Blogging via Picasa

Okay, well I'm actually starting over with this post since I had the last version partially typed up when I navigated away to check a setting, not realizing that the text wouldn't be saved. *sigh* I won't make that mistake again.

I decided to make this post not only because I wanted to describe the new blogging features of Picasa that I'm using, but because I thought that my comments in my last post might have been confusing.

Right now I'm typing this blog post up from within Google's Picasa photo program. I've been using the program for quite a while now and I really enjoy it. It has some basic photo editing capabilities and if what I read is correct when you make changes it doesn't change the original file, only the display within Picasa! If you do any work with digital photos you'll know this is important--you don't want to change your original picture files because once you make a change you can't undo it--so you save corrected (i.e. for red eye) or edited pictures as new files--but with Picasa that shouldn't be a problem. But that isn't what I wanted to type about, ;-). I'm more interested with the e-mail and blogging features.

I've used the e-mail features frequently as Picasa will not only seamlessly mesh with Gmail but it will resize files so that I'm not attaching massive pictures to my e-mails. The blogging feature was nice, but I didn't ever use it much because I could only upload one picture at a time and I had to go to my blog and edit the post to put in a title and more than one paragraph of text--plus I could only upload one picture at a time. Well I can still only upload one picture at a time, I'm not sure if that is just because I'm not doing something right or if that is all the program can do--but several new features are making blogging much easier!

First of all the program formerly used in conjuction (Hello--responsible for several of the faults) with Picasa is no longer required. Now when I want to blog with a picture I simply select it in Picasa, click the "BlogThis" button and a window identical to the new blog post window on Blogger opens--the only difference being that it already has the picture uploaded. Furthermore you can determine if you want the picture within the text to the right (as above) or left, or you can center it above the text--much like normal placing of a picture tag does. I'm sure I could have messed with the blog's HTML and perhaps achieved this same picture-in-text result before, but I don't quite have the knowledge at this point, so Picasa is much easier. Anyway, I'm very happy with the results and I even took one older post and converted it (the one entitled Cheysuli), but that wasn't quite enough of a test so I had to type up this post! :-) If I keep up this momentum I might be picture blogging quite a bit, but I'm not sure--right now this is new and easy, we'll see what happens. I'm not yet as reliable as Mark.

~Matt

PS There is only one flaw to this interface that I can see, no save as draft setting--and if you change the settings to determine where the picture is located your text won't be saved.