Quick Picasa tips for organizing your photos

Posted on March 30, 2007 at 12:16 am

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

I have way too many photos in Picasa now not to have some sort of way to tag pictures so that I can find them later on. At one point, I tried to sit down and start giving each picture a caption that tried to incorporate all the various aspects that I might search on: name of people in photo, location, colors, etc., but after about 150 pictures and aching hands, I realized this was not going to work.

And certainely trying to change the file names from DSC or whatever to something useful would be horribly painful! But I found out that in Picasa, you can now tag a group of photos with keywords and later search on those keywords! The key part being a GROUP of photos! I can now select 10, 30, 50 photos and tag them with as many keywords as I like very quickly.

To do this, open Picasa and choose a folder or choose the pictures you want to tag. Press and hold the CNTRL and then press K. You’ll get a small dialog box where you can add multiple keywords:

Much easier now to find pictures now with the tags! Another useful tip is to create folder with names that have keywords and dates in them. For example, if you want to a baseball game, name the folder somehting like “Hornets vs Bulls - 03/30/07″ because when you perform a search it looks at the title of the folder. And on top of that, if you put a date in the folder, Picasa assumes your date is correct and will sort the photos in that date order.

Also creating Albums and Collections is another way to organize your photos in a better way! Click here for my article on how to create Collections and here for Albums.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

» Filed Under Google Software/Tips

One Response to “Quick Picasa tips for organizing your photos”

Barbara said on : January 27th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

I have recently used the record button on my Canon digital camera to take two short videos of my granddaughter at a recent cheerleading competition she participated in. When I transfer the pictures from my camera using Windows Explorer and then bring them up in Picasa, I love the way I can easily edit the still pictures I’ve taken with my camera, but Picasa just played the two short videos and I wasn’t able to zoom in on any of the play back to see my granddaughter up closer, nor could I see any directions for editing these short videos - i.e., my granddaughter’s cheer group started (introduction), then their music stopped and they stood around for a short time so I stopped recording, then I started the recording up again as soon as their music started (second part). Can I join the introduction part to the second part of their performance. Also, is there a way to make a still from any part of these short videos. If Picasa doesn’t allow me to edit, is there another (preferably free) program that is good for a beginner to use. I was pleased with my first attempts at the short videos as in one of the “mounts” my granddaughter is in the air, then the girls holding her up seem to put her in a swing forward, under and back up to a balancing position - there’s no way I could have “caught” this manouver with still images. I eagerly await your response.