How to enjoy YouTube automatic screen captures

We often need to make screen captures of the videos we watch in YouTube and we don’t have any program that can do it, such as WinSnap and HyperSnap-dx. You can get through this issue with YouTube automatic screen captures.

YouTube makes these screen captures with the aim of using them in its own portal as a preview image to identify the video or to display in the player while the video is not being played. These 4 automatic captures are available in different sizes depending on the use you want to give them.

We can access this tool very easily. First, we must extract the ID of the video from its URL. To do so, we must select the 11 characters that come after http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.

Finally, there are some default addresses for making captures:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/……….. /0.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/……….. /1.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/……….. /2.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/……….. /3.jpg

We must replace the dotted line with the video ID in the previous addresses and we will get a fast screen capture in YouTube.

Image viewers round up: Picasa, ACDSee and JetPhoto Studio. Which one to pick?

With the rise of digital cameras, users were in need of application to manage and view their photos since it can be quite messy to store loads and loads of photos. We can properly organize our photos and images by creating albums and view in different ways, plus we can add some effects and post them on the web –among other things. The three contenders are: Picasa, ACDSee and JetPhoto Studio.

Let´s have a look at some of the features of these three popular image viewers. Let´s get started with Picasa, another great creation from Google which –as well as other software from Google- surprised users around the world and quickly gained worldwide popularity due to its user-friendly interface and its wide range of features. Among the multiple possibilities Picasa delivers for managing digital photographs, it´s important to highlight the possibility of importing image from several devices including digital cameras. We can also create slideshow presentations from a group of selected images, record a Picasa CD/DVD gift and make backups.
Moreover, this program has a photo editor of its own and a video player, though they have basic functions and lack advanced user features.

Passing on to JetPhoto Studio, it´s a viewer which doesn´t feature a fast image viewing (and it should) but presents a fully-features slideshow function. Among other things, JetPhoto Studio organizes your photos by notes you add, keyword tags you choose, camera EXIF information, by time, and by geographical location. Searching, filtering or sorting is done using this information.

All in all, we can say that Picasa is the fastest image viewer. In fact, many users have replaced Picasa over the default Windows image viewer.

All viewers nowadays feature several image editing effects such as: brightness and contrast adjustment, red-eye, lightning, blur and other tools and effects.
Once again, Picasa stands out by allowing users to design and print beautiful photo collages, create fun video slideshows, add photo text or view your favorite photos on your desktop or screensaver.

You can upload images to the web with any of these viewers (with Picasa you can even add geo-tags to your photos so that you can remember exactly where they’re from using Google Maps) though JetPhoto Studio is also an efficient desktop photo organizer for flickr users. You can edit tags, descriptions, geo data for photos or sets of photos on your computer and then you can post your organized pictures onto Flickr with just one click.

With most image viewers, you also have the possibility of importing image from several devices (such as mobiles) including digital cameras. The same goes for slideshow presentations which can be created from a group of selected images and then burn them into a CD or DVD. In this case ACDSee is the winner. You can use ACDSee’s Burn Basket to create a CD or DVD of your photos and files, or to create specially formatted discs that you can watch on your television.

All things considered, Picasa as well as JetPhoto Studio and ACDSee are all great image viewers and managers. Still, Picasa and ACDSee are both equally good. For those used to organizing images and photos, Picasa delivers an amazing alternative combining functionality, simplicity and web integration. ACDSee on the other hand, provides more features and tools for advanced users.

Google Earth

Whoever thinks of Google Earth as a simple software map is mistaken. Nowadays, this application is one of the most complete software for the 3D Planet´s images visualization, offering satellite images and different type of maps with the help the powerful Google search engine through the original stream technology.

The difference between the cartographic visualization software and Google Earth is that it features an original user-friendly interface: our planet. From this satellite space image of it, we will be able to see any place of the world, turning and rotating it using the mouse.

The most attractive option that Google Earth offers might be the possibility of making incredible zoom in to any region of the world map obtaining satellite images with different resolution levels and details as soon as we zoom in the region.
In this way, Google Earth allows a top-notch online view of cities, and even buildings and streets, but their quality may not be as good on low-end PCs due to technical streaming requirements. It´s also worth mentioning that highest image quality is available on most important cities and metropolis.

