New plugins have greatly optimized the process of getting photos from your camera to your social sites. Here’s the best process I have found:
- Import all photos into a new folder using Picasa.
Picasa should be able to find your USB connected camera and find all the photos and know which ones are duplicates. When you import it will put them in a new folder on your hard drive and then display that folder in the application. - Edit and star the best photos in Picasa
Picasa has great color and light balance as well as cropping tools. You then add a star to the cleaned up photos. - Move the good photos into their own album in Picasa.
Go to the “Starred Photos” bookmark at the top of the left side and find all your starred cleaned up photos. Select all and choose to add to a new album. Now you have all the photos you want to display in an album separate from all the raw photos in the folder. - Label the photos in the new album
Go ahead and add a description to each of the photos in the album. - Upload your photos to your social networking site.
At this point it is time to upload, and it’s a matter of personal preference as to where you wish to upload your photos. Obviously, Picasa Web Albums is directly sync’d with the Picasa application, but now you can download plugins for Facebook and Flickr to upload to those sites instead. I will focus on these two.For Facebook: You will be asked which album or to create a new one, and then to approve the images. The Picasa descriptions will carry over.
For Flickr: Picasa will push your images into the Flickr Uploader application, where you can set a global title and tags and add the photos to a current album or create a new one. The Picasa descriptions will carry over as descriptions (not titles).
- Final touch up and tagging
For Facebook: The photos are now in an album, the descriptions matched up and there are no titles. All that remains is tagging which of your friends are in each photo.For Flickr: The photos are now in an album, the descriptions matched up. All that remains is adjusting for specific titles or tags and adding to the appropriate groups.
And that’s it. Now you have your raw files in one directory, an album set up on your desktop, and shared across both Flickr and Facebook. That’s a lot accomplished in only six steps.
