creative-kit method of editing these pictures, even if you didn't load them via Google+.

What features are available in Creative Kit

At one point Picnik used a "fremium" approach: Basic features were free for everyone to use for free, while people needed to sign up and pay a subscription to use the Premium ones. This has changed, though,and now features are are all free.

At the time of writing, the features include:

Basics

• Black and White
• Bocal B&W
• Boost
• Soften

Camera

• Lomo-ish
• Holga-ish
• HRD-ish
• CinemaScope
• Orton-ish
• 1960s

Colours:

• Tint
• Vibrance
• Duo-Tone
• Heat Map 2.0
• Cross-Process

Touchup

• Blemish Fix
• Shine-be-Gone
• Airbrush
• Sunless Tan

Google Plus Exclusives

• Daguerreotype
• Reala 400
• Green Fade
• Magenta Fade
• Polaroid* Plus
• Sun Aged

Troubleshooting / Where to get help

Creative Kit uses Adobe Flash Player. If Creative Kit doesn't work inside Google+, try installing a newer version of Flash Player.

If that doesn't help, try:

• Clearing your cache

• Clearing Flash shared objects
  These are data files are created by the Creative Kit on your computer, like cookies.  To clear them, go to Abobe's Flash Player help web site.
  The Settings Manager that you see is not just an image; it's the actual Flash Player Settings Manager. Scroll through the list of sites and select www.picnik.com and www.gstatic.com.
  
  Click the Delete Website button for each, and confirm the deletion.
  
  Open the Global Storage Settings Panel. Check both of the following boxes:
  - Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer.
  - Store common Flash components to reduce download times.
  
  Once you've cleared your local shared objects, clear your browser cache again.
  

• Using a different browser, eg Chrome or Firefox.

• Disabling ad-blocker or flash-blocking extensions

For more assistance, there is a Creative Kit help-centre in Google:
https://plus.google.com/100432630524345907101#100432630524345907101/posts

Is Creative Kit just Picnik with a new name?

Most probably: the controls and features are very similar, and the press-releases seem to tie up. There is one screen that names both while the photo-editor is loading in Google+>Pictures.

But on the other hand there's no official confirmation either, and there are some product differences. It's possible that Google's engineers were simply inspired by the former Picnik colleagues to create similar controls, and that the underlying photo-editing tool is different. Who knows.

What we do know is that many of the much-loved Picnik features are available in Creative-Kit, provided you're willing to load your photos to a Google+ account.

TL;DR

You can edit a photo in Creative Kit by uploading it to your Google+ account, then choosing the Edit button when you are viewing it.

This may be the same Picnik photo editor that was available in Picasa-web-albums until 2012. Or it may not. Either way it lets you crop, re-colour, apply lots of filters etc for free.

Don't want to put your photos into Google+? Bad luck, there's no other way to use Creative Kit / Picnik on them at the moment. Find another on-line editor instead.

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Related Articles:

Creative-kit works with pictures accessed through Google+, but not Picasa-web-albums

Adding a picture to a blog post

Introducing Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:



From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

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Sept 2013 update:   Creative Kit has now been totally discontinued.   Use either Picasa-web-albums or the Google+ photo editor instead.

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For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago.

This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful.

But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message:

We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting
may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble:
[t1]   Click for Assistance»

Waiting never solved the problem for me (trust me, I tried), so eventually I tried the help-link, which went to this Picnik help page.

After following lots of the instructions, I finally found this helpful line in the Adope Flash Player re-installation instructions:

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, Adobe® Flash® Player is built-in but has been disabled. To enable Flash Player, follow the steps in this TechNote

Which sounded hopeful - it's only recently that I've switched to use Chrome all the time, so maybe this was the problem.   But it didn't help - despite what they said, Flash was enabled in my setup.

Eventually, it occurred to me that since I have a Google Plus profile, my albums are now accessible via the Plus interface too.   So I went there, chose Photos, found the album, opened a photo, chose creative kit ... held my breath for a few seconds ... and the editor opened up and worked nicely.

I'd still like to get this working from Picasa, because it just looks so much nicer from the small screen that I use a lot of the time.   Suggestions are very welcome!


PS   Thanks to Hardeep of Widget Craft who used the picture that I'd made as the thumbnail picture for How to Edit Your Blogger Template in one of his articles, and thus inspired me to start putting my own name onto the image files I make.

