I hadn’t used Picasa for quite awhile, so I downloaded the free Picasa 3 and noticed a pretty nice interface for making a movie, so I tried it out, then compared it to Windows Live Movie Maker.

I’ll say right away that Picasa is the big time winner. It was pretty easy to select my photos from different folders and put them in the show. I found it was easier if I somewhat had them organized before bringing them in as the provided timeline shrinks the pictures and you can’t see everything all at once, scrolling to the right is necessary. Later, I decided to remove some pictures – just highlight and click remove.

I used text slides to introduce different sections of my movie. The slides are pretty plain, but background color, text color and font sizes could be adjusted. I found it easy to place my text slide where I wanted it. There is also an option to add a caption to pictures and move/rotate it for the effect you wish.

There were quite a few options for slide transitions, but only one transition can be applied for the entire movie, which seemed a bit limiting, but I suppose it prevents folks from going crazy with various transition effects. You can also set slide view duration and overlap.

In addition to pictures and text slides, movie clips can also be imported – that’s handy to have.

Yes, you can set your movie to music – options are below. Be aware if you choose music, then it will override the ‘slide duration’ setting chosen earlier.

Here is Picasa Help should you need some.

Picasa beefed up the extras included when you download the desktop version. It’s easy to upload your photos to a web album, email a collection of photos, print, export to a folder, visit a picture printing service to order prints, make a collage, movie and also new is geo-tagging (the location of your picture will appear on a google map).

When you’ve finished tweaking your movie, click the ‘make movie’ button and depending on how many slides you have, it could take some time to render the movie. There is a button to publish your movie directly to YouTube, but it didn’t work for me.

Picasa 3 is head and shoulders above Microsoft’s Windows Live Movie Maker. Functionality was severely limited and it’s definitely a backwards step from Windows Movie Maker. With Windows 7 coming out soon, they’ve decided they are not even going to include movie maker, instead it will be a separate download if you want it. Read more about it at O’Reilly’s site. It includes a link to get the free download. Hopefully, the Windows Live team is working on developing something as good as Picasa 3.

For greater detail on Picasa 3 movie maker and photo editor, complete with screen shots, check out Michael Muchmore’s article in PC Magazine.

Here, we’ll talk about Microsoft offering 25GB of free cloud storage and the enhancements they’ve made to this free service as well as their improved picture storage/sharing/viewing services. I have a Windows Live Home account and a Small Business Live Account with Microsoft and it’s amazing how they’ve upgraded their free services and offerings over the last year.

Sky Drive- 25GB of Free Cloud Storage

Microsoft recently mega-boosted their storage limit from 500MB to 25 GB of free storage space. I was excited about that and had plans to move quite a few folders to the clouds for back-up and remote access. I quickly gave up because it was a very slow one-file-at-a-time-process. I didn’t have the time or patience for that. Wa-la – now you can upload multiple files in one of two ways:  

• Drag and drop files from windows explorer

• Select files from your computer – then the familiar box will pop up where you can navigate to the folder containing files. Simply select one, some, or all of the files.

When finished click on the ‘upload now’ button and they are uploaded. My uploads were very fast.

When you’ve finished, make sure you apply the correct viewing permissions to all your folders. They will be public by default and you probably don’t want that. You can choose to share with your network, contacts or just yourself. At a glance, you’ll see by the type of icon on each folder the type of permission it has. You can share a folder by clicking the ‘send a link’ button and enter in an email address. You can click the ‘do not require a Windows Live ID’ in order to share the folder. This is new as Microsoft previously made everyone using its service sign up. You can also choose to download files as a .zip file for large files.

Office Live Photo Gallery and on-line Photo Storage

Uploading, viewing and sharing photos on-line has never been easier. I blogged about Windows Live Photo Gallery earlier this year. I’ve got duplicate folders of nearly all my pictures on my Live Account in the clouds. The permissions and sharing features work exactly the same for photos as for document folders.

What’s new is the improved slideshow feature. Now, you can view your pictures nearly filling the screen with background colors that change to match the photos! Beautiful.

Conclusion

The multiple file upload has really sold me and I’ll be getting more of my documents safely stored on-line. I do two other backups (Carbonite & external hard drive), but it’s nice to have multiple systems and easy access to documents and pictures. Enjoy.

You might enjoy checking out this article from ExtremeTech that discusses 6 other storage services – some with interesting features.

Think of WLPG (windows live photo gallery), being an upgraded Picasa. I’ve used Picasa in the past and was pretty happy with it, although it seemed like it would arrange my pictures in ways I didn’t understand. In all fairness, I didn’t stop to read much about the program and what it could do for me. So when I changed computers awhile back, I didn’t put it back on and just imported my pictures using windows explorer, named my folders, and left it at that.

Then, I started my VA business, got a website and started blogging. I heard about the Windows Live brand quite a bit from the ‘Windows Weekly’ podcast with Paul Thurrott & Leo Laporte. Thurrott has a ‘Live Services’ tab on his blog where he’s extensively reviewed the Live Products. So, I decided to try out the Windows Live Photo Gallery and thought it was pretty cool, but didn’t go much further with it.

I recently downloaded the newest Live updates and decided to look into what the Live Photo Gallery could do. I wasn’t expecting it to be better than Picasa, better than, well, Google—how could that be? I did some searches of WLPG vs. Picasa and was pleasantly surprised that most reviews gave the edge to WLPG. All found that WLPG was faster at getting your pictures on-line than Picasa – that’s huge. WLPG has a feature (as does Picasa), where you can tag and categorize your pictures. The difference is that when you tag, or add additional information to your WLPG pictures, the information stays with the picture if you email or upload it. That’s a nice feature and eliminates additional editing.

If you already have photos on your computer, after WLPG is installed, it will automatically file them neatly in the program. Open WLPG and you will see how they’ve been organized for you. But you’re not limited to viewing by date. There’s a drop down called ‘Arrange by’, where you can sort by date, type, name, tag or person – very handy. You can tell WLPG to look for pictures in other folders on your computer and add them to the gallery.

Importing is a breeze with several options. Instead of having to import all my pictures, it groups them by date, tells me how many pictures are in each group and asks me if I want to organize them before importing! This is great. Here is where I can add a descriptive folder name and tag the picture before it’s uploaded. Do it right away and it’s done! Later, when I’m in a hurry and looking for a particular photo, I can click on the tag and instantly all photos with that tag will be there.

After my pictures are in the gallery, it’s easy to publish them to my Windows Live Photo Gallery that is on-line. I can select an entire folder and with a few clicks, tell the program where to put it, what to name it and who to share it with.

So, what if I or someone looking at my pictures wants a copy? There is a ‘Print’ drop down button where you can select ‘on-line printing services’ and send the photos you want printed to any of a number of services, i.e. Snapfish, Shutterfly, Kodak, CVS, etc. This is great. You are directed to sign-in and it puts the photos in your on-line album where you can order prints. What a great benefit!

Of course you have various photo enhancements available to you with WLPG to help clean up your pictures quickly. You can select pictures and then click ‘burn to CD or DVD’, ‘make a movie’, stitch a panoramic photo, or put photos in a blog posting. WLPG will allow you to work on GIF and TIFF files, Picasa won’t.

Limitations: Picasa has a space limit of 1GB for your photos and three web albums per month. WLPG has a 500 photo/month limit for upload, but as far as I know, they don’t limit you on the space used.

Advantage Windows Live: I was excited to see  that I can share an album with people who don’t  have a Windows Live ID!  I was also pleased to find when I started typing in someone’s name, the complete email address auto-filled. This was because my contacts were already loaded into Windows Live – woo hoo! With Shutterfly and other photo sharing services, I have to type them in…nice.

I viewed a couple of on-line tutorials from the Main Stream Guide that contrasts Picasa and WLPG and found them very helpful in showing me features I didn’t know.

If you haven’t visited Microsoft lately, take a look at their new look and the site map that opens up right on the front page so you can actually find what you’re looking for. Go to the ‘Downloads’ section and find Windows Live and from there you can select the whole suite of products or just WLPG.

Best of luck in getting your pictures organized, categorized and tagged.