Interaction with the interface is quite simple. The sidebar is completely easy-to-use for those users not familiarized with geographic applications.
Just enter the name of the location you want to view, and Google Earth will take you to that spot in a matter of seconds. Hardware components as well as broadband will depend on the loading time as well as its visualization.

Google Earth presents an interesting feature to view different thematic “layers” providing additional information regarding the selected location, as well as climatic conditions in the area, travel services, photo galleries and more.
Another aspect to take into account is that Google Earth enables users to add their own information such as photographs and text.

To sum up, Google Earth stands as an essential application for cultural, educative and geographic purposes, and its success lies on the use of new satellite image visualization technologies. By adding new features on each release, Google Earth will rapidly become an indispensable tool for any PC user.

DAEMON Tools

If you are tired of burning disc to see ISO files content (many of the internet download, for example Pc games), then DAEMON Tools is the perfect option for you. This tool enables you to use your CD/DVD images as if they were already burned to CD/DVD.

With DAEMON Tools you can back up your physical CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray discs into “virtual discs” or so called “disc image” files, which run directly on your hard drive. You can also work with images created by other burning programs! DAEMON Tools supports variety of image types (ISO, NRG, CCD, CUE, CDI, MDS, B5T, B6T, BWT, ISZ o PDI).

When installing DAEMON Tools it will be run on resident modality and its icon will appear on the task bar located on the right of the Windows menu. Its icon can be recognized as a thunder inside a circle. By clicking the right button a menu will be opened to access its functions.

The first thing we need to do is to create a virtual unit; “Add a new virtual ID drive” by clicking on the icon that has a plus sign located in the central part of the tool bar. Once created, we will be able to access an image file by searching it from the window that will appear when clicking on the first button to the left of the top bar. After finding it, click on open and it will be loaded as a virtual content. Other options that DAEMON Tools offers, is the possibilities of see “recent image files use” and a catalogue of image files. We will be able to recognize our files by the logo of DAEMON Tools.

Once you have the file loaded, it will be ready to use. If we open a window form windows explorer to visualize our units, we will find our virtual disc among them. We can access it by double clicking on it and work with it as if it were any other unit on our pc.

We can now manage our files, copy, eliminate them, remove, compress, etc. We can also access those auto-run files without burning a CD.As long as we have DAEMON Tools enable, our virtual disc will be as drive unit.

DAEMON Tools allows offer another functions as the image file creation to burn them in a CD. The process we need to follow is basically to access its most important option: access the image file content from a virtual disc without creating a physical disc.

Google Earth

Whoever thinks of Google Earth as a simple software map is mistaken. Nowadays, this application is one of the most complete software for the 3D Planet´s images visualization, offering satellite images and different type of maps with the help the powerful Google search engine through the original stream technology.

The difference between the cartographic visualization software and Google Earth is that it features an original user-friendly interface: our planet. From this satellite space image of it, we will be able to see any place of the world, turning and rotating it using the mouse.

The most attractive option that Google Earth offers might be the possibility of making incredible zoom in to any region of the world map obtaining satellite images with different resolution levels and details as soon as we zoom in the region.

In this way, Google Earth allows a top-notch online view of cities, and even buildings and streets, but their quality may not be as good on low-end PCs due to technical streaming requirements. It´s also worth mentioning that highest image quality is available on most important cities and metropolis.

Interaction with the interface is quite simple. The sidebar is completely easy-to-use for those users not familiarized with geographic applications.
Just enter the name of the location you want to view, and Google Earth will take you to that spot in a matter of seconds. Hardware components as well as broadband will depend on the loading time as well as its visualization.

Google Earth presents an interesting feature to view different thematic “layers” providing additional information regarding the selected location, as well as climatic conditions in the area, travel services, photo galleries and more.
Another aspect to take into account is that Google Earth enables users to add their own information such as photographs and text.

To sum up, Google Earth stands as an essential application for cultural, educative and geographic purposes, and its success lies on the use of new satellite image visualization technologies. By adding new features on each release, Google Earth will rapidly become an indispensable tool for any PC user.

Feel like trying new ways to enhance your digital images but image editing and photo retouching software like Photoshop is too complex for you? Do photos from your trips look dark? PhotoFiltre Studio provides the tools for all sorts of photographic retouching jobs. It’s the ideal application for experimenting with digital photos, easily and without issues.