This article explains how to put a picture that is one shape (a "square peg") inside an image of another shape (a "round hole" - or star, elipse, octagon, etc) - using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Original title:   How to put a square peg into a round hole - in pictures


Recently, I've been using PowerPoint to make the thumbnail image for my posts. This means that I own the copyright of the pictures, so can share them without worrying about copyright issues.

One approach I've used is to find an interesting copyright-free picture that is related to the theme of the post, and then put it inside a shape that adds some visual interest or has some words along side it.  Another thing that I'm going to try is using multiple pictures in this way to make a more-interesting-than-usual collage.

How to put a picture inside a shape

NB PowerPoint commands are based on Office 2007 and 2010 - but the same principles most-likely apply in other versions where the commands may be slightly different.


1   Get your image file, and save it somewhere on your computer.

A wide range of picture-file formats are supported by PowerPoint:  in the 2007 version this includes as shown in this list:

2     In PowerPoint, make a blank side (Home > Layout > Blank)

3     Then add a shape (Insert > Shapes, click on the shape you want)



Intially, the shape with have the fill-colour and border that are the current default values. But you can change this, which is what we are going to do.


4    Right-click on the shape, and choose Format Shape from the pop-up menu




5    In the Fill tab, choose Picture or Texture Fill, then click the File button and navigate to the image file you got in step 1, and click OK.






6   Make sure that the portion of the picture that you want to show is in the picture:  to start with the shape is centered on the middle of the picture.

Change this using the Offsets to move the shape to the left or right over the image.   You can make the offsets positive or negative as shown.

You can monitor the results of different settings in PowerPoints slide thumbnails (on the left hand side, if you have it showing), or by dragging the pop-up menu to a different place in the screen so that you can see the shape itself.




Job Done - at this point, you have an image that is cropped to the shape that you chose - now you just have to put it into your blog.

Using the picture

There are (at least) three ways to get the shape-cropped-picture from PowerPoint into your blog.

I usually copy the item from PowerPoint, and then paste it into a picture editor (Paintbrush etc), manually.   This is an old-fashioned approacb - but it lets me adjust the size and position of the image, and save it (usually a .png) with a file-name that describes the image really well which is good for mating the blog come up in search results (SEO).   The this picture can be inserted into a post just like any other picture.

Another option is to choose File > Save As from Powerpoint, and choose to save the slides in an image format, eg JPEG which can also be inserted into a post in the usual way.  You are likely to be asked whether to put all the slides in one image, or to make one image per slide. Usually, it would be best to make one image per slide - but I don't use this method because the image that is created is the size of the whole slide, rather than just the pictures on it.

A third option is to display the PowerPoint file as a slideshow. This isn't something that I'd do for only one shaped image, but may be relevant in some situations.

Adjusting the size and quality of the picture

One thing that you don't have any control of inside PowerPoint is the zoom level of the inserted picture.

If you make the shape larger, it doesn't show a larger proportion of the picture. Instead, it just shows the existing picture in a larger size, as you can see in the slides shown here.

I suspect that if you want to zoom in to a particular area of the image file, the only approach is to edit the picture in another tool, crop out the bit that you do not want to show, and only keep the part that you want to include inside your shape.

However PowerPoint does have some limited control over the contrast and brightness of the picture, from the Picture tab of the Format Shape window.

Can you do this in other tools?  Why PowerPoint?

Yes, you can.

Photoshop, and similar commercial tools almost certainly have features like this, and I'm certain that GIMP (like a public-domain, less powerful version of Photoshop) and Inkscape (another public-domain image program which is more focussed on scalable-vector-graphics and objects than on pixels) also have these features.

So why use PowerPoint?   In short, its (relatively) cheap and many people have access to it already.   It's also very easy to learn, compared to the other packages, and what you learn is likely to apply to lots of tasks and not just in making pictures for your blog.

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Related Articles:

Putting a picture into a blog-post

Post.thumbnail and post.summary - ways of describing blog posts

Showing a PowerPoint slideshow in Blogger

Copyright, blogs and Blogger/Google

If someone shared a cool photo with you on Facebook or Pinterst, you might want to write a blog post about it.

The post will be a lot more interesting if you can actually include the image. But you're not allowed to put copyright material onto your blog without permission - and how do you know if the picture that was shared with your is copyright or not, and who owns it.

Google Image Search may be part of the answer. Find out about it.

