I must say a lot of you have asked how to make the photo collage that was on our Christmas letter. So here is how. First, you need the photo software
PICASA. The good news is that it is free. It is great. It is easy. Click on
Picasa and you can download it. Picasa is made by google. It's big strengths are that it searches constantly for new pictures on your computer (in fact it may even find ones you thought were long lost), it is easy to use, and it is super compatible with email (if you have a gmail account) and blogger (if you have a blogger blog). When you open picasa, it will search for all your photos and then look like this.
You then select photos 1 at a time (making sure to edit and crop them how you want it). When selected they appear in the tray (the white space in the lower left of the screen). If you want to continue working with a photo you click on hold.
Now, here is the thing when doing a picture grid collage. They are square, and each photo in them will be square and so you need to crop each photo to be a square (if you don't do it, then the computer will do it for you and you may end up with the important parts cropped out). Don't worry though, one nice thing about picasa is that any edits do not change your original and you can always select "undo all edits" and get back to a standard size.
The other important thing about a square picture grid is that it holds 4 (2x2), 9(3x3), 16 (4x4), and 25 (5x5) photos (I am sure you can do more, but that is the biggest I have done. If you do not have enough photos to make the square complete it will duplicate photos to finish it off.
In this next screen shot, you will see 4 photos selected and then I clicked on collage, chose picture grid, and it made it.
If you like the collage, hit create. If you need to change it, click cancel. Hope that helps! It really is very, very easy to do.
Google really is amazing. I looked up "how to get the photos off my cell phone and onto my computer" and found step by step instructions. (For those of you wondering . . . the easiest way is to link your phone to your computer through bluetooth . . . Go to your control panel, search for bluetooth, if you have it, you should see the "Bluetooth connection wizard". Click on it and walk step by step through it. At some point you have to enable bluetooth on your phone. (menu, settings, connection, enable) and then Wahlah! if you go to Windows Explorer and click on computer you will see your hard drives and anything external and there will be the phone and the files called audio, picture, text. Open the picture folder and there are your photos and you then copy them and save them to the computer) Amazing that there are no wires or anything!!! And even more amazing is how bad the pictures turned out. So . . .
computer???? so that I can do it again!!!!!
That is enough, MOM!!!!! Put the camera away!!!!
