photo tips

i've gotten a number of questions about pictures {editing them and uploading them} so i'm going to try to answer them here:

1. what software do you use to edit your pictures?
i use picasa.
you can download it for free here.
i LOVE it.
i mostly love it because i've used it every day for 3 years so i'm really fast at it.
i edit almost every picture i take...at least in some little way.
normally the color temperature.
or the "tint."
i hardly ever crop.
play around with it.
the cool thing about picasa is you can always "revert" back to your original picture!
so there's nothing to lose! {except your time...:-)}

2. how do you upload your pictures? it takes me forever and you upload so many!
when i used to use my point and shoot camera, it didn't take too long to upload.
but once i got my new camera, the pictures are HUGE {4272 x 2848}
and it DID take forever to upload {and it was taking up lots of space on the blog!}
so, what i do is:
-edit my pictures in picasa
-select the pictures i'm going to post on the blog
-then go to "file"
-then "export picture to folder"
-this puts all those pictures in a new folder but in a much smaller file size
-then i use the pictures from this folder to upload into the blog {it'll be in a folder called "picasa exports"}
***good follow-up question, cassie: i can only upload 5 pictures at a time. so i do them in batches of 5.

3. how do you get your pictures so big?
i have my dear friend, kate, to thank for this.
this is straight from her answer to me.
and i've done it on every picture since then.
seems like a lot of work at first.
but now i do it without even thinking.
{i had to take some of the "code" out or it wouldn't post...but i think you can still figure it out from this...}

when you post a pic, you see the html code for it come up {you have to go to "edit html" at the top instead of "compose"}, which usually looks like this (but without the blue underlined part):

3.bp.blogspot.com/_mmrWEgww1qm/s1600-h/3girls.jpg>
style=display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 226px; src=3.bp.blogspot.com/_mmrWEgww1qm/s400/3girls.jpg> border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5295784134144860914"/>

so, the parts in red are the parts you have to fix. just take out the "width:400px;height:266px;" entirely and change the s400 to s640. so it looks like this:

1.bp.blogspot.com/_mmr/s1600-h/belly.jpg
style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src=1.bp.blogspot.com/_mmr/s640/belly.jpg " border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5294643771953853202" />

when you take out the part about height/width, make sure you end up with only 1 semi colon after hand;", cause sometimes i forget and leave 2 there.

there you have it!
my tips for today!
let me know if any of it didn't make sense or if you have any other photo/uploading questions!