Tuesday 13 January 2015

Nya nya nya nya nya


You may (or more likely, may not) remember me moaning about the way Picasa buggers-up your photo editing whilst it carefully stores every image you have ever taken as it sends them down the line for remote storage.

Picasa tends to view all of your images as if they belong to it and for all I know, when I ill-advisedly signed up to them having been told that their editing suite was better than the one I already had, I may have agreed to them owning all the pictures I put through their system. Anyway, I found that it was no better than my Mac one, so I stopped using it.

When I got fed up with all the pop-ups requiring me to download the latest version of it via Google (which you can only tell to go away and come back later), I looked into unsubscribing from Picasa for good.

They said something like, 'Are you sure you want to do this? You will probably lose all your photos that you have ever put through our system', and that scared me enough to press the cancel button and carry on getting the irritating pop-ups.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I no longer cared if I couldn't put photos up here any more - I almost didn't care if I could no longer post anything up here anymore - and this coincided with finding the version of Picasa in my applications section of this computer. I wonder... I thought...

So I clicked on it to send it to trash, then I used the 'secure empty trash' facility which really does get rid of unwanted images or documents, never to be seen again - ever. Over a period of about 25 minutes, my little machine deleted about 8000 items - forever - including my out-of-date version of Picasa.

With a little trepidation I went to Blogger to see if there were any photos left (Picasa was bought by Google after I signed up) and what do you know? They are all still here.

Of course, if Google ever get to find out that this is my attitude, they may strike me off for good, so if you don't hear from me again you'll know why.

Right. Next job. How to rip off photos from Pinterest...

16 comments:

  1. By ripping off photos from Pinterest, do you mean you want to copy and paste them to your own computer? If so, I only managed to do it by going to the site from which they were originally pinned. They seem to have some kind of block on doing it there. I'm boring myself now.......

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    1. At least they are free when you subscribe - if anything is free. Getty Images have a very effective way of stopping you from downloading images without paying for them - very scary. I won't be trying that again!

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  2. Tom if you use Preview on your mac you can take a screen shot of any image that you want.

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    1. Yes, thanks, but I would just like to save my own photos without being obliged to share them with anyone else. I understand about screen shots, but if I can't just swipe it, I will just leave it.

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    2. You can always burn the photo's on to a disc Tom - that's the best way of storing them.

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    3. Actually, the best way is a Seagate hard-drive to back up everything. £50 buys you more GBs than you would probably need.

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  3. I have been having problems with Skype and was advised to unsubscribe and reinstall Skype desktop. I was worried that all my Skype addresses/contacts would be lost, but was reassured that all is preserved at Skype Global headquarters. Hmmmm.

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  4. I haven't had any problems at all.

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  5. All sounds brave to me. I had Picasa on my old computer but have not got it (yety) on my new one. Making do with Pictures.

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  6. So what do you do exactly to delete your own Picasa photos? Till now I am not able to delete any from the Picasa web-album (but 2 years ago I could).

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    1. Go to your documents, find 'applications', find Picasa, move it to trash, then scrap trash in the most secure way you can. With a Mac, you move it to the waste-bin, then click and hold the 'delete' button, then hit the cmd button and it will say, 'secure delete'. It will ask if if you really want to, then you say 'yes', then it is gone forever.

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    2. Thank you, Tom - I copied this, and when Son comes for his next visit, he will help me (He has a Mac, I have now a Vaio. Are then all photos from all blogs gone too? Will find out - and how to bring new photos in, too).

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    3. No, everything should be safe - except Picasa's remote storage. I back up with a 500 GB Seagate thing anyway, just in case. They're cheap.

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