Yes, Picasa and Flickr both have their benefits. I also use both and I find it is often easier to share a Picasa album with my friends and to make certain customizations that Flickr just does not handle well, like changing the order of photos or mousing over for full captions, etc.

Great tip. Thanks.

tasselhoff76

@fleetwood: Mostly because I want my captions and other photo metadata on my desktop as well as in Flickr, for when I'm offline, Flickr's down, or my pro account expires and my photos are no longer accessible online, say.

Gina Trapani

If you use Flickr, why do you need Picasa? I would just skip the whole Picasa part of this. You are already using Flickr as your photo management tool. Adding Picasa, to me, just seems to add un-needed complexity and steps in the process.

-Dump all your photos from your camera into a new folder on your box
-Drag and drop all the photos from that folder onto Flickr Uploadr
-Inside Flickr Uploadr, using multi-select you can create all the new sets, captions, and tags.
-Once done, hit Upload

fleetwood

Picasa is for your local use, while flickr is for online use. I use both as well. This is a good tutorial but the overall process is still painful.

Type-E

I only use Flickr for my best an nicest photos ... to show friends my Albums i use Picassa Webalbum

lala19

I've been using the picasa2flickr plugin:
[picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net]

it's a little bit slow, but you don't have to create albums specifically for flikr.

motdiem

Hi,
nice post, just for info though you can also use Picasa in Linux and there are Flickr uploaders for Linux too like kflickr and postr.

seoras

IIRC, you CAN add tags to Picasa, except they are called keywords. Flickr imports them just fine, from my experience.

One caveat, however - if you resize the photo, chances are it strips the metadata from the photo and it will NOT import the tags.

woo2the2

@woo2the2: I believe if you set the image quality to "Maximum" on the export/resize from Picasa (as shown above), no metadata gets stripped. At least, the caption doesn't.

Gina Trapani

"The one drawback is that Picasa doesn't have tags, so if you want them in Flickr you have to add them by hand."

Well this is just patently false. With a photo (or photos) selected, press Control-K. This pops up on the handy Picasa Keyword box, which lets you add or delete tags to/from the selected photo(s). These tags are maintained in the actual photo files, added into the EXIF/IPTC data by Picasa (just it does with the caption!). FlickrUploadr does a great job of reading these tags and automagically adding them to the photo once uploaded into Flickr. Some drawbacks:
- If the FlickrUploadr gets interrupted, your photo may be uploaded but be missing tags. If this happens, simply delete the file from Flickr and re-upload
- The file modification date is changed by Picasa when you add or delete tags. This may or may not be a problem for you; Picasa seems to recognize and respect the EXIF tag that tells it when the photo was actually taken and ignores the file modification timestamp when sorting by date.
- If you let FlickrUploadr resize the pictures for you, it strips the metadata. Let Picasa do the resizing (during the Export step mentioned above) and the metadata is maintained.

planux

I follow the same procedure with one added interim step... I first run all the new photos through the AmoK Exif Sorter. It renames all the files to the format I want and sorts them in the correct directory. I use a x:\year\month\yyyy_mm_dd_#.jpg format for easy storage, retrieval and sorting. You can have AmoK Exif Sorter do it to any format using text or Exif data.

Launch Picassa and it finds the new files, I photo-finish and then upload to Flickr.

When oh when will Picassa allow common tagging?!

KenKrause

Gina, I realize this isn't exactly what you were asking for, but I find it's easiest for me to run Gallery2 on my website, and use the Picasa module to upload the photos.

It includes the filenames, and you never have to worry about storage limits, accounts expiring, or anything of that nature.

Plus with wget, you can create offline fully functional copies of your gallery for times when you don't have internet access...