It won't tell you if a picture is definitely avaiable or not - but it gives you information from you can make some judgements based on when it first appeared, and what sort of web-sites it has appeared on..

Remember - although you're not allowed to publish copyright material, you will only get "caught" if a copyright owner spots something on your blog and takes action by filing a DMCA report. There are a great many items which are fine to share, even though they're not technically in the public domain, because no one is actively claiming ownership - and image search gives a way of validating ownership claims made by chancers.

Some very interesting info from David of Blogger Xpertise about controlling the display of photos from Picasa by manipulating the URL.   What he's found is nothing that we couldn't do with HTML, but I have a feeling that it might point to some other possibilities using Picasa's URLs.   Ref:   http://blogxpertise.blogspot.com/2012/05/tip-automatically-cropping-square-and.html

The first list of Google application retirements for 2012 includs Picnik, a photo editing tool that was accessible via Picasa-web-albums (and perhaps from other places too) - it was an effective, though slow, way of adding a watermark to pictures.

I'm sure that PWA has a replacement tool for doing this ... don't have time to research what it is right now.

Custom Search has a new option to have search results that are images.  

If you have existing Google custom search engines on your blog and want have the image search feature, you need to edit each CSE and

• turn the image-search-option on 
• generate the code
• re-install it into your blog.

I probably won't bother, as my blogs aren't image-intensive.   But I can see that this will be a big thing for some people.

This article shows how to change a picture in your blog, so that when it is clicked, it opens another blog post, or even a totally different website.


Clicking pictures in your posts 

Previously I've described how to put a picture into a blog post.

By default, when a picture in your post is clicked, the file that is used to load the picture is opened, in a new window and at its original size.   This can encourage readers to steal photos that don't belong to them, so I've also described how to stop pictures in your blog from being "clickable".

But sometimes you may want to set a picture up so that clicking it opens up a different post, or even a whole different website.

How to change where a picture is linked to:

Add the picture into your post in the usual way.

Note where in the post your picture is - you may want to put some temporary marker-text (text that doesn't appear anywhere else, eg ZZZ) just before or after it, so make it easier to find.

Look at the HTML behind your post

• Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger:  Click Edit HTML in the top-right of the editor window 
• Post-Sept-2011-Blogger:  Click HTML in the top-left of the editor window

Find the code for your picture   (Hint - use the find-feature in your browser, eg Ctrl/f in Chrome to look for the marker-text if you used some).   It will look something like this:

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/tkoGx2454hA/s1600-h/Inserting+a+picture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqkhV0hm0z_1yfRFJk1HIRj_tuD1wJvcqZ9pn_MldyGx5ME9E17_iYN46s09ZQ7tRAWR_CJE-Sr0XHwGSKhPJqIhmb31_LiAq4AYZ_030LFrcUM6i7aOw17HJxCHR5jEDS94kisKdjTv9Q/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

Notice the part in bold, ie the href="CONTENTS"

Replace this with the URL that you would like your readers to go to when they click on the picture.
For example, if you want them to be taken to Google to do a search, the code would look like:

<a href="www.google.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqkhV0hm0z_1yfRFJk1HIRj_tuD1wJvcqZ9pn_MldyGx5ME9E17_iYN46s09ZQ7tRAWR_CJE-Sr0XHwGSKhPJqIhmb31_LiAq4AYZ_030LFrcUM6i7aOw17HJxCHR5jEDS94kisKdjTv9Q/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

By default, clicking the picture will take your visitor to the link you give in the same window.   But if you would like it to open in a new window, add target="_blank" to the code too, like this:

<a href="THE URL TO GO TO" target="_blank" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqkhV0hm0z_1yfRFJk1HIRj_tuD1wJvcqZ9pn_MldyGx5ME9E17_iYN46s09ZQ7tRAWR_CJE-Sr0XHwGSKhPJqIhmb31_LiAq4AYZ_030LFrcUM6i7aOw17HJxCHR5jEDS94kisKdjTv9Q/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

Go back to Compose mode (so you don't get confused next time you edit a post)

Remove the marker text, if you used any.


Some more things to think about:  

Will your readers realise that they should click the picture?   Unless it says "click me", some of them won't - and if they're used to Blogger, they may just expect to see a larger version of your photo.   So it might be a good idea to add a caption, or even some instructions in your blog to tell them to click the picture.

Also while you're editing the code, you might also like to add some alt-text to your picture link too, to make your blog more friendly for readers who use screen-reading tools, and for search engines / SEO.


