Easy ‘Life Posters’ with Picasa 3 beta
I like Life Posters. They look good on the wall, and make great presents. But before today they were irritating to make.
A couple of years ago I put one together for Dad's birthday. It wasn't a fun process. I wanted a seamless grid of non-cropped images, and I couldn't find anything to generate it for me. I didn't have Photoshop at the time, so I needed cheap/free options. Picasa 2 could build collages, but only by cropping each photo to a square. Everything else could generate contact sheets, but with ugly gaps between the images, particularly when I mixed portrait and landscape shots. I also struggled with spatial concepts - if the final output has a ratio of 3:2, would a 9x6 grid of 3:2-ratio photos fit properly? This confused the hell out of me, and I kept getting it wrong. In the end I only used landscape images, and managed a seamless grid after a lot of trial and error with the XnView contact sheet generator. If I did it again, I'd just build it manually in Photoshop.
Except now I don't have to, because the new Picasa 3 beta has extra collage options that make life much, much easier. Its 'mosaic' collage will arrange any photos into a fixed ratio, without gaps or cropping. That's pretty clever. I'd love to see the algorithms figuring that out. I made this in two minutes, using images from my enormous 'To Flickr' folder:
I think that makes for a much more interesting poster. It has both portrait and landscape images, and all neatly arranged without whitespace. Picasa also handled the different aspect ratios: there are some square images in there, and even a 5-image panorama (it's above DJ monkey). The layout isn't fixed, either - you can hit 'shuffle photos' to produce a different design.
But Picasa has another trick up its sleeve. It lets you choose various aspect ratios for the collage, but it always produces images with a long-side length of 5120px. So there's a lot of leeway for large prints.
For example, a portrait A4 mosaic is 3621x5120px (with a default setting of 72dpi). If you print this on A4 you'll get 451dpi, which is very, very high (300dpi is magazine quality). In fact, you could easily use it for A3, where it comes out at ~300dpi. So A3 isn't officially supported, but works anyway. And this obviously applies for all the other ratios.
Dad's life poster was made into a 30"x20" canvas print, for which I had to supply a 200dpi jpeg. Picasa's 3:2 export produces a file that's 170dpi at 30"x20", and imho you could get away with resampling for the final 30dpi. And if you want anything larger than 30"x20", you're probably not using Picasa.
Sadly you can't specify a custom size (although see the last bullet point for a potential way around this), but there's a fair range of ratios built in:
- 5x8
- 9x13
- 10x15 (so, 2:3)
- 13x18
- 20x25 (4:5)
- A4
- Square
- 4:3
- 16:10
- 16:9
- 5:3
- Desktop resolution (which, interestingly, also exports to a long-edge of 5120, so you could conceivably fudge this to get any ratio you want. Unless this is a bug.)
I think this will be very useful. I'm impressed with the mosaic collage anyway - the maths behind that must be pretty daunting - but defaulting to a large export is a very nice feature. Thanks, Google.
Geotagging for Flickr using Picasa and Google Earth
Flickr's new geotagging tools are fun. Apparently they've had over 1.5 million photos added to maps since they launched the service at the weekend, which is quite impressive! I geotagged all the shots from my March trip to New York, and it's cool to look at the resulting map then turn off the filter so that everyone's photos are visible. You can see similar shots at all different times of the year, which works particularly well in Central Park.
While trawling around the forums I came across a good method for geotagging photos before uploading. If you use Flickr to store your photos online, Picasa to organise them and would like to geotag them easily, there's coolness afoot:
- Pick up the new beta version of Picasa from here (you'll need a Google Account, I think) and the Google Earth 4 beta from here.
- While they're downloading, make sure you're logged into Flickr and go here and confirm you want EXIF data imported automatically.
- Using the new Picasa, select a bunch of photos that you want to locate, then go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Geotag' -> 'Geotag with Google Earth'
- GE will then open, and you can use the full power of its search capabilities to find the correct location. Hover the crosshair over the appropriate area and click 'Geotag', and repeat for each picture in GE's window before hitting 'Done'.
- The latitude and longitude data have now been added to the actual JPEG file and are combined with the existing EXIF data. Send the pics to Flickr in the normal way (I tend to email them from Picasa, or if there are a load I'll export them and use a bulk uploader). Flickr will automatically recognise the mapping data and add the images to its geotagging database.
I only found out about the Flickr's EXIF Import option from a post in their forum - it doesn't seem to be accessible from the standard Account options screen as yet.
Obviously this doesn't work for photos already uploaded, although it'd theoretically be possible to 'replace' each one with a mapped-up copy. I've been using the localize bookmarklet, which works well but is far slower than the built-in interface would be. However, Flickr today released their mapping APIs and have explicity stated that people can build applications using other providers' maps, so hopefully there'll be a decent equivalent within a week or two.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often meander around humanism and photography, but they're flighty and you can't trust them, so anything is possible.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
Recent Comments
- vicky: going up this weekend having done all the welsh peaks except 4 snowdon, cant wait
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: what, how can u live in the 21 c and say that, probably a sexist thing
on Climbing Snowdon. - vicky: da iawn laura, cant believe what im hearing, all this fuss, anyway love the site, and i agree, normal people who swear and curse clomb mountains cos we live in the...
on Climbing Snowdon. - Andrew: Did a few quick test shots to check the light levels, then balanced the camera on the arm of a bench, set it for a 20s exposure and hoped for the best
on ISS. - lynsey: Wow, how did you take that photograph?
on ISS.
