How to setup Google’s Picasa Web Album for newbies!

Posted on March 5, 2007 at 10:00 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Picasa Tips and Tricks series!

I’m a huge fan of Picasa because of it’s ease of use and the way it organizes all my pictures so nicely! And the fact that I can have my pictures on my computer and see them locally and remotely as a web album. I don’t like Flickr because it’s a pain to upload photos and there is nothing on my local computer to organize all my thousands of pictures. So if you’re trying to decide on the best program to manage your photos, I would suggest Picasa!

Ok, so here’s how you would go about setting up Web Albums with Picasa (and in turn setting up Picasa itself)…STEPWISE!

1) Download the Picasa program. Go to http://picasa.google.com/ and click the Free Download link. A dialog box should pop up asking to save the file or run it. You can just click Run, so that after it downloads, it’ll automatically start the installation.

2) Next thing, before you start Picasa, move all your pictures to the My Pictures folder under My Documents. That’s where Picasa looks first for your pictures. Now if you have a crap load of pictures and it’ll take too long to move them, then don’t worry, go ahead and open Picasa and you can tell it to look in other folders for your pictures.

3) So now open Picasa, either from the desktop icon or from the start menu. Once it loads, a dialog comes up asking to either scan your whole computer or just My Pictures, My Docs, and the desktop. I usually choose the latter option (My Pics, My Docs, Desktop) because otherwise scanning the whole computer, it picks up a lot of images of junk that you don’t want (Office icons, etc). So even if your pics are not in those folders, just choose it anyway and I’ll tell you how to add the folders later.

4) Then give it some time to find all the pictures and you’ll see them load onto the screen. On the left side are the folders you have create and when you click on one of the folders, all the pictures load up on the right side as thumbnails. And it’ll sort out all the pictures by year, month and so forth on the left side.

5) Ok, once everything is loaded, then you can click on any of the folders in the left pane and it’ll highlight that folder and bring you up to the pictures for that folder. Then you can simply right click on the folder and there is an option called Upload to Web Album. When you click that, it’ll ask you for your login information, so you need to create a Google account if you don’t already have one. There is an option Sign Up for Web Albums, so click that if you don’t have an account.

6) Once you do that, it’ll bring up another dialog box asking for the Title of the album and some other things. Most of it is self-explantory, but leave the setting for Upload Setting to the default of Optimized: Large size, fast upload. And the Visibility option is basically if you want to share the pictures with everyone, then choose Public, otherwise if you just want to upload the pictures for backup purposes, then choose Unlisted and they’ll be saved on the Google servers and therefore backed up, but no one will be able to see them. And then just click OK and you’re done!!!!

7) The website to view your pictures is just http://picasaweb.google.com/yourgoogleaccountname. For example, if you want to see some of my pictures that I put up on Google, click this link: http://picasaweb.google.com/aseem1234.

And that’s it!!! Now I think it only gives 250MB of free storage, but you can upgrade to 6 GB (gigabytes) for $30 for the year!!! (If you need more, you can get up to 250GB for $500) That’s what I did and I was able to upload all of my pictures and still have a ton of space…and it proves great as a additional backup of your photos!

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