Photofiltre

PhotoFiltre Studio adds the “Auto select layer” and “Display layer number” options to the Preferences menu. Together with the rest of the tools and features included in the program, such additions help make this application comparable to the very biggest names in the world of digital imaging. PhotoFiltre Studio features Red Eye correction which can be enabled with the Retouch Tool by selecting the part of the picture to soften. Red Eye removal is very easy to use.

Of course, it has all the traditional basic editing tools, such as: rotation and cropping, lighting changes, text or frames – and everything is clearly displayed in the tool bar at the top of the interface. With PhotoMasque you can create advanced effects of contour and transparency on your imagesby using preset masks.

These masks are greyscale images, where white is the transparency colour, while opacity increases as the shades of gray become darker. Black means complete opacity. PhotoMasque comes with several basic masks to inspire you to create your own masks.

It also features a tool bar on the right-hand side of the screen, where you can choose the range of colours, clone a portion of the photo, work with different geometric shapes, and use various different tools like the spray can, magic wand, etc. PhotoFiltre Studio uses two types of vectorial selections. The first type uses automatic shapes (rectangle, ellipse, triangle, rhombus, rounded rectangle). The second type corresponds to the lasso and polygon. They both allow a customized form by drawing a shape by hand or using a series of lines. Every selection can be saved into a separate file, to be used later on.

PhotoFiltre Studio features the more than 100 filters to discover and experience, arranged in various categories, are: artistic, visual, deformation, mosaic, puzzle, texture and blur-effect filters. PhotoFiltre Studio also offers the possibility to handle all of Photoshop’s 8BF-type filters.

Other highlights of the program include: the ability to process several images simultaneously, import images from a TWAIN device, and work with the majority of photographic image formats (BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, Targa, PNG, RLE).

Though PhotoFiltre Studio is only in English, we can find many downloadable translations from the program´s website.

PhotoFiltre Studio  is available in English and also has translations in several other languages, available from the developer’s web site. This versatile, well-laid out program is free of charge for private or educational use, so there’s no excuse not to give it a try right away. If you´re inexperienced in the field of image editing and photo retouch, PhotoFiltre Studio is the perfect alternative to start practice.

Download PhotoFiltre

If you want to have fun creating new images or retouch those favourite photos that mean so much to you, to a professional standard, you should take a look at GIMP. If you´re tired of complex image editing and photo retouching such as Photoshop, The Gimp is the perfect alternative for beginners and professionals alike.

The Gimp

The Gimp is an excellent application – used by graphic designers, photographers, and generally anyone who works with images – lets you carry out all sorts of tasks with graphics: manipulate them, retouch them, and even create multimedia presentations with them. Although it has less plug-ins and features compared to the market leading graphics editor, Photoshop, this new version of The The Gimp can be enhanced with more than 100 plug-ins. It also has support for working on an “unlimited” number of images simultaneously, it has a built-in database for calling internal The Gimp functions from other, external applications, and it comes with advanced scripting capabilities.

The Gimp also features Script-Fu, the first The Gimp scripting extension.Extensions are separate processes that communicate with the The Gimp in the same way that plug-ins do. The distinction is that extensions don’t require an active image to operate on, instead extending The Gimp ’s functionality.

Its interface is divided into modules, which are arranged into blocks of features (channels and paths; tool options menu; etc.). If you can get used to this system handling the program can be an extremely dynamic and practical experience. But if you can’t, you may have problems. Among the tools on offer are ones to rotate images, change their size (and resample), crop, and make mirror effects, as well as convert the images between different formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, PS, TIF, TGA and XPM).

Each task requires a different environment and The Gimp allows you to customize the view and behavior the way you like it. Starting from the widget theme, allowing you to change colors, widget spacing and icon sizes to custom tool sets in the toolbox. The interface is modulated into so called docks, allowing you to stack them into tabs or keep them open in their own window.

Among The Gimp features, you have the possibility of making your jpegs smaller without changing the pixel width of the images; you can actually change the weight of the image a lot. Let’s say you turned your brand new digital camera to get a vertical shot, now some of your images are on their sides, but fortunately you can rotate them quickly and easily. You can also use layers and masks, as in most professional design programs.

