Mike DelGaudio

If you’re using the latest version of Picasa, just follow the steps below to upload videos from Picasa to your online Web Album. If you see a “Web Album” button at the bottom of the Picasa window, you’re using the latest version.

To upload your videos:

1. Open Picasa.
2. Select the videos you want to upload. To select multiple videos, press the Ctrl key or click “Hold” at the bottom of the window. The selected videos will appear in the “Photo Tray” in the lower-left corner of Picasa.
3. Click the “Web Album” button at the bottom of the page. If you’re not signed in to your Picasa Web Albums Account, you’ll be prompted to sign in.
4. Select the album you’d like to add videos to, or create a new album.
5. The Upload Manager will display the status of the upload. Once the upload is complete, you can click “View Online” to launch the album in your browser.

Video Uploading is only available using Picasa. If you are using Mac uploading tools to upload photos to picasa web, you will not be able to upload video.

This video show how crafter and scrapbooker types can quickly import and organize downloaded clip art and photo files for use in their crafting.

This trick also works for web developers or graphic artists who need to manage large quantities of image files, not just photographs. For example, now that the fantastic Silk Icons free icon group is complete — at over 1000 icons — Picasa is a great way to manage and tag the icons.

I am really enjoying the Scobleshow photowalking tours. In this episode Robert Scoble walks with Thomas Hawk of Zooomr and Heather Champ of Flickr as they walk through a park in San Francisco. The episode is a nice Photography dichotomy as Heather shoots with an old Polaroid sx70 and Thomas Shoots with his whizbang Canon 5d.

If you like watching geeks geek out with thier geeky photo toys, then check it out.

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, scobleshow, Zooomr, Flickr, Thomas Hawk, Heather Champ[/tags]

Once you have created you time-lapse stop-motion video why not share it with the world. Luckily, the latest version of Picasa makes that easy with their upload to Google Video experimental feature.

First, click the video you want to upload in your library.

Then click “Tools”, then “Experimental” then “Upload to Google Video”

After you agree to the terms and conditions, click “Upload Video”. Picasa will start the upload right away. Depending on the size of your video and your connection speed, this can take a while. You can watch the progress with the progress bar that appears.

It is important to note that Picasa has an imposed 100 MB limit on all videos that can be uploaded. If your video is too big for Picasa you’ll see:

If your video is under 100 MB, you;’ll be prompted to login to Google Video (you can create an account from here if you don’t have an account.

Then you’ll see a screen prompting you for a title and description of your video.

Once the video is uploaded, a browser window will open and a status page from Google Video will appear.

Once Google Video has finished processing the video, it will show you the final screen with the video (and a form allowing you to mail it to friends.

Once you view the video you can Embed the video directly into your web page or blog using the “Email – Blog – Post to MySpace” button next to the Video. Click the “Embed HTML” link and paste that into the source code for your web page.

The result will be something like this:

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, Google Video, Video[/tags]

Create a “Time-Lapse” home movie with Picasa and PhotoLapse

If you have a digital camera, you can easily make a time-lapse video of just about any subject.
Using Picasa only or a combination of Picasa and a nifty little application called PhotoLapse you can create your very own movie.

If you don’t have Picasa, from Google, you should.

A time-lapse video is essentially just an assembly of a series of still images into a video file. Here is how I made a short movie of me playing with my kids in the back yard.

Here is the movie I created using this technique:

Setting up

Here is how you should set up.
- First, make sure that battery in your camera is charged up, all the way up. You may end up taking several hundred pictures. In my move I shot over 1000 pictures (and used about 700)
- Make sure your memory card is big, and empty. I use a 1 gig memory card in my camera.
- If you can set your camera to take the smallest possible pictures it can. You’re going to shrink them down anyway, so maximize the number you can fit on your card. The smallest resolution I can get on my camera is 1500×1000 which gives me 1,100 images on a one gig card.
- If you can, set your camera for continuous focus.
- If you can set it for continuous shooting or burst mode, do that too.

The idea here is to set your camera to take pictures at the fastest possible rate.

Take the pictures for your movie

All set? Good. Go take a whole heaping mess of pictures in a row.

In the video below, I just pressed the shutter button down and let the camera take pictures as fast as it could until the card was full. How fast this happens varies by camera.

Now, come back to your computer and dump all those pictures into one folder that Picasa will add to your library.

Resize all the pictures to a manageable size

Select all the photos in that folder by clicking one image in the folder, then CTRL+A to select all.

Click “File” then “Export To Folder”

Note how this is set.
- Give the folder a name like “resized”
- The “Resize to” slider is all the way to the left, making the images only 320 pixels on the long side.
You need to do this because the video is going to get big, fast. My video of 700 or so frames was 81 megabytes.

Depending on how many images you are resizing, this could take a minute.

Create the movie

Choice 1: Within Picasa (less preferable)

Picasa can assemble images into video.

Click the “Create” menu, then choose “Movie…”

In order to make it a time lapse choose click the “Delay between pictures” pull-down and select “Just Raw Frames”

Choose a movie size of “Small”

Then click “OK”

Picasa will assemble your movie.

I find that the movies created this way shoot by WAY too fast. Depending on how many pictures you take, it may work fine it may not.

Which brings us to

Option 2: PhotoLapse

Download the free application PhotoLapse

PhotoLapse is a TINY application that takes a folder full of JPGS and turns it into a movie that t a little bit more configurable than Picasa (but not as hard to learn as Adobe Premiere for that matter.)

First, use the pane on the left to locate the “resized” folder we just created with Picasa.
Click “Load Files from Current Folder”

Once the pictures have been located, you’ll want to set the Frames per second (FPS) that you TOOK the pictures at. I think it looks better if you set it a bit higher than what you actually shot at. Somewhere between 3 and 6 FPS works well for me.

Then click “Create Movie” You’ll be prompted to choose where you want the movie to reside. Just put it in the same folder as the resized pictures.

Next, you’ll need to tell what kind of Compression to use. Experiment with what you have, each computer has different compression software (called a “codec”). Or just choose “Full Frames” uncompressed.

PhotoLapse will churn away for a minute or two, and when it is complete it will open up your default video player and show you the movie.

In the next post we’ll show you how to post that movie to the popular video Sharing site Google Video.

Here is a preview of the completed Time-Lapse Movie on Google Video

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, video, time-lapse, PhotoLapse[/tags]