I have been asked 2 questions on this feature in the last week so I figured I would discuss it more.  ACDSee has a tools menu, where one of the tools is Convert File Format.  You can easily convert any image into any other type of image.  This is really handy because you don’t have to open up your editor and open each file to convert the file type.  I usually scrap and only have a working file until I am ready to share or print.  Then I select all my images and convert them to JPG, ready for printing or do one more step of resizing and share them. 

So here is how to convert files in ACDSee Photo Manager:

1. Select your images.  (1 or more)
2. Choose Tools | Convert File Format (Ctrl - F is keyboard shortcut)
3. Select the type of file you want to go to from the list.
4. 
5. (You can then change Settings if you wish. I usually change Format Settings and make sure my jpg is best quality.)   If you know what the rest of the settings mean, feel free to change them or play with them to see the difference.  And click OK
6.  
7. Choose Next
8. I select "Place Modified Images in Source Folder" and then make sure "Remove original files" is UNCHECKED so you don’t lose your original (its default is not to be checked.)
9. 
10. Choose Next
11. Select Input All Pages and Split. These settings are for multi page images and most of us deal with 1 page images, so they really don’t apply.   A pdf contains multiple pages, so this is when it could apply. 
12. 
13. Click Start Convert
14. And they are created…
15. Choose Finish

Its fast and easy.

Kodak

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20% OFF photo gifts at the Kodak Gallery!

Shutterfly

Snapfish

FREE Shipping on all photo cards at Snapfish! (coupon code: CARDSHIP07, exp. 12/16)

FREE Shipping on all photo calendars at Snapfish! (coupon code: SHIP365, exp 1/8)

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Snapfish stocking stuffers - 25% off when you buy duplicate gifts

Photo Stamps

And for that hard to find person? What about some custom photo stamps just for them?

TogetherBook

[ together ] book featured on Oprah & Real Simple

What’s a [together] book(tm)? A bound book of your photos from digital prints or existing prints. Offered in 4×6 or 5×7.

One True Media

Here’s a new company that I haven’t looked. They have 10 x 10 hardcover photobooks and 8.5 x 8.5 soft cover photobooks. Or turn your layouts into a professional looking DVD. Or create a video montage of your layouts and share on Youtube, TIVO, blogger, or other places. They have calendars, posters, postcards, stickers, etc.. too.

Wallhogs

And if you want to print big (on vinyl, poster or canvas) this is the place to go at reasonable costs!

(text descriptions copied from their website)

Canvas: Decorate your area with a high quality custom canvas! We print on a artist-grade, 18 mil, semi-gloss, fine art canvas that is water resistant with a guaranteed 10 year indoor durability. This is a print only - these are not stretched or framed. From sizes: 11″ x 14″ to 24″ x 36″ and prices starting at $19.99

Poster: 24″ wide to 84″ wide and prices starting at $19.99!

Vinyl: Now you can enjoy decorating with reusable vinyl. This material has a semi-adhesive backing which means it will stick to your walls but can be moved anytime you want without damaging the wall surface or paint. The vinyl is very thin (3.5mm), durable as a tank, and will not fade. No more nails, glue, or tack! From sizes: 24″ wide to 84″ wide! and prices starting at $24.99

If you already have ACDSee 10, there is a free update you should go get. If you are running with ACDSee 9, there are some new features in ACDSee 10 that make digital scrapbooking easy: ACDSee 10 New Features plus these new features/enhancements below:

And this latest update allows users to: View, browse and organize .abr, .jbr and .pbr files, known as ‘brushes’ and used in applications such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro.

Let’s see it action:

What else is new:

• Hot key for mouse over pop ups
  • Show or hide mouse over pop ups with the Shift key
  • If you a pop up thumbnail showing and you want to get rid of it, just hit the shift and it will hid the pop-up.
• Enhanced uploader to Flicker
• More RAW Camera support
• And the new missing artistic effects are now available.

To get the update, download the file here:

ACDSee 10 Update

• You must have ACDSee 10 installed for this update to work. It will not install ACDSee 10 for you.
• Close ACDSee 10,
• Run the downloadable file to install it
• Restart ACDSee 10.
• It’s that simple.

