[e-learning]
You can do it!Organising your images.
Whether you have a few sketches or hundreds of illustrations, it's unlikely that many will be in a form suitable for publishing on the web as they are. Scanned images and those taken by today's digital cameras are big files that need some attention. You may also like to select just certain sections of a picture, focus in on part of it or fix some of the common things that go wrong with pictures.
Picasa
This application is from the Google stable. It has been around for a year or two now and has a very user-friendly interface as well as tools that make the process of editing your images and creating a web gallery or uploading them to a set of web notes really easy.
You will need to download the free, open source, software onto your computer. Many colleges and schools now incorporate this as part of the campus desktop and you should not encounter any licence issues but it is recommended that you do check with your IT Services people first. If you are downloading the software yourself just click on the link on these pages and follow the simple instructions. Once installed, Picasa will find all the images stored on your computer and within a matter of minutes have them catalogued and presented to you in a very attractive way.
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Editing images
In amongst the galleries you should find the images you want to use. Double click on a thumbnail and you'll see a larger version. On the left is a collection of tools for a whole range of things, from fixing poor lighting or contrast to sharpening out-of-focus shots. You can even make skies bluer if your picture was taken on an overcast day! More often than not, hitting the I'm Feeling Lucky key will do all you need.
When you've made the changes you need you can save the new image. Picasa stores back-ups of images so this will not overwrite the original (but you may find it convenient to save revised images to a folder for your project).
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Printing pictures
Picasa offers several ways to present a bunch of pictures. If you really do want to print them then the application can help you arrange them so that they fit on an A4 page neatly. First select all the images you want to print. Hold the Ctrl key and click on individual images to select (or de-select) them. Your chosen selections will appear as mini thumbnails in a window at the bottom left. Next, click the Print Pictures button near the foot of the page and Picasa will offer a range of options for how they can be displayed. After that it's plain sailing.
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Slideshow
Whilst these notes are mainly to help you get your materials onto a web site of your own for use in class or by students anywhere over the internet, it's worth mentioning that there is a simple tool you can use to display your chosen images as a smart slideshow without having to use Powerpoint. Just click the Slideshow button near the top of the screen. That's it. Sit back and enjoy the show! Obviously, this can only be used on the computer that has the images and Picasa on it but you could, for example, take a laptop into a class and utilise this facility to produce an impressive display without any effort.
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Creating a web gallery
This is the main option dealt with in this project - mainly because it is something that many people ask for but which can normally be pretty complicated to set up. In Picasa, there's a Web Album button. Clicking this will start the process. If you have a google.picasa account you just have to give the album a name (and add any supplementary information you wish) and it will be created. If you don't have an account then there is a sign-up procedure that is pretty painless you'll need to complete first. As Google are now tending to offer more and more of their services via 'google accounts' it is well worthwhile getting one. (You will not be opening your yourself up to a flood of spam - like most open source providers, Google are as anxious to clean up our inboxes as anyone.) Note: you should chose an option to make your album available to the public. If you are concerned about this and really only want to share your images with a selected group of individuals then there are alternative methods of doing so. These are outside the scope of this project. Contact me for more information, if required. Make a note of the web address or url of your new gallery. It will be in the format http://picasaweb.google.com/username or similar and this will be needed when you make a link to your gallery in your web log and web pages
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