What you will see:

At some times in the past, when you added a link a picture and then hovered over the picture in the post editor, your would see a double-row of in-post editing options:

• one row had the usual options for editing pictures (which lets you set the picture size, alignment and caption)
• one row had the usual options for editing links (with options to go-to, change and remove the link.

Today, as I'm writing this post using the new-interface editor, I can only see one row of options in hyperlinked pictures - so I need to edit the HTML again if I want to change or remove the link.


But it's quite possible that this is a mistake and that you can see the two rows of options in the old-interface editor, and that it will be added back to the new one too.    Fingers crossed.


What your readers will see:

When you readers look at a picture that you have linked to somewhere, it will seem just the same as any other picture.

For example, the picture to the right of this paragraph looks just like the one one at the top of the article.  But when someone clicks on it ...

Go on, click this one yourself, to see what happens!


(Acknowledgement: public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

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Related Articles:



Adding a picture to your blog

Making your blog friendly for search engines and screen-reader software

Stopping pictures from being able to be clicked

Aligning text and pictures in blog-posts

Integrating Picasa and Blogger

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

The Picture gadget

Dry dock in Claddagh Basin

A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use a Picture gadget.   This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up an all pages and is linked to somewhere.

Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go almost anywhere.


Follow these steps to add a picture gadget:

1  Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet.  
(This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's already stored in Picasa.   To find the URL of a picture on the internet, you can often right-click on it and choose "copy image location")

3  In Blogger, follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, and choose the Picture gadget from the list of options.

4  In the Configure-Image box, enter the options you want for your picture.   These include:

• The title for the Gadget,
• The caption for the picture
  (the small words that go underneath it, usually explaining it, or where it came from),
• What should happen when a reader clicks the picture - put this into the Link field
• Where to find the picture
  (ie the file-location that you copied in step 2)
• Whether to re-size (ie shrink) the picture to fix the space in the sidebar in your current template.

5 Press Save.

6  If necessary, drag-and-drop the new gadget to the place where you want the picture to go, and press Save.

What your visitors see:

<a href="YOUR LINK" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target = "_blank"><img border="0" src="YOUR PICTURE LOCATION" /></a>

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Related Articles:



Options for putting pictures into your blog

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Picasa and Blogger - an overview

Getting the HTML to add a picture to your blog

Finding a picture's location in Pisasa-web-albums

Finding the URL of a picture stored in Flickr

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for bloggers

Following a blog by email

This article is about how to put a Picasa slideshow into your blog, using Picasa's slideshow tool.   

It also looks at the security issues that may be involved in doing this, and suggests some ways around these.

Picasa, Albums and Slideshows:

Previously I've explained what Picasa is and how it is used by Blogger as the default place to store uploaded pictures.

You can also use Picasa in more complicated ways.  You can put a set of pictures in a separate "album" (Picasa's word for a user-defined group of photos), and it will give you the HTML code to use to show these photos in your blog (or any other website).  


There are two ways of doing this:

• Link to the album:  clicking on the link takes your visitor away from your website and into Picasa-web-albums, where they can use the PWA tools to look through the pictures
• Link to a slideshow:   this scrolls through the photos that are in the album at the time, right inside your website.  Here's an example of a slideshow:
  
  

This article is a step-by-step guide to the second option, is showing a Picasa-web-album in your Blogger as a slideshow.    A similar approach will work for other websites, thought the details will vary slightly.


How to insert your slideshow:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home), and log in with the Google account that owns (or you want to own) the album.

1. Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
   (and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
2. Choose an album by clicking on it.
   The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools.
3. Under the Edit drop-down (the one in the album, not the edit menu in the browser), check that Visibility is set to either "Anyone with the Link" or "Public on the web"
4. Click on "Link to this Album"  (currently it's in a small font, 3/4 of the way down the right-hand sidebar - this may change if Picasa changes its interface)
   
5. Click on "Embed Slideshow"  (currently this shows up underneath "Link ... " - and only AFTER you've clicked link...)
   This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
   
   
   
   
   
   
6. Fill in the details you want
   (slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
7. Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
8. Go to Blogger and log in with a Google account that has rights to edit the the blog - note that this doesn't need to be the same account that owns the Picasa album.
9. You can put the code that you copied into your blog in the same way you would adding any other 3rd party HTML to it.

