In the continuing saga of (mostly Google) searches, these are expanded answers. I know I’ve written something about the subjects because that’s what’s bringing people to my site from the search engines, but I can also tell from the queries I haven’t said enough. So, here I am saying more. …[continued]
While my friends are hawking my business card around town and I’m short on sleep and creative inspiration, it’s easier to answer ready-made questions. So, here’s some more illumination from Google keywords. …[continued]
These are a few of the Google keywords leading to JLog in the last 3 days. Fairly typical going back months or years. And my answers, in case that would be useful. …[continued]
Needless to say, I’m a little unfocused lately. It’s now been over three months since my computer crashed, i.e. since life was hunkered down in a predictable groove. The temperature was about 75 F and I wasn’t wearing undershirts yet. …[continued]
ExifTool is really a misnomer because it also creates and edits IPTC and XMP data. …[continued]
This is about adding GPS co-ordinates to photos and viewing the locations on a map. In the What I Do meme, many participants deemed Picasa a popular photo pit stop. I’m guessing because it’s free, it’s easy and it links directly to Google Earth. But, Picasa has some serious problems as I noted previously in Picasa Summary. …[continued]
For those still floundering in genealogy file overload and general disorganization—
The general file challenge breaks down into 3 parts: naming your files, organizing your files and searching your files. And then, if you have any time left over, linking them to your genealogy database. And if you’re really far ahead of the game, doing creative projects with them.
Today, I’ll revisit searching files and see what’s new. …[continued]
Someone came looking on this site today for “how to see inside my house with Google Earth”. A few things went through my mind at the same time:
1. Google’s not that good. Yet.
2. I wonder if that person is a family historian.
3. This would be funny if it wasn’t so funny. …[continued]
Awhile ago I recommended Picasa 3 to you. It’s fun and interesting and all that but there’s a little problem with backups. Picasa does offer the option of backing up your entire photo collection but it’s labour-intensive, inefficient and redundant. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you should already be keeping at least one up-to-date backup of your entire photo collection. The issue here is backing up the work you do in Picasa. …[continued]
If you haven’t discovered Picasa 3.5 yet, you really should. It’s a riot. They’ve added face-tagging and a geo-tagging panel. No-one does geo-tagging as well as Google so that’s a no-brainer. As far as the name tags go, I spent many months IPTC-ing 10,000 photographs in great detail and I was not keen to start over with something that’s not in the same league. But, as ever, Google has made this different enough and fun enough to be worthwhile in its own right and it’s not difficult.
First, prime the system by tagging a couple of dozen people and then just let it go. It will continue churning out thumbnails of faces and try to match them up with the faces you’ve already tagged. The accuracy rate is phenomenal. It’s having a problem with my identical twin sisters, (so do I) but other than that it’s stunning. Then you can do things like make collages or movies or desktop backgrounds.
If you want to go really wild, you can also add geo-tags with their new full-length geo-tagging panel and follow the life of your photos on Google Earth. It’s all integrated with Picasa Web Albums as well.
When you first install Picasa, it takes you to their blog where there’s an introductory video about what’s new.
‘Nuff said; just go there.
2010 update – but here are some caveats:
Picasa Backup
Picasa Tags
IPTC: Picasa
Picasa Summary
The actual numbers are unknown to anyone except Google but there are guesses. How many searches are done on Google every day? The guesses range from 200 million to 10 billion. And a very, very … very small percentage of those searches lead to this website.
But nevertheless my own statistics are interesting … to me. The most popular Google search queries, by far, leading to JLog in 2008 were:
It’s not my fault this time.
There may or may not be a disruption while Google moves all the FeedBurner feeds over to its own kingdom. They bought FeedBurner awhile ago and now they’re Google-izing it.
If you don’t have a web property of some kind, you have no idea the kind of things that don’t interrupt your genealogy research. I’ve changed the address on the little orange button so if you need to you can always click on it and resubscribe.
