Ricky Says

I've been snapping pictures left and right with my new Canon Powershot, especially now that the holiday season is underway and I've been on vacation all week - plenty of photo opps with Thanksgiving dinner and the kids helping me put up Christmas lights.

I wanted a way to share these pictures with friends and family using all free tools (preferably a single software program), and what better place to do that than Facebook?

Google's free Picasa photo editor can import photos from your camera's SD memory card, and you can install a plugin that will let you upload photos directly from Picasa to Facebook (notice the Facebook button in the Picasa toolbar shown below).

Here's how to install the Facebook plugin in Picasa so you can upload photos directly from Picasa to Facebook:

1. Open Facebook in your web browser and click "Applications" in the lower left side of your Facebook home page. Then click "Browse More Applications" in the popup menu.

2. Enter "picasa" in the application search field on the top left of the page, and select the first match named "Picasa":

3. Click on "Go to Application" to configure the Picasa plugin.

4. Install the Picasa plugin, which will install the Facebook button in Picasa.

I recently downgraded from Vista back to XP for performance and stability reasons, but forgot that XP doesn't have the Windows Photo Gallery that I had grown to love on Vista (that made it easy to import pictures from an SD digital camera memory card).

You can still import pictures in Windows XP using the built-in Scanner and Camera wizard, and can view them using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer - both free utilities that ship with Windows XP.

Here's how you can import digital camera photos in Windows XP:

1. Remove the SD memory card from your digital camera and plug it into your computer's memory card reader slot, or plug the data cable that came with your camera into your computer's USB port.

Windows XP will recognize the new card or data cable and will ask you what you'd like to do:

If you don't have a memory card reader built into your system, you can buy an adapter from Amazon for about $10 (including a 4 GB SanDisk memory card).

2. Choose the option to "Copy pictures to a folder on my computer using Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard".

Question: I was wondering how I would transfer music from my computer onto the memory stick and then transfer them onto my digital picture frame. Also, is it possible to have music on my picture frame when I show my pictures?

Answer: Digital picture frames are awesome. I have one at work, my wife has one at home, and we gave my parents one for Christmas this year.

Transferring pictures from your computer to a picture frame is a matter of copying the pics to a memory card or usb flash drive, and then plugging the memory card into your picture frame.

Here's a step-by-step guide for loading pictures onto a digital picture frame:

Step 1: Find the pictures on your hard drive

If you're using Windows Vista, then your pictures will most likely be located in the Pictures folder under your User folder (C:\Users\YourName\Pictures).

Expand the Pictures folder and find the photos that you'd like to view on the picture frame. If possible, copy them all to a single folder location, as that will make the next step much easier.

Step 2: Copy the pictures to an SD Micro memory card, or to a USB Flash Drive

Find the SD Micro memory card slot on the side of your laptop, or in the front of your desktop, and insert the card. Memory cards are dirt cheap these days, and you can get a 2GB card for under $10 on Amazon

My wife and I bought a Sony Handycam about a decade ago, to capture video of our kids as they grew up. It records on Hi-8 video cassettes, and I needed a way to convert these analog recordings into digital movies and save them to DVD.

The Sony Handycam (model number CCD-TRV22) has RCA outputs for video and mono audio, and I found an EasyCAP USB2.0 Video Capture VHS-to-USB Adapter that converts the analog Hi-8 recordings into digital movies.

The Easycap adapter plugs into the RCA jacks on the Sony Handycam (I used the white line for the single audio jack), and the USB jack plugs into my laptop. Also bundled with the adapter is a licensed copy of ULead Video Studio 8.0 for creating and editing movies.

I had to use an RCA patch cable between the female adapter jacks and the camcorder, just like you would between a VCR and your TV. In fact, this adapter could also be hooked up to a VHS VCR (yep, I still have one), to make digital copies of old VHS movies.

Once I hooked up the camcorder with my laptop using the EasyCap usb adapter, I ran the Ulead Movie Wizard software and selected the "Capture" menu.

I put the camcorder in Player mode, loaded the video tape and pressed play. Then I pressed "Capture Video" in the Ulead program, and received an error indicating that no input signal could be found.

The reason was the video capture options are set by default to record from Video Tuner and I was using a video camcorder with RCA (composite) outputs. I clicked "Options" and then selected "Video and Audio Capture Property Settings" to change this setting:

Question: Have you any info on formatting the memory chip for a camera after deleting all the photos? I tried to make an 8x10 enlargement of our family photo.

Do you have any input on this? The photo is great but if you look close, it definitely could use better resolution.

Answer: This question has been heroically rescued from the Open Questions forum by Greg Woosley. You can view his reply below, and stop by his website at http://codenoter.blogspot.com/ for some useful tips on "tricky geek things he's figured out once and doesn't want to figure out again later".