I started playing around today with Picasa and it’s really just what I’m looking for in most regards.  I’ve got SO many pictures to go through, and the more I can do with them all in one tool the better.  In this case I can store, organize, tag, and caption all of my photos, plus embed them in my blog and post them to Facebook and a bunch of other stuff, and it saves bandwidth load on my server.

What you’ll see is something like this:

It has very basic controls that, when not obvious, will be easily explained by a couple of clicks:  the little person floats a link to the album on Picasa; the little box turns captions on and off, the usual forward-play/pause-back buttons, and a link at bottom right to another “page” within the slideshow that has yet another link to the album @ Picasa on it.  This will allow me to accomplish several things:  keeping more images to show publicly, needing to write less to accommodate a one-photo-at-a-time approach as I’ve been doing up to now, and the ability to re-use images in different “albums” but only caption/tag them once.

So now instead of twenty pages of text with four or five pictures each describing the trip from Denver-ish to Salt Lake City, I can describe each segment of the trip with a few selected photos, and link to a nice slideshow/full gallery complete with captions etc.

Hopefully this will generally make things more interesting.  Plus I think it’s easier to comment on photos, AND I can share from Picasa directly to Facebook, although I’m not going to do that with every photo, or even most of them.  That’s actually more a matter of convenience for other photos, like the ones I took in my cab over Halloween weekend.

Anyway, that’s what’s up.  As of right now I’ve caught myself up to all of the photos that I’d already put into articles.  Now, one of the neat things about this is that it’s a “live” slideshow, which means that as I update the album, the changes are visible in this slideshow.  So right now, I’m adding photos to the “Goin’ To California – All” album that the slideshow on this page is generated from.  If you come back and read this post again later, the new photos will be in the slideshow automatically.

So here’s my plan for this stuff:

1. Finish post-processing, captioning, tagging, and sorting the 90 or so photos I have left that get me to the California border
2. Add the slideshow embedded above as well as a link to the album at Picasa, to the “Goin’ To California” page.
3. Write a couple of blog posts with selected photos and attached sub-sets of the “All” slideshow above.  For instance right now if you go to my public Picasa page, you’ll see albums for NC through Kansas, and for Colorado and Wyoming together.
4. Lather, Rinse, and Repeat for the rest of the trip to California, the photos actually from Cali, the photos from the trip back, and the photos I’ve taken since.

Right now I’m in the middle of post-processing the remaining images.  This is one of the longer processes, as it involves viewing and making changes to each image individually according to what it needs to look its best.  The other long process is captioning and tagging each photo.

So that’s where things are this evening.  More to come as I get it done…