What you see in the Post Editor:

If you put the slideshow into a blog-post, the the way that the post-editor currently works with code means that the slideshow is not visible while you are editing the post.   This means it's easy to accidentally over-write or delete the code.

One way around this is to put some "marker text" before and after it.

For example, I've put in <hr /> and <blockquote> </blockqoute> statements before and after the code just underneath this paragraph.   While I'm in the editor, all I can see is a pair of parallel lines, with nothing between them.   But (because you're visiting the blog after it's published) you can see a slideshow in between.

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This makes the code look like:

<blockquote>
<hr />
<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&amp;hl=en_US&amp;feat=flashalbum&amp;RGB=0x000000&amp;feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F105223767362417288786%2Falbumid%2F5439615839989953921%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCK7yg5XUpNHZtAE%26hl%3Den_US" height="192" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288"></embed>
<br />
<hr />
</blockquote>


What your visitors see - and can access:

The steps above puts a slideshow of the photos in the album at the current time into your blog post.

You can use the examples above to get an idea of how these slideshows work:  they have next, play / pause, and previous buttons, and you can toggle captions on/off.   The top example has auto-play ON, while the second one has it OFF.

On important thing to note:   when your visitors click on the slideshow itself (anywhere but on previous / play / next buttons), they are taken to the place in Picasa-web-albums where the album is.


This may or may not be a problem for you - but it's something that you should be aware of.  It certainly was a problem for me initially, and I had to go and get a slideshow in a Google account with no personal pictures to make the examples in this post.   

If you are not willing to live with this level of security, then I suspect (am yet to confirm) that using the RSS feed provided by Picasa with Blogger's own slideshow gadget may be a better approach.   This will only work in places where you can put a gadget - although it may be possible to use a 3rd party service that converts a feed into Javascript to make code that can be put inside a post.    Or totally different solution is to put your pictures into a PowerPoint slideshow and display it in your blog.

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Related Articles: 



Picasa & Blogger - Part 1, What is Picasa?

Picasa & Blogger - Part 2, Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

Showing a PowerPoint presentation as a slideshow in your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

This article is about how to use pictures stored outside of Picasa-web-albums in your blog. It also looks at the risks and issues you might face if you do this


Where does Blogger usually store pictures

When you put a picture into a blog post, it is usually stored in Picasa-web-albums, the on-line part of Google's photo management tools.

For example, the picture at the start of this article was uploaded from my desktop, and so is stored in a folder in the Picasa-web-albums associated with my Google account.

I can see it here in the album:



Alternatives to Picasa-web-albums:

There are many other on-line photo storage and sharing options, eg Photobucket, flickr - and you can even use Google Docs which can now store files of all types.

For example, this photo (creative commons licensed, with no known copyright restrictions) is stored in flickr

To insert it into the post, I:

• Copied the URL of the picture in flickr

• Used the standard Picture icon on Post Editor toolbar in Blogger, and chose the "from URL" option, and pasted in the URL

But because the photo is hosted elsewhere (in this case in flickR), it is not put into Picasa-web-albums.

Instead the code for it points to the location in flickR where it's found:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" /></a></div>

Hosting photographs elsewhere is one way to work around the size restrictions which Google has placed on Picasa-web-albums accounts.   (Another is to link you blog to your Google + account).

You do need to make sure that the security options for the account and/or album that they're placed are set up so that at least anyone with the link is able to read the files.

Be aware that a photo that is stored outside of Picasa-web-albums cannot be used as the thumbnail for your post:   if all the illustrations in a post are stored elsewhere, then the post simply will not have a thumbnail.


Risks and Issues:

Disappearing Photos:
When you don't control the files that pictures are in, there is a risk that the pictures might "disappear" if whoever is hosting them (flickR in the above example) decides to move them or even just change the structure of their URLs.

There is, of course, the same risk with PWA, but since you need to be signed in to put a file into Picasa, Google knows that it's yours and can email you and let you know about upcoming changes.  flickR, on the other hand, has no record my setting up an URL to the photo, so cannot give me any warning.

Integration:
Picasa/Google have various tools for showing slideshows in blogs.  The specific features that any photo-sharing tool has change from time to time, but by using the tools from Google there is more chance that the will definitely work well with other Google tools, like Blogger.

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Related Articles: 


Applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting HTML from a 3rd party into your blog

Putting a slideshow into a Blogger post

Picasa - a basic introduction

Understanding post.thumbnail, the picture used to summarise a post

Creating a button that links to your blog.