“Living In The Google World” – Morning 1 – Working with Images

Day 1 Morning:

This is the first day of “Living In The Google World” and I decided my first adventure would be to figure out how to edit and add images to “The Chrome Voice”.

So here goes:

Step 1 – Reinstall Chrome:

I want to start from a clean slate so I uninstall Chrome, reinstall, switch to the developer channel and update to version 0.2.152.1. 

All went well, and now I’m 100% Chrome and “Living In The Google World”.  

I do wonder why the about box for this version shows “Checking for new version”  constantly.
 

Step 2  - Find Photo editing tool

I start looking at Picasa online, but want more control over image editing so I go to Photoshop.com (Adobe’s online image editing).

The interface is fairly intuitive and the app runs lightning quick in Chrome.

One problem…I need to get an image to edit…and I’m not ready to run back to using my hard drive yet so I open up my online Picasa library directly from Photoshop.com. Very cool. 

(NOTE: 1st “Living in the Google World” Insight – I need my online apps to be able to fully access files to my online storage location in a secure fashion. This seems like a basic function that every online app should have.)

I pick a test file, make a quick edit and send it back to my Picasa online folder. So good so far. 
 

Step 3 – Make the photo accessible to this blog

Now I have to get this file to display on my blog. Easy. Picasa gives me a URL I can use to share. 

Well not quite…

For some reason, Word Press doesn’t like the URL when I try to use it to access the image.

I’m looking all over for the easy and obvious way to share, even hit the help file and see about emailing the link to myself. That still doesn’t work.

After about 10 minutes of trying, I give up and embed the image using HTML (see the image above).

So the net results of “Living in the Google World” so far? It’s taken me 60 minutes instead of 10 to create this post.

Ok, some of it was a learning curve and installation of software which was expected.

The part I didn’t expect and I would guess most typical users don’t have the patience for was messing around trying to figure out how to display a photo on my Picasa web album here.

Either there’s something I’m not getting about Picasa’s way of doing things or I just hit a friction spot that needs to be ironed out.

Summary:
Key learning: online file editing tools need to easily access online file hosting services
App for photo editing – www.photoshop.com
App for photo hosting – picasaweb.google.com
Browser: Google Chrome
Desktop Apps used: NONE
Desktop Storage used: NONE