JeffCarr

For those who want to do this in a bit more high-end way, Jeffry Fridl created a Flickr export plugin for Adobe Lightroom. You can do all of your captioning, tagging, and sorting in the great Lightroom environment, then push the shots you want up to Flickr. While Lightroom certainly isn't free, this plugin is:

[regex.info]

--Bill

bigbill25

Though it's still not the perfect app, I've made the switch from Picasa to Microsoft's Live Gallery (the new download, not the one that comes default with Vista). It addresses most of the problems mentioned here. It also has a built in option to upload to Flickr, though I prefer to use JUploader (granted I haven't checked out v3.x of the Flickr uploader).

snekse

Gina - Awesome pics - Funny I just got back from Thailand and have almost exactly the same photos!
Decent guide for Win users, I use iPhoto to caption, edit, albumize... (well actual it pretty much does that for me - events), etc then export using plug-ins to photo sites. Works great.

Cheers.

Jzoo

@Gina: "Mostly because I want my captions and other photo metadata on my desktop as well as in Flickr"

That's why it's a good idea to do all tagging (Picasa keywords) and titles (e.g. with IrfanView's Thumbnails -> JPG Lossless Information -> IPTC -> Origin tab) before you upload.

eejit

@woo2the2: yep, tags are called keywords in Picasa. Use Ctrl-K to set them for selected photos.

@Gina: "Mostly because I want my captions and other photo metadata on my desktop as well as in Flickr". A good reason to do the tags/keywords and titles before you upload. You will then have all that info in Flickr AND Picasa.

AFAIK, Picasa doesn't let you set the titles, hence the need to fiddle around in Flickr Uploadr or Organize. I add photo titles using IrfanView (File->Thumbnails, select the photos, then use Alt-F-J-I to edit the IPTC information in the Origin tab, "Object name" field).

Given the sucky way in which Picasa does it, I also do the comments and keywords in IrfanView's IPTC dialog (the Caption and Keywords tabs respectively). Picasa notices the changes to the EXIF/IPTC and updates its library.

I suspect that there's a better setup somewhere for having photo library, basic editing and workflow but it probably involves a (justifiable) cash outlay.

eejit

I'm really looking for an application that will allow me to setup and organize collections and sets for Flickr on my desktop and upload the changes to the web later. I have so many sets and collections that it hangs the browser (I get a stop script box that doesn't help) on 99% of the computers I use.

Does anyone know of a program that I can use that will do that?

bill_roehl

makes sense for me. thanks!

mskadu

Do your tagging in itag (www.itagsoftware.com).

leland_sabon

Excellent post! I routinely use this approach to export my pictures to my online album Smugmug. But the problem with Picasa is that it does not recognize Raw format. If you use raw format, the best convert software is the software with Canon.

[web500.us]

familyresource4u

I'm late to the game on this comment thread. I have been using MS Photo Info (free download) that adds the ability to edit IPTC info for the files before loading to Flickr. It's not the greatest but for a small number of files, it worked well for me. I still haven't gotten on board w/ Picasa yet - I can't put my finger on it but something just doesn't feel right for my workflow.

aerialsoul

Great, now people can upload 400 of the same lame photo from different angles even FASTER.

wiretapstudios

Another thing you might want to do while you're in Picasa is to geocode your images using Google Earth. You'll find the option under Tools --> Geotag. (You need to have the free Google Earth application installed on the PC.) If you geocode the images before uploading them, they will automatically be on the map in Yahoo.

Resizing the images during upload may remove this data, and you should also check your options under Privacy and make sure you have "Import EXIF location data" set to Yes. Putting the geocoding data in the image itself means that it will be there for anyone who downloads the original file later.

I've been using a free program called GeoSetter to geocoding, tags, titles, descriptions, copyright information and more to images. The geocoding uses Google maps and is faster than Google Earth, and there are some nice features like automatically looking up the place names and (optionally) adding tags for country, state, city and sublocation. You can create templates with some or all of this data, which really makes it easy to work on batches or to add consistent data to all the photographs you take of a particular place or subject.

I have a sample image here which I coded using GeoSetter, and I added a comment documenting the process: [www.flickr.com]

ethomsen

As said before, just use picasa2flickr and you get a button at the bottom of Picasa that uploads straight from Picasa to Flickr. No need for a time consuming tutorial.

BugMeNot