Picasa Email Uploads

Picasa is an awesome image sharing tool which just gets better and better.

Upload by email is a great feature, which is perfect if you want to allow an undetermined audience/group to submit images to you simply and easily.

First lets look at two ways to manage this.

If you haven't yet activated your Picasa account you'll need to that first, just Google 'picasa web', or click here, picasaweb.google.com/home to activate it with your school password.

Once in there you have 2 options...

Option 1

This is great if you want to ask a class of students to contribute an image/s to one album, or maybe parents to contribute photos they took on a school trip etc.

Create  an album with a sample image in it, and share that with the students/parents who are participating, and tick the 'Let people I share with contribute photos' box, here:

Now they can just add images to that album themselves. This works better for a specific class, or grade or email group like Parents, not so much for a larger or undetermined audience, for that - you need option 2:

Option 2

This works well if the you don't know who the contributors are, or how many there are.

You can adjust the settings in your Picasa account to enable upload via email, this link explains it well, and I've included the text below to save you the stress of clicking:

Email upload

Use email upload to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums by sending them to a secret email address, especially useful from your mobile device. This allows you to stream and caption photos on-the-go. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your acount at http://picasaweb.google.com/.
2. Click the gear icon in the top-right corner and choose Photos settings.
3. On the General tab, in the "Upload photos by email" section, select the "Allow me to upload photos by email." checkbox.
4. Enter a "secret word," 6-15 characters long. As you enter this word, an email address appears.
5. Click the Save changes button.
6. To email upload your photos, just attach them to an email message and send it to the newly-created address.

Use the email "Subject" line to add captions or to include the photos in a specific album. If the email "Subject" line matches an existing online album title, your photos will be uploaded to that album. Otherwise the 'Subject' line will instead be added as a caption and the photos will be placed in the Drop Box album.

You can attach up to 20 MB of photos in JPG, GIF and PNG formats.

IMPORTANT! The participants will need to put their name in the SUBJECT of the email, if you want to know who sent the image... Or if you want the images to automatically go into an existing album.

I've set it up in my account so you can see how it works.

115729468016446857469.smcuwc@picasaweb.com

If you send an image to this email address it will automatically appear inside an album designated for that called 'Drop Box' nothing to do with THAT other web service. Or it will be added to an existing album if the subject matches the name of one of your existing albums.

If you want to move images out of the default 'Drop Box' album to another album, choose 'Organise' then 'Move' to move an image or 10 or so, to another album.