Using Picasa 2 with Web Templates

Picasa 2 is an excellent free photo organizer that is the easiest and quickest way to get your digital photographs ready for use with our web templates.  Picasa helps you organize, find, and collect pictures that you want to use, helps you improve them (by cropping, straightening, brightening, etc), and finally it will automatically re-size an entire folder of pictures at once, so they fit on the Web pages neatly.

Downloading and installing Picassa
1. Connect to the Internet, go to picasa.com, and click Free Download. (Or, open the CD-ROM and double-click "picasa2-current.exe").
2. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the program.
3. Run Picasa by double-clicking on the Picasa icon on the desktop. If you are asked to register, give your usual email address (necessary for Picasa's picture email function).

Importing new photos from digital cameras, card readers, and photo CD.
1. Connect the camera or card reader, or insert the photo-CD. 
2. Click the Import button in the upper left.
3. Pull down the Select Device menu and select the desired device. Wait for the pictures to load.
4. Click the Finish button at the bottom, then type a descriptive title for this group of pictures into the "Finish Importing" box and click the Finish button again. (Pictures with a red X have already been imported and are skipped).

Finding pictures and collecting them into one folder
1. Picasa makes a "library" of all the pictures on your hard disc, so you don't have to know where they are stored.  You can just scroll through the library or through the list of folders on the left.  
2. You can also use the Search button: type in a search term next to the magnifying glass icon at the upper right of the screen.  All the matching photos will be displayed instantly. (Click the red X in the search field to return to the full library display).  The computer searches for matches in the file names, the folder names, and in any added captions. To add a caption, open the picture (double-click on the thumbnail) and type in the space under the picture.
3. As you find pictures that you want to include in your collection, you can collect them in "labels", which are groups of specially-identified pictures. To create a label, right-click on a photo, select Add Label => New Label, type a name for the label, and click OK.  To include other photos in that label, right-click on each photo, select Add Label, and choose the desired label from the list.  Labels are listed at the top of the left-hand panel in Picasa to make them easy to find.

Cropping and enhancing photos.
1. Open the picture (by double-clicking on it).
2. Click the Auto Contrast or Auto Color buttons and adjust the Fill Light slider in the left-hand panel to see if this improve the picture. Click the Undo... button to remove the effect.
3. Often you can improve a picture by cropping out some of the background to zoom in for a close-up of the important subject. To crop a picture, click the Crop button in the left-hand panel, click on "Manual", then, click, hold, and drag over the picture to select the desired area. Click the Apply OR click Reset to remove the crop. Click Cancel to exit the crop mode.

Exporting and re-sizing pictures for making Web pages
1. Click on the desired label in the left panel and pull down Label => Export as Web page....
2. Choose a size (640 is good), click Next, and choose any of the styles listed there.
3. Click Finish.  Minimize the Web page that pops up. To find the exported files, open My Documents/Picasa Web Exports/ and the folder named the same as the label.  If all you want is a simple slide show, you can use the Picasa-created Web page as-is (open index.htm in this folder), or you can use the images in the "images" and "thumbnails" folders with our templates by re-naming the images according to our naming convention (e.g. p1, p2, or T1, T2 for thumbnails) and dragging the images out of these folders and into the template folder.