13 June 2014

Photos, photos everywhere but none to drop just here


I have just posted about this on Google+ but something else occurs to me and so I thought I'd write here too - sort of a frequently asked question that I can't answer!

I have a Google+ My Business Page about Corgi Toys and would like too add pictures to the Photos section. Even though it has the text 'Photos of you' which I think is a hangover from the normal user-type page it is clearly a sensible idea to show people who drop in on a business page something relevant to your business.

Now, you can upload photos from your computer in the usual way. That's OK but nowadays photos are massive - 4000 by 3000 pixels is a pretty common camera size as standard and I've seen plenty bigger too. Even though people have larger resolution displays than the old 640 days I am quite content with images around the 1600 x 1200 size which are still going to fill best part of a great many monitors and these will show plenty of detail too.

So the process would involve first resizing the original, renaming it and saving it somewhere, then uploading to the Google+ page. That's OK for a few images but I have nearly 2000. That's not all - why should I spend what could be many hours uploading them all when copies are already uploaded! Google Photos Auto Backup service has one or two things that annoy me but they're fairly trivial and the important thing that it does really well is upload everything almost as soon as it finds it. Indeed, as the more observant may spot, the screenprint below shows Picasa adding the 1600 versions of 1434 photos that Irfanview is batch editing from 4000x 3000 originals in one hit. Just out of shot is Google Photo's Auto Backup busily uploading the new 1600 size files.

Now, if the new 1600 size files were being uploaded to a place I could get at them from my Corgi Toys Business Page that would be brilliant but they're not. I can get at them as me but not as the me editing my Business Page.



Just to make this all even crazier - and you may have already appreciated this and smiled ruefully - Google Photos Auto Backup has already backed up the originals (well a slightly reduced size version which makes a zero impact on my file storage space but more than enough for web use). So there are now two perfectly usable image files up there and neither can be simply transferred to my Business Page. It's not as if I am asking for something impossible here; Google's Blogger makes this simple - using an image from a Picasa Web Album.


I suppose someone may write to me and say that I am missing something really obvious but I suspect that there are actually many others out there who have several Pages on Google+ and would like to be able to share images more sensibly.

I first wrote about this in connection with articles bout American Idol and X Factor where I had albums of contestant photos on my hard drive but had to upload to each place separately. That was bearable as there were usually just 20 or so at the most. With 2000 and counting Corgi Toy images this is a serious business!

I am presently using Irfanview to change the dimensions and save new files and will then upload a few at a time and see how that goes. It is such a drag but, until someone comes to my assistance, that's how it has to be. Or, I suppose, I could just not bother and just have a blog post about each model and the post and one photo will get automatically added by Blogger to the Corgi Toy page. That works well ad I am at a loss to know why it cannot work within Google+.

Oh well.