And if you want, ACDSee 10, remember the current special going on: 2 for 1 with gift: Get ACDSee 10 Photo Manager- Gift with Purchase

If you want to upgrade ACDSee 9 -> 10 , the cost is $34.99.

And for all those that don’t use Adobe or Corel’s products, I was hoping this new brush feature would allow me to save my brush files and turn them into usable png files. It can convert the brush files to different images types (using Batch Convert or Save As) like png, but unfortunately, the transparency is lost. So the brush has the dreaded white background. For some brushes, I can easily select the background with my magic wand/selection tool and get rid of it and for some it doesn’t work. ACDSee is working on getting this functionality fixed so we can easily convert the brushes.

How many email accounts do you check? Be honest now! I have 6 - 8 feeding into Thunderbird, a yahoo account that is rarely checked & my work email on Outlook.

As I prepare to travel for a week & half, I needed to have a way to read them away from my personal laptop. I could have forwarded them all into gmail but to be honest I can’t stand the threaded reading. I really like reading them in Thunderbird & my accounts are set up by purpose.

Fuser.com offers a solution to me when I travel. It’s the equivalent of online web access to several accounts. I wouldn’t use it everyday, but for these trips it will work great!

It’s easy to set up & is user friendly:

• It easily recognizes gmail accounts
• It reads messages & Wallposts from Facebook & Myspace

How it works:

• You can read all the accounts & all the messages are mixed. (scary really!)
• Click on All Accounts Off & click on the account that you want to view (much more manageable!) - I have 5 accounts there

Some downsides:

• One irritation is that it doesn’t give me the option to remember my login info.
• Fuser recognized my Outlook account but won’t update it after the initial time. (but I will have my work laptop with me, so it’s ok).

It supports many types of email:

Okay, this is the last post. Like I said this is the easy part now because of all the prep work we did.

Create a book:

From my gallery, click on Order Photo Book in the top right.

Set your Book size, Make sure Full Bleed is checked, I checked No Captions, uncheck Auto Crop. and click Next

It its your first time, it will start generating the book and it takes a few minutes. If you have made changes and you want to update your book, scroll to the bottom and click RECREATE BOOK and it will start the book making process again.

Once done, click on preview your book and view your book in pdf format. In Adobe Reader, Viovio say continuous facing setting. I couldn’t find that option in Adobe Reader 8. The setting that worked for me in Adobe Reader was: View | Page Display | Two-up Continuous. Then I saw two pages, left and right next to each other just the way they will be printed.

PROOF your book. If you see any pages/misprints/mistakes. Now is the time to go correct that. I deleted any image that was wrong, made changes to it, uploaded the image again, and from the gallery click Order Photo Book again and Recreate Book.

Once you are satisfied, continue on by clicking on CREATE COVER NEXT

Setting Cover Options:

There are 3 tabs and I will tell you what I did on all 3.

Cover Text:

I deleted the Title Text & Author Text since I have that incorporated into my cover.

I didn’t put anything on my spine because I got this warning:

At least 35 pages are needed for your spine text to appear.

Their help states you need 40 pages “Note: Your book needs to be 40 pages or more in order for text to print on the spine.”

Which basically means my spine is going to be too skinny to print spine text since I only have 28 pages. But if your book is large enough, this is where you put the spine text info.

Colors & Images:

I made no changes

Advanced tab:

• I deleted the product URL
• Make sure you check “Full Wrap Cover” if you are using their template.

You should see the cover generated and verify it looks good.

Once the cover is to your satisfaction, choose Next.

Webstore Options:

I gave my product a name with the my photo books title.

Security level: Private (so no one else can see my book)

At this point you can buy or your photo book will be available in My Shop when you are ready to purchase it.

Purchasing:

When you purchase you will have some options for the cover:

• Embossed Hardcover gives you hardcover with your image in it.

Zipped & Uploaded Images:

I zipped up my files in ACDSee Photo Manager using the Create Archive feature.

