Sun 1 Jan 2006
Life Poster: A Picasa How-To
Posted by Dave under Desktop , Informational , Published Article , Software
Happy 1 year Birthday Life Poster
The holiday-?s are over. (sigh) The gifts have been opened. (sigh) You have mountains of digital photos (with your new camera) from Thanksgiving through New Year-?s totaling 100 shots? 1000 shots? 5000 shots? (sigh)
Not a problem if you recall TechLife-?s November 2005 article about Picasa; an easy to use and free of charge tool to organize digital images. While Picasa is great for digital organization, it also has a few hidden tricks; one of them is a Life Poster. A Life Poster is a collection of photos grouped together in a single image. Usually they focus around a specific subject. The best part is they are easy to make, and Picasa makes them even easier.
More after the jump.
In January of 2005, Mike Matas posted instructions on how to make a Life Poster using Apple-?s iPhoto. It was quickly followed by a Photoshop version, an XnView version, and a Paint Shop Pro version. Interestingly no one created a Picasa version.
The Simple Life
(These step-by-step instructions assume the reader has used Picasa. Even if you haven-?t it should be pretty easy.) Below are detailed instructions, you can go even faster if you don-?t care about photo counts, cropping, or repeat photos. To create a more exact Life Poster though, follow these steps.
1. Picasa-?s ease of use comes at the price of flexibility. Picasa Life Poster-?s are square in shape, which means an equal number of rows and columns. Use the following number of different photos to make the best-looking Life Poster; 9, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100. For this example I went with a 5×5 (25 Photos) Life Poster.
2. After deciding how many photos to use, drag-and-drop all the photos to the same folder. If you have a bulk of the photos in a single folder already, drag the few stragglers to that folder.
3. Starting in the upper left hand corner as position 1, drag-and-drop your photos in the order you wish them to appear in the LifePoster. Make note that if you decided on a 5×5, the Picasa slider bar can allow you to align the photos in about the same configuration as the Life Poster by dragging until you see 5 across.
4. Once your photos are in order, it might be wise to rotate, crop and color correct them one at a time. Picasa makes it pretty quick, with the -I-?m Feeling Lucky-? button for color correction. 
Keep in mind that the Life Poster is a square as are all the photos within, so crop accordingly. Cropping close to a square will result in the best looking images.
5. Once you have arranged the photos and corrected them, type Control A or Edit, Select All. All your photos will be surrounded in blue borders and appear in the Picture Tray.
6. Click the Collage button near the bottom.
7. Under the Type pull down choose, Picture Grid. The window above is the preview window. Your machine will churn (depending on how fast your machine processes things) for a while and spit out a preview. For Location, Choose a Folder. Then click the Choose button to select the location. Then click Create.
Print by Number
Wow, that was easy you are probably thinking. So now the kicker, printing is going to be tough, right? Nope, not at all. When the Life Poster opens, click the print button near the bottom of the page. Choose the Full Page button, and then the Shrink to Fit button. Make sure your printer settings are set for high quality and the correct photo paper to ensure the best quality. Then click Print near the bottom right. Frame and enjoy.
Article Update: 7/25/2006 - An example of a collage images that are larger.
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porn toon simpsonsteens losing asian virginity/shitting pissingfucking free lesbianspuissy hairytucci interracial flower sexrussian underage teenbig tity ebony girls Map
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__DIRECTORY__ Listen to this post
January 3rd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
DK! This is awesome. I’m totally going to give it a try.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Thanks for an especially helpful set of instructions. It has inspired me to learn more of Picasa’s tricks.
January 14th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
great post! a definite hidden trick!
will give it a go!
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:03 pm
cool! but can i make a poster out of it? do i need to save it to a disk and bring it to someplace like staples? thanks.
January 23rd, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Kelly - Yes you can make a poster. You can save it to your hard drive. Then a few options. Email it into an online service. For local service I would look into various printers such as Kinko’s, Alphagraphics, and of the office stores (such as Staples) and see if they will print large format. The original post by Mike Matas said it might cost $25 - $30, or the cost of a nice gift.
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:18 pm
I e-mailed my collage to kodakgallery.com however my poster got cut off on both sides. Does anyone have any suggestion? Thanks
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:26 pm
A couple of thoughts…
Your idea of a local store is probably good for something like this to get “exactly” what you intend.
I would look at the Picasa poster file before you send it. Is it landscape or portrait? Does Kodakgallery.com offer an option to rotate or select this pre-upload?
Looking at this page:
http://kodakgallery.com/OrderOverview.jsp?UV=538798027232_80892356609
It says it offers a 20 x 30″ for 22.99. Make sure your upload will fit in the size format you are looking at.
I went into the help center:
http://kodakgallery.com/HelpPrice.jsp?UV=538798027232_80892356609
I noticed they offer a Photo Collage/Life Poster idea. More interesting is the 20 x 30″ size is 29.99. So this method could save you $7 if you could figure out the upload deal.
On the left side, top 5 questions, see the Zoom and Trim help question too.
Report back and let us know if you still go with online vs. local store and how it looks.
