Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [44]
Getting Photos onto Google+
THERE ARE THREE MAIN ways to add your photos to Google+. You can upload them, either in batches or individually, to Google+ using a web browser. Or, you can upload them from a web-connected cellphone that’s running the Google+ mobile app. Finally, if you use Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa Web Albums, you can easily move photos from Picasa over to Google+. The following sections explain all these options.
TIP
Flip to Adjusting Overall Photo Settings to read about settings that affect all the photos you upload to Google+.
Uploading via Your Browser
It’s hard to miss the big, red Upload New Photos button in the upper-right corner of your Photos page.
When you click it, you see an “Upload and share photos” box that should look familiar if you uploaded a profile picture when you signed up for Google+. What’s in the box varies slightly depending on which web browser you use. At the center of the box is a “Select photos from your computer” button. You may also see a message telling you to “Drag photos here” and a dotted line indicating where to drop images you’ve dragged over from elsewhere on your computer—your Pictures folder, your desktop, or even an attachment in an email program.
Click “Select photos from your computer” to open a dialog box where you can choose files to upload. (Select multiple photos using the Control [or ⌘ on a Mac] and Shift keys.) Once you’ve selected the photos you want, click Open (or Choose, depending on your browser) in the dialog box.
Back in the “Upload and share photos” box, Google+ displays a thumbnail preview of each image you dragged over or selected. Move your cursor over or just below a thumbnail and you’ll see a few handy icons tools that let you rotate the photo clockwise or counterclockwise or remove the photo from this batch (click the trashcan), and a link you can click to add a caption to the photo—though you’ll have time, and much more space, to edit and comment on your photos later, too.
If you decide, after seeing the pics you plan to upload, that you want to add a few more, click the “Upload more” link in the lower-left corner of the upload box to re-open the file-picker dialog box. Or, if you saw the “Drag photos here” message mentioned earlier, just drag more photos onto the “Upload and share photos” box.
Once you’ve selected the photos you want to upload, you can either put them in a new album or add them to an existing one. (In Google+, an album is a batch of photos you upload at the same time, although you can add more photos to albums after that, too.) If you’re new to Google+ and have never used Picasa Web Albums, you won’t have any existing albums to choose from, so use the “Album name” box to give this group of photos a descriptive name, like “Vermont Vacation 2011” or “Fried Turkey Leg Inside a Hamburger Experiment.” If you’re uploading a bunch of unrelated photos, you could create an album called “Random pictures,” or just leave today’s date, which Google+ automatically puts in the “Album name” box. To add these photos to an album you created previously, click “add to an existing album” and use the drop-down menu that appears to select the one you want. (You can also do this later, though.)
When everything looks good, click the button in the lower-right corner of the box (if you’re creating a new album, it’s labeled “Create album”; if you’re putting these photos in an existing album, it’s labeled “Add photos”).
The next thing you see is the “Share album” box. Near the top is an “Add a comment” field where you can explain or comment on these pics (“Thanks, Adam, for putting me up in L.A. for a week! Sorry about the avocado stuck to the ceiling fan!”).