Zipping up my images

• I selected about 5 images - 10 images and tried to keep the size of the zip file to 30 - 50 MB.
• choose Tools | Create Archive and created a zip file of those images. I numbered my zip files, Book1.zip, Book2.zip.
• Repeated this for however many images I needed to do.

Uploading them to Viovio

• Logged into Viovio.
• Click on [my] photos
• Clicked on Create Gallery and made a gallery for the book images.
• Clicked on Upload images, in the Upload Files section, entered in the name of my zip files.
• Made sure that “Add files to these Galleries” that the right gallery was chosen.
• Choose “Don’t Resize” and chose a private security level since I didn’t wish for others to view my images.
• Then click Upload Files.
• Then walk away and do something else for a while.

Note: Viovio only allows 200MB worth of images uploaded. So make sure your total book image sizes is less than this. If not, you may need to upgrade and get more storage.

Viovio Supporter
500 Megabytes
US $25 / annually

Quick things to do in your Viovio Gallery:

Once you images are in the gallery, there a few things I did to get ready.

View your images, by clicking on the appropriate Gallery

Here are 3 things I did to get ready:

Choose Edit:

• Changed the Security Level to private so no one else can see my gallery. Default is public.

Choose Image Order:

• Scroll to the bottom, and choose Re-order gallery by “filename”, the choose Save Changes. If you followed my advice from above, your pages should be ordered correctly now. If not, you need to manually change the position numbers of every page and click Save Changes.

Choose Cover Image:

• Find the cover image, and check that it is a gallery image. This means it will be used for the cover.

• Once done, Save Changes

Okay, all we have to do is create the book and checkout and we’ll do that in the last blog entry. Everything should be ready so this part goes quickly.

Putting your pages in the right order:

Most online printing places allows you to order pages when you upload and Viovio does too.

I just find it easier to order my pages before I upload in Photo Manager. Here’s what I do:

• So I look in my folder where I saved all my pages.
• In ACDSee Photo Manager, I drag and drop my thumbnails to reorder them in the order that I want them to appear in the book.
• Things to remember in printing books:
  • The first page will be by itself on the right side of the page.
  • If you continue counting, even page numbers are on left and odd are on right side of pages.
• So the easy way, once you have your pages in the correct order, is to rename them with the page number in front. To do this:
  • Select All Image (Ctrl-A)
  • Choose Tools | Batch Rename
  • The template will pop up.
    • Change Start at: to 1
    • Delete anything in the Template: box
    • Click on Insert Metadata, choose File Properties, select Filename w/o extension
    • Right before <File Properties:Filename(w/o extension)> insert ##. This will be your page numbers.
    • Here all the settings changed:
    • 
    • Click on Start Rename
  • All my pages are numbered in order.

Another option to manually rename them. This is for people who forgot if even or odd are right and left.

• So for the first page, rename (right click thumbnail and choose rename) the file to 01_filename.jpg.
• The next two, I am going to name 02L_filename.jpg & 02R_filename.jpg, followed by 03L_filename.jpg & 03R_filename.jpg.
• And luckily L comes before R in the alphabet so the 02L page will come before the 02R page.
• That way I know for sure which is going to be left & right hand side of pages.
• This method has to be done manually those with renaming each file.

Create Cover:

Viovio provides a cover template also. It’s interesting that it is formatted for a 12 x 12 book when they print their books at 10 x 10. Anyway, I opened the template which is 7200 x 3600 with 300 dpi.

Square format wrap cover:

I placed in 2 of the same papers to cover the entire space. Made sure everything stayed within the Casewrap Hardcover Fold Line. (In my example, I wanted part of the scroll to go off the cover.)

Due to the size of this file, I didn’t save it as working file (apd, psd, pspimage file) but just saved straight to a jpg with compression of 90%. Do not resize this image. It needs to be this size to work.

Trying to get text on the spine in this image is really tough so I didn’t try. There is an option in their interface to add text to the spine if your book is large enough and I recommend you doing it that way.

Okay, the book is almost ready to go! Next, we will get it uploaded! That’s easy just takes time (your computer’s time, not yours.)

Once I had all my working files (apd, psd, pspimages) ready to go and PROOFED, I need to create JPG’s. I never make JPG’s until I am ready to print or share on the web.

How to Convert all your files to JPGs in one step:

1. I open up ACDSee Photo Manager and select all my working files. (I selected all my apds but if you use Adobe products (psds) or Corel products (pspimages).)
2. I choose File | Batch Convert
   1. Choose JPG
   2. Select Format Settings and make sure it is setting to Best Quality
   3. Choose Next
   4. Usually I choose to place files in the same folder, but when I am getting ready to print a book, I place them in new folder for easier ordering of pages and uploading. So choose Place modified images in the following folder and select a folder below that option.
   5. Choose Next
   6. I leave the defaults which is Input: All Images (this doesn’t apply since I only have one file per image) & Output: Split (I want to create separate jpgs of all the files I chose.)
   7. Choose Start Convert
   8. When it finishes, choose Finish

Batch Resize

Next step, is resize them for you book size. I am printing a 10 x 10 inch book. The official specifications say they want a 10.25 x 10.25 image. So I am going to use ACDSee Photo Manager to resize all of them.

1. in ACDSee Photo Manager, I select all the jpg’s of pages. (Mine are convenient because I placed them in a separate folder.)
2. Go to Tools | Batch Resize
3. Check Actual Print Size
4. In the boxes, set the following: Units: inches, Width & Height: 10.25, Resolution: 300 in. check Preserve original aspect ratio
5. 
6. Click Options
7. Choose Rename modified images & place in source folders
8. Click on JPEG compress options,
   1. Choose 90% Image quality to reduce the size slightly.
9. Click OK, OK, and Start Resize

You should now have all your images in jpg format and resize to the expected size. I would just like to comment that the Viovio software would resize the images themselves. But since resizing the images is easy and then it takes less time to upload the images to Viovio, you might as well do it yourself.

In the next blog entry, we will talk about ordering your pages and making a cover. Unless that is too much.. We’ll see.

Well, maybe “mistake” is too a harsh word. How about an “Airhead Moment?”

The other day, I was working on my computer and I was trying to save something to my C:\ drive. I got the little pop-up telling me that I had low disk space. So I try to clean up, compress and defrag my drive. Not happening. I only had 1% free space, way less than the 15% recommended for defragging.

I started deleted old documents, photos and so on, but it didn’t free up any significant amount of space. I am not sure what made me think about the back ups of ACDSee, but I am glad it occurred to me at one point. I went into my Local Setting Folder, and found man, many backups for ACDSee- over a year’s worth! I looked in my Version 9 Folder, and deleted all but the last four back ups. Then I went into Version 10 and did the same thing. I was able to free up over 25% of disk space, which has made my computer much happier!

What happens is that because ACDSee does not overwrite the back up data, it makes a new folder each time you back up. And since I am a compulsive backer-upper (Is that a word? ha ha!), I had lots and lots of folders.

From ACDSee’s Help File:

Backup location

It’s a good idea to consider where you back up your data, as well as how often. If you’re backing up to your hard drive, ACDSee creates a new folder for each day. This helps to avoid overwriting your backup, and gives you several increments from which you can restore. Backing up the database to a CD or DVD once a week will help protect you in case of hard drive failure. Also helpful is a monthly backup that is stored in a different physical location than your computer, such as a network drive.

To do this in Version 9, the default location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\90\ACDSeeBK

For Version 10, the default location is:

C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Local settings\Application Data\ACD Systems\Catalogs\100\ACDSeeBK

Here is a screen shot of where my folder is located:

Be careful that you only delete backup files. You do not want to delete the Default folder. This folder contains all your organizing information.

You should only delete as many back up folders as you feel comfortable with. I felt that four back ups was “safe” for me. ANd don’t forget it is a good idea to back up your database to a CD or DVD as well.

For more information of backing up your data, click here.

What can ACDSee do to make this a better digital scrapbooking tool for you? We have so many users out there and I bet you have some opinions. So feel free come to this forum and post Suggestions for ACDSee Photo Manager!

I will gather up the information and forward it onto ACDSee. And some things you may find out that you can already do in ACDSee Photo Manager and just didn’t know it!