Week 6- Image management and editing

Visual media is a primary instructional need. Most projects require many images to create useful and meaningful instruction. A photo manager can help organize images for a project. My photo editor of choice is Picasa.

Picasa automatically organizes images by file title. It then offers some great tools to help you organize your images. You can use the star to mark photos and then pull only the starred photos.

Many of the tools are available in the properties side bar on the right hand side of the screen. In the properties menu, you can run the face recognition tool to find people. This tool will recognize any face in a picture taken vertically, but not horizontally. You must manually enter the face in horizontal pictures. You can use the red flag tab to mark geotags. The beige rectangles add tags to images or entire folders. The tags are then searchable. The final tab, the i, provides technical information about the image, such as pixels and camera model.

Picasa does provide some basic photo editing, such as crop and rotate, as well as some filters.

However, for more photo editing options I recommend Gimp. Gimp is a free, downloadable software that provides many of the same tools as Photoshop, but for free. Some of my favorite tools are the blur tool, to hide faces and school names, and the clone tool, which will help you eliminate unwanted blemishes.

Gimp also provides the use of layers. For this image, I changed the size of the canvas to 851x315, the required size for a Facebook header. I then added a new layer for each picture, which allowed me to work with images separately and change the image without changing the entire project. I then blurred the edges to help the pictures flow together. The fifth and final layer contains only the text. Gimp offers many export options. I chose to use .jpg to keep the file within Facebook limits and not effect download time of the Facebook page.

I also used Gimp to create my favicon, which can easily be added to blogspot using the template.
To create the favicon, I set the canvas to 500x500. You can set it to anything as long as it is a square. I then added a paw print and colored it red, using the paint bucket. I then added a layer with the text and exported as a .jpg.

TL:DR Picasa will help you organize your images, but has limited editing tools. For more diverse editing and projects use Gimp.