For everyone, send an email to techlife [at] dkworldwide dot com and I will post your Life Posters in a gallery.
February 21st, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Thanks for the advise on using Picasa. After dowloading the software, I was amazed at the ease-of use and the “cool factor”. It made my blogging much easier as well with the direct interface to blogger.com through their relationship with google (who owns both).
The only thing however, that wasn’t easy to use, was in “ordering” photos in the collage module. I selected 38 pictures to collage together and wanted to place them in chronological order, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Is there a way?
Thanks, dan
February 21st, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Dan…
This is pretty easy. I had the same need. I think Step 1- 3 covers it in the article but let me elaborate.
You mentioned having 38 pictures. Picasa’s LifePoster’s are squares. So we need equal numbers of rows and columns. 38 doesn’t work so well. My suggestion is to either use 36 photos or add 11 photos or text. (new idea explained below.)
Let’s say you wanted a 49 image collage. If you created 11 white placeholder images you could strategically place those images as negative space or white space in the life poster.
Now to arranging….This is easy. Make sure all 49 images are in the folder by themself, with no other images.
Use the slider bar to select the size of the images to create a 7-across view. Once you have it. Click on a photo and drag it in order. The first slot is the upper left corner. The next slot is “column 2, 1st row” and so on.
After they are all in order you can go create the Life Poster.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:09 am
Since the above instructions aren’t real clear, what works better is to select all the photos you want, through ctrl-click, or by using the ‘hold’ button in the lower left. Once they are all selected, create a new label and it it to the photos, say ‘my collage’. Do this by right clicking, label, new label if you have them click selected, or by the ‘label’ button in the lower left if you have them in the hold tray.
Then go into the label folder and rearrange the photos. That way your standard arrangement of photos is not changed.
March 30th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
For those of you wanting to use Picasa to upload to Flickr, thanks to Lifehacker for this cool upload idea. I have not tried it out so use it and report back…it looks cool.
July 25th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
I dont get it. Picasa creates a collage that’s significantly smaller than the original images even. Any tips?
July 25th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
DM - I hope you were not looking at my example at the top of this article. That’s just for the article.
At the end of the article I have added a new image of just 4 images in a collage. It is much larger. I think the collage image sizes are based on the total images included in the collage. Let me know what you think.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
The image at the end of the article is actually bigger than this template.
July 25th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Well, I started with 9 images, 1024×768. Selected them, hit collage. Chose the picture grid option. I ended up with a 960×960 image. Any thoughts?
July 26th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Yes. As noted Picasa’s method is squared off photos. Which is why your images are probably cropped slightly on the sides. It is automating the process.
So Picasa tries to force “decent” resolution images into the “Picasa Format” which is a specific sized square.
If you want more control, check out the third paragraph of the article, where I list some less automated more control options for your Life Poster.
September 1st, 2006 at 4:05 pm
[...] People love their digital cameras. They love them as low-end phones, high-end DSLRs, and handy point and click models. Readers of TechLife also love our Picasa LifePoster article. It still gets comments. I think people enjoy finding unique ways to use their digital photos other than printing them out one at a time. This article is considered “graduate level” and assumes the reader has read the previous LifePoster article and the first Picasa article from TechLife. [...]
March 26th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
How can I increase the resolution of the resulting JPEG?
I’m creating a collection of 5×5 photo’s and the resolution is 1600×1600 by default.
March 30th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
@Harrie - Picasa is limited right now. The resolution can only shrink from 1600×1600. There are no settings to increase the size. You might have to look at some of the other LifePoster options.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:17 am
[...] When you take a photo you resign yourself to the fact that you captured the photo at a certain place in both time and space. (Already to deep, just skip to Techlife TV’s video.) Basically you click and shoot capturing at the moment in time and from your angle. Combining photo collages, photo stitching, massive amounts of visual data Blaise Aguera y Arcas recently demoed Photosynth, a Microsoft Labs project at TED, a conference on new ideas. [...]
August 25th, 2007 at 8:31 am
Valeria…
while I was surfing the internet when i found your blog i stick to it reading more and more keep going….
September 6th, 2007 at 9:41 am
[...] Photoshop? Illustrator? Corel? Gimp? Picasa? SeaDragon? These programs all owe homage to the grand daddy of them all MS Paint. In this look behind the Microsoft development curtain we catch up with the MS Paint team as they explain how to use MS Paint and how they built it. Riveting. [...]
February 20th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
As I describe on my website in Undocumented Picasa tricks section, you can easily crop a perfect square in Picasa by holding down the shift key while cropping.
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:11 am
[...] Blogging is a pretty cool way to write my syndicated column. Recently other peers in MSM (Mainstream Media) and the blogosphere have been taking notice of Techlife. Our recent brush with the paparazzi came a bit more literally. “Popular Photography and Imaging” magazine and it’s sister publication “American Photo” magazine each have a blog. In a recent post on the blog PopPhoto.com| FLASH they wrote about the DIY project How to make a LifePoster with Picasa article. They added this great idea: [...]