The file format support ranges from the common likes of JPEG (JFIF), GIF, PNG, TIFF to special use formats such as the multi-resolution and multi-color-depth Windows icon files. The architecture allows extending GIMP’s format capabilities with a plug-in.

In their own words, The Gimp is the answer to the current lack of free (or at least reasonably priced) image manipulation software for GNU/Linux and UNIX in general.

The The Gimp is open-source and free software, and is without a doubt a great choice when it comes to editing images for the web or for personal use, thanks to its ease-of-use and handy features. You’ll soon find yourself getting to grips with it. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Download GIMP

The widespread success of iPod -the mobile device developed by apple- lies in its capacity to play audio and video as well viewing pictures. In this case we´ll deal with CopyTrans Photo, an application made for copying images to the iPod quickly and easily.

CopyTrans Photo

One of the many features an iPod delivers is the possibility to take all your photos with you, so that you can see them wherever you want and share them with all your friends. In order to do this, we need a program to manipulate the images and load them into your iPod. A tool that can be of great help is CopyTrans Photo.

This original application will enable you to work with images for you to copy them from your PC to your iPod or vice versa. Moreover, it allows you to create, rename and delete photo albums both from to the PC and the iPod. You can also make backups, create slideshows with your photos, and synchronize your PC with your iPod and much, much more.

CopyTrans Photo delivers an exclusively designed interface to transfer photos from the PC to your iPod easily.The interface features drag and drop support to copy photos between your iPod and your computer with a single click creating image lists quickly and easily.

CopyTrans Photo allows navigating through thumbnails enabling you to manage files quickly and guarantying optimal image quality when converting files. This easy-to-use interface allows all types of users to run the program, both experts and less experienced users concerning iPods and copying files from the PC to a mobile device.

CopyTrans Photo supports all iPod models: iPod: iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Video, iPod Photo, iPod Mini and iPod Shuffle, as well as supporting the brand new multimedia mobiles from Apple: iPhone and iPhone 3G.

Another thing worth mentioning is the support for several image formats, among which we can find the most popular ones such as: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TGA.

Another aspect worth mentioning is CopyTrans Photo´s size, it´s only 1mb! This allows users to run the application on low-end systems.

The only issue stated by some users is that a few antivirus don´t recognize the program and identify it as a “malicious file”. Moreover, there are some un-installation issues and some minor problems when installing a new version.

This handy tool to manage images and synchronize your PC with your iPod is what we had expected, thanks to its simplicity, speed and overall quality.

In short, CopyTrans Photo presents as an efficient tool to manage images and sync the PC to the iPod.

Thanks its user-friendly interface, speed and quality, you´ll get optimal results in
spite of limitations characteristic of its version.

Download CopyTrans Photo

Windows Live Messenger comes with many features and options for customizing the program according to your personal tastes. The good thing about this is that, as well as being able to choose from the elements provided by the program, you can also import new items such as winks or emoticons or customize them make instant messaging a more pleasant experience.

Windows Live Messenger's winks and emoticons

For example, you can add an unlimited number of emoticons to your copy of the program. Not only can you choose between those images offered by the program, but you can also import any photo that you have on your computer and set it to be the image to display. Lastly, Messenger allows you to download winks, which can also be used during chats. This last feature is perhaps the most fun since it displays, within the chat window, an animation to both you and the contact to whom you’re talking.

How to add an emoticon

Once Windows Live Messenger is running, open the “Tools” menu on the menu bar at the top of the screen. From the menu that opens, select “Emoticons…”. Now click the “Create…” button.

Now, select “Find Image…” and browse through your PC until you find the image that you want to set as an emoticon (an image that you already have, or one that you’ve downloaded from the Internet especially for this purpose). Next, enter the keyboard shortcut that will be used to trigger the emoticon. From now on, during a conversation, the emoticon in question will appear every time you type in this shortcut. Lastly, and optionally, give a name to the emoticon. Once you’ve gone through these three steps, click “OK” and the emoticon will automatically be created.

So now, when you’re chatting to a friend, the emoticon will appear alongside the others one that are shown when you click “Select an emoticon” in the chat window.

Windows Live Messenger also allows you to take an emoticon that another contact uses during a conversation and add it to your collection. To do so, right-click on the emoticon and, from the menu that will appear, select “Add…”. At this point, a window will open:

In the field labelled “Keyboard shortcut”, enter the code