Ok, so I’m probably the last person on earth to know this, but I thought I’d share.

My favorite way to get photos off my camera (that doesn’t require me to hunt down that pesky cable) is to post them to facebook from the phone then go download them from my facebook album to keep on my computer.

I use firefox, and when I download something it goes to my downloads folder, and a little window pops up to show me the progress of the download. What I’ve been doing is right-clicking and choosing “Open Containing Folder” then dragging from the downloads folder to wherever I want to keep it.

But today I had a *headsmack* moment!

You can drag the file directly from the little download notification window to wherever you want to keep it!

Just click… and drag.

DUH.

Did you know that? What else do you know that you’re not telling me?

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Sometimes you have a ton of photos you need to resize. Maybe you want to put them on Facebook or Flickr but don’t want your high-resolution photos going out there. Maybe you captured them at very high resolution but are making a collage and don’t want them that big. Either way, Photoshop and Elements gives you a quick way to do that, without even opening up the files!

I made you a little video using PSE10 – the Photoshop instructions are at the end, too.

What do you think, do you ever have a reason to resize a whole folder of photos?

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Happy New Year, everyone!

Here at the White house, I’ve been bitten by the organizing bug. It doesn’t happen often, and usually passes if I just spend some time on Pinterest, but it’s almost always triggered by the appearance in the stores of shiny new storage containers.

I’ve even been organizing my digi-stuff! A new 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive somehow got delivered along with all the Christmas presents from Amazon, so I’m putting it to good use and taking the opportunity to clear out files as I transfer them. (More about that in another post, coming soon!)

As part of my mission to clear out clutter, I’m using a few new tools – the digital equivalent of shiny new containers – that I wanted to share with you!

Evernote - this Evernote is worth getting if only for the clipping feature. Install the Firefox add-on and you get a little elephant head icon in your browser bar. When you get to a webpage that you want to keep, click on the icon. (If you only want to keep a portion of the page, highlight that portion first!) It will create a new note with the content from that page, and you can tell it which of your notebooks you want to put it in, add your own notes to it, and save it. Best part is it also captures the link to where you got that information, so no more saving a tutorial then forgetting where you got it from! But you can use Evernote for so much more. Sir Scrapalot has written before about using it to keep things straight, and I can see how it would be useful for CT work.
Oh, and did I mention that you can get an app for your phone and tablet and sync across all platforms? So handy when I’m at the grocery story and can’t remember what else was in the goulash recipe… just pull it up in Evernote on my phone!

IFTTT – If This Then That -

If This Then That is a great new service that lets you set up little scripts to link up your social media accounts. Want all your flickr photos to be tweeted on your Twitter account? You can set that up! Want only your blog posts with the word “tutorial” in them to appear on your facebook page? You can do that! I’ve only just begun to look at the ways to use this service, but they’ve covered about everything on earth. You can trigger an action with a phone call, an email, or an action on one of the zillion services they have set up. You can also look at other people’s scripts (or recipes as they call them) and if it works for you, use it yourself! I’m thinking this will make it much less time consuming to post across platforms, and to remind myself of stuff!

OhLife – daily journaling service -

OhLife is too much fun! Sign up and every day in the evening you’ll get an email asking you to write a little about your day. Just hit reply and write away. It’ll save your entry, and when you go to the site you can export your postings and download them whenever you want. If you want to be better about journaling your everyday life, this is a great way to do it!

What are you doing to get your digital life in order? Are there cool new tools you are using? Share with us in the comments!

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Every time I pick up a recipe card out of Great Aunt Elizabeth’s wooden recipe box, I’m taken back in time. The treasure trove of handwritten recipes she left me are precious to me and a family heirloom.

My oldest daughter will be off to college soon, and I want to send her with a cookbook of all the recipes we cook every day, but no way am I writing all that out on index cards like Aunt Liz! I’m digi-scrapping them!

Even though I’m doing my recipe cards digitally, I still want them to have that personal look. So I’m trying out handwriting fonts. While I haven’t had a font made from my own handwriting (yes, you can do that!), I have found some cute fonts that are either free or inexpensive. But there’s a problem.

Sometimes the spacing of the letters in these fonts is… well… wonky. There will be too much space after one particular letter, or too little space before another, leaving the text looking clumpy and off. Fortunately, Photoshop Elements gives us a super-quick fix for this!

You may know how to adjust the tracking on text through the Character Panel. But what if you just need to change just one space? You could figure out which letter to highlight and use the Character Panel, or you could do this super-quick trick!

Try this: (Photoshop only, sorry Elements folks!)

• Get the Type tool (if you’re not already using it).
• Place your cursor between the two letters where you want to change the spacing.
• Hold down your Alt (Mac: Opt) key and press your left arrow to make the space smaller, or the right arrow to make it bigger!

That’s it!

Look what it did for my recipe title here:

This is also a great method to snuggle up the rest of a word to a larger capital letter like this:

So next time you get a font that just looks a little “off” to you, take a look at the spacing between the letters. If there are just one or two problems you can fix them up quickly with this handy keyboard trick!

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Someone asked me this week what was the big deal about brushes. They were familiar with using them like you would a rubber stamp, but that’s all.

So, I thought I’d put together a little video on one of the ways I use the default brushes in PS. You can do this in PSE too, so check it out:

I’ve got the written instructions in a .pdf (without screenshots) for quick reference. Download it here and keep it in case you forget a step, or come on back and watch the movie.

Happy Scrapping!
Jenn

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