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Tampilkan postingan dengan label Pictures. Tampilkan semua postingan

Senin, 30 Juni 2014

Introducing the "Free high-quality picture search" tool

This article introduces the Free High Quality Picture Search tool which has been added to this website.

Today I've added a new feature to Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

The Free High Quality Image Search tool is available from the menu bar. It is a tool to help you locate free, high-quality pictures to use in your blog posts or other website projects.

It is based on a Google-custom-search engine, and a carefully selected set of websites that offer images you can use for free on your blog, even if it is "commercial" (ie you have advertising or any other way of making money from it).

The difference between this and the images that you can get from a general-purpose search using the Creative Commons image and multi-media search tool is the resolution of the images that are found and/or their photographic quality.

How to use the Free-image-search tool

  • Type a description of the image you want to see into the search-bar.
  • Press Enter
  • When the results display, click the Image tab, to see what photos are available.
    (Hopefully this step is only temporary, and I can soon manage to have the search-results default to images and still use the tool in Blogger.)
  • Use the numbers in the lower-left side to move to different pages in the image-search results.
  • Choose an image that you would like to use.

Once you have chosen an image, you can either link directly to if (if the site allows), or download a copy, put it on your own image-service (eg Picasa-web-albums), and use it in your blog.   The latter approach is required if you want the image to be used as the thumbnail for your post.


Copyright

By definition, all images returned by the search-tool should be free-use and so not subject to any copyright rules.

However some do have attribution requirements, and you may need to use image-captions or similar to make sure that these are followed in your blog.


Related Articles:

Finding free photos for your blog, using Creative Commons

Introducing Google-custom-search engines

Summarise your blog-post with post.snippet and post.thumbnail

Copyright, Blogs and Blogging, an introduction
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Minggu, 01 Juni 2014

How to take better pictures - no matter what sort of camera you have

This weekly blogger tip is complements of Shutterfly:   tips about how to take great photos, of various types, no matter what sort of camera you use.

Why?


Why take your own pictures, when there are so many free-photo-search tools out there?

Well, if you want your blog to be copyright-legal, then you need to either find free-use photos, or make your own. Creating your own post-photos is especially useful to prove that your local blog really is local (like this) - and taking pictures that I take myself and host pictures in Picasa / Google+ Photos means that my posts always have a thumbnail image.


How?

Great tips from the pros, here: http://www.shutterfly.com/how-to-take-the-perfect-photo/

The best bit is that this isn't just a glossy, or a snobby "fancy-cameras-only" guide.    There are tips for every combination of  camera type:
  • DSLR
  • Smartphone
  • Point and shoot
and photo type:
  • Portraits
  • Selfie
  • Bokeh
  • Macro
  • Action shots
  • Close up
  • Wide angle
  • Food
  • Candid
  • By the water
  • Landscape
  • Panorama





PS Shutterfly said
"Please share this interactive on your site or blog. Just copy and paste the code below"

So I did. But it looks like it's not working 100%. To get into their tool, click here: http://www.shutterfly.com/how-to-take-the-perfect-photo/


Happy snapping!
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Jumat, 11 April 2014

Use diagrams to make pictures for your blog posts

This post from the Weekly Blogging Tips series is about a cost-effective way to make pictures for blog postings.


The best blogging advice is that every post should have at least one picture:  is a stunning professional-looking shot which perfectly illustrates the point you are making perfectly.

This is a great idea if you're a professional photographer and have all time in the world, or if you can afford to purchase images which are custom made for your blog.

But most of us just aren't in that league.

Sometimes, you can use a search tool to find a re-usable photograph that you can put into your posts. (Remember to download your own copy and put it into a Google picture host, to make sure that it's accepted as the thumbnail picture for the post.)

But another option is to use a diagram - like this.

The picture above is a diagram that I used in a blog-post to emphasise that budgeting for an event is on-going through the planning phase, not a one-time job   I spent quite a while thinking about how to make the point about the original plan vs the on-going feedback loop.

Diagrams don't have to be complicated. Sometimes something as simple as showing a bullet pointed list in a different shape can be an effective way to add "visual texture" to your post and thus make it more appealing for people to read.


There are various tools that you can use to make diagrams.
  • PowerPoint is fantastic especially in in Office 2010 and 20123 where it has shape placement guidelines, as well as the usual squiggly word-art, smart-shapes, gradient-fills etc. 
  • Google Spreadsheets is catching up, though they've got a way to go yet, and your have to use screenshot tools to get an image (JPG, PNG or BMP) file from it. 
  • And most other drawing and word-processing tools include some drawing tools too.
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Selasa, 21 Januari 2014

Putting a picture on your blog as a Gadget

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

The Image gadget

Dry dock in Claddagh Basin
A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use an Image gadget (previously called a Picture gadget).  

This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up on all screen and is linked to somewhere.

Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go in other places too (header, footer, etc).


Follow these steps to add a picture gadget:


1  Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.


2  Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet.  
(This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's already stored in Picasa.   To find the URL of a picture on the internet, you can often right-click on it and choose "copy image location")


3  In Blogger, follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, and choose the Image gadget from the list of options (you may have to scroll down to find it in the list).


4  In the Configure-Image box, enter the options you want for your picture.   These include:

  • The title for the Gadget,
  • The caption for the picture
    (the small words that go underneath it, usually explaining it, or where it came from),
  • What should happen when a reader clicks the picture - put this into the Link field
  • Where to find the picture
    (ie the file-location that you copied in step 2)
  • Whether to re-size (ie shrink) the picture to fix the space in the sidebar in your current template.


5 Press Save.


6  If necessary, drag-and-drop the new gadget to the place where you want the picture to go, and press Save.


  

What your visitors see:

People who visit your blog in a web-browser, will see the picture, in the place where you put the gadget.  However pictures are not supported gadgets for dynamic view templates, so it won't be see if you use one of these.

Also, people who see your blog through an RSS reader, or by receiving emailed updates don't see any gadgets, so they will not see the picture.  

If you entered a value for Link, your visitor's browser leaves your blog and goes to the Link location:  with the Picture gadget, then there is no way to make this open a new window.   If you want to do so, then use an HTML gadget instead, get the code for the picture, and put target = "_blank"   into it:, so the code looks something like: 
<a href="YOUR LINK" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target = "_blank"><img border="0" src="YOUR PICTURE LOCATION" /></a>


Related Articles

Options for putting pictures into your blog

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Picasa and Blogger - an overview

Getting the HTML to add a picture to your blog

Finding a picture's location in Pisasa-web-albums

Finding the URL of a picture stored in Flickr

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for bloggers

Following a blog by email
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Senin, 21 Oktober 2013

Stop Google from "fixing" pictures that are loaded through Blogger

This article is about how you can stop Google from automatically "enhancing" pictures that are loaded in Blogger - even if you do not have a Google+ account.


Google has started automatically "fixing" new pictures as they are added to your blog

In May 2013 Google added the Auto-Enhance and Auto-Awesome features to Google+ Photos. These are meant to make your pictures look better, ie more like those which are taken by professional photographers.

These features are turned "on" by default. And because:
  • Photos loaded using Blogger are stored in Picasa-web-albums, and
  • Picasa-web-albums and as Google+ Photos actually have the same collection of photos - yes, even for accounts that do not use G+,
the effect is that auto-enhance and auto-awesome are applied to all images loaded through Blogger's post-editor, header-picture loading tool and gadget-picture loading too;.



Why is this a problem

In many cases, these features work as they are intended to, and the illustration that is shown on your blog is more attractive than the one you uploaded - it's brighter, clearer and loads faster.

But there are some situations where the effect of the auto-enhancement is not good. These include:
  • Pictures with some transparency - which is auto-corrected to either light grey or black
  • Pictures that are intended to be dull / dark / shady - these are automatically lightened.]
  • Pictures that are loaded at a certain photo quality - are automatically downgraded to a lower quality (which is fine for viewing on screen, but not so fine if you actually want to use your blog to share high-quality photos).

Blogger users who have a non-white background, and who deliberately upload images with a transparent background so their blog background will "show through" the image have been particularly annoyed by this.   And I have been less than impressed by the faint grey "wash" added to the background of some of my diagrams - for example:

The left-hand picture was auto-enhanced, the right hand one was not



How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you use Google+

If your blog - and the account you use to post to the blog - is linked to your Google+ profile, then you can stop your photos from being changed by:
  • Opening the Google Plus settings tab.
  • In the "Photos" section, un-ticking "Automatically enhance new photos"

This stops the auto-enhance and auto-awesome tools being applied to any new photos that you upload from now onwards using Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums or any Blogger feature that lets you load a picture (the post-editor, the header widget settings, the picture gadget settings).

Alternatively, you can turn off the auto-enhance and auto-awesome changes that are made to specific pictures by by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.


How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you do not use Google+

There is currently no option in Piscasa-web-albums to turn off the auto-enhance feature.
This means that if you load photos to either Blogger or Picasa-web-albums, using a Google / Blogger account that is not linked to a Google+ profile, you cannot stop auto-enhance from happening.

Some people have suggested that the way around this is to:
  • Temporarily link the blog to a Google+ profile (either your own one, or one that you create just for the purpose - eg "Mr John Smith")
  • Turn off the auto-enhance feature using the Google+ procedure listed above
  • Fix up the damage to any pictures that you loaded through Blogger or Picasa-web-albums between mid May 2013 and today by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.
  • Unlink the blog from the Google+ profile.

However I do not believe that this is entirely correct:   my tests suggest that whether or not photos are auto-enhanced is controlled by the settings on the Google+ account that is used to upload the pictures, no matter whether the blog is attached to a Google+ profile or not.

(I've been testing this a lot because I have a number of blogs that are linked to Google+ Pages that are in my personal profile, but which I generally post to using a different Google account that has a more generic name like "Editor, Table Quiz Helper", and it's own separate set of Picasa-web-albums:   I want to be able to hand these accounts on to my successor when I leave the community groups that they are for.)

Previously, the main options that I identified and recommend were:

However another option, which I now think is better, is to:

  • Make a Google+ Page for the blog
  • Give that Page it's own login-name and password - effectively turning it into a separate new Google account
  • Give that new Google account administrator rights to the blog
  • Make the setting change described above in "How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you use Google+" while you are logged in as the new Google account
  • Use the new Google account to load photos to the blog:   this will mean that the photos are placed in the Google+ Photos album associated with the page, and so you can access them using either Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos.



Other Options

If you really don't want to use even a minimal Google-plus account, then your options are limited.

Use another picture host

You could load the pictures that you want to use in your blog to another picture-hosting service (eg Flickr) - however doing this means that you posts will not have a thumbnail image.

Minimise the damage

If you make sure that pictures which you load have a white background (or whatever colour background your blog has) instead of being transparent, then the impact of auto-enhance will be a lot less.    I have found that if you use a .png file rather than a .jpg, the background is white instead of transparent.   (This is fine for me, because I use white blog backgrounds.)

Wait for things to change

A very simple fix would be for Picasa-web-albums to use default values of "No" instead of "Yes" for auto-enhance and auto-awesome, or to set these up as settings in the PWA profile.

Another option is that Google may improve the enhancement algorithms (ie rules which control how pictures are "touched up").

Fingers crossed, one of these will happen soon.



Related Articles:

Giving another Google account Administrator rights to your blog

Turning a Google+ Page into a separate Google account

Post.snippet and post.thumbnail - how they are derived from your blog post

How to add a picture to your blog, using the picture gadget

Making a Google+ profile for the Google account that you use to upload the pictures,
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