Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Sharing a Single Photo in Google+

Google+ is the new social network that Google released less than a month ago, and that already has more than 20 million users. I won't derail this post into a Google+ review, there are plenty of those out there, but I will just say that it is a great platform for those interested in sharing photos. Given the amount of privacy control it gives (which is also intuitive to use and not hidden in an obscure setting), and how it is linked to your Picasa albums, it makes it great to share photos... and that is why there are many world class photographers that have jumped into the Google+ wagon and started using it to share their work and receive instant feedback. Tray Ratcliff, known for his HDR photos, has compiled a list of many photographers in Google+ in case you are interested in following a few. Also if you already have several albums in Picasa, the first thing you notice once you get into Google+ is that you are not using any of your Picasa space. That is because all your small photos (smaller than 2048px I believe) don't count towards your 1 Gb. storage in Picasa, so great news!

Now, given that Google+ is just in its ß form, it still has a lot of wrinkles to iron, and one of those wrinkles is how to share a single photo. If you have some albums in Picasa already, you will see that at the album level you can press "share" on top or at the side, and decide with witch circles (or single e-mails) you want to share that album with. That will post the whole album on your Stream in Google+, and only the selected circles or e-mails will be able to see it, and it shows the first image sort of big, and then a couple of small thumbnails of the next two photos in the album. But you will not find any way to share a single photo from that album. The share button in Picasa will popup a small window offering you to send it as an e-mail... so no luck there.

To show a single image on your stream like Tray does (check them out here if you like), you have two options, and none of them is optimal (yet):

1. Picasa Link: The only way I know to share a single image in your stream (with the image being large, not just a tiny thumbnail) is by using the URL address on Picasa. To get that, go to your Picasa webpage, get to where your image is, and copy that URL on top (not the URL you get by pressing the "link to this photo" button at the lower right, that will add a tiny thumbnail on your stream). Then go to Google+ and add it to your post. You can either add it somewhere in the post you are writing (Google+ will automatically add a large photo at the end of your post) or add it by pressing the "link" icon on your post. You can write anything you want on your post, and once you press share, the post will appear with whatever you wrote first, the photo next and the text of the image's caption after that. If you click on the image you will go to the beautiful photo gallery that Google+ has.
Drawback? Any comments made on that post will be kept on the post and you will not see anything in your photo. So if you want to have the comments synchronized in both places this is not the way to go.

2. Upload a new picture: This is the only way I know to keep the comments synchronized in both the image and the post. On your Google+ page there are four icons on top: Home, Photos, Profile, and Circles. Go to the Photos one and you will see a huge red button saying "Add New Picture". Click it, add a single image, and then you can then select the album you want to put it in and any comments you want to add on your post, just as before. Once you share it it will look almost identical to the previous method, but it will also add a link to the whole album on top of the image. Drawback? If you use Lightroom, like I do, to post your photos, you will not be able to use it. That might be a huge drawback since it adds an extra step (you need to export to your hard disk and then import to Google+) but also you loose the connection between the photo and Lightroom. This allows you to edit a photo even after it has been published in Picasa, and the changes you make will be reflected there too, without erasing the comments or +1s the photo might have.

If you want comments in sync and use Lightroom... you are out of luck... (at least for now).

Monday, July 25, 2011

Summer Cleaning

Finally I had some time to order and clean things around, so I re-organized my whole web footprint. From now onwards www.rax.cl will serve as my web command centre or hub, and from there I will link all the other places where I have things that might interest some human being. If you want to be updated automatically about changes in any of my pages you can click the subscribe link at my "What's New?" page here: link.

After much consideration I've decided to focus this blog only in Photography, so I cleaned it a little and hopefully now it will serve it purpose. Here you will find a selected number of photos, as well as some short accounts of the trips  where I took them. I will also add some tips & tricks I've found around the web or I've learnt along the way.

Stay tuned!