Embird Cooperation with Google Picasa

Embird Embroidery Software Tutorial

Google Picasa is a free application developed by Google (http://www.google.com) and it allows you to organize, edit, and share images and photos. It allows you to manage your photos and images in one place and find photos or images you forgot you had on your hard disk. It cannot work directly with embroidery designs, but the new Embird Manager option "Automatically Create Documentation Files (*.jpg)" allows you to create image files automatically for every design which you digitize or display in Embird. Google Picasa can then index these images and allow you to quickly browse through them. This way, you can use Google Picasa to quickly locate your design, which is stored in the same folder as its image.

Note: Before you start, please download the Google Picasa application from http://picasa.google.com and install it on your PC.

Hint: It is recommended to move all your designs into a sub-folder of the "My Documents" folder in your user profile. Otherwise, it might happen that Google Picasa will not index the images of your designs. We recommend creating a folder "My Designs" under "My Documents" and keeping all embroidery designs in sub-folders of the "My Designs" folder.

Follow these steps to create images from your designs for Google Picasa:

1 - Run Embird; it will start in "Manager" mode.

2 - Select the "Options" menu and make sure that the "Automatically Create Documentation Files (*.jpg)" option is ON (Picture No. 1). In case it is OFF, please select this menu to switch ON this option.

Picture No. 1

3 - Display your designs on the screen - you can use, for example, thumbnail view mode (Picture No. 2). More details about viewing designs are available in the Viewing Designs tutorial. Embird will create the .JPG documentation image file for every design being viewed. This image will be stored in the same folder as the design.

Picture No. 2

4 - Launch the Google Picasa application using the "Start > Programs > Picasa > Picasa" menu, or double-click the Picasa icon in the tray (Picture No. 3). Browse to the folder that contains your designs. After a short while, which is needed by Picasa for indexing new images, you will see the design images. Google Picasa allows you to view all folders in one place - just scroll the vertical bar at the right side of the screen and locate the image you are searching for.

Picture No. 3

5 - Double-click the image to find more information about the design - the size, number of stitches, and colors (Picture No. 4).

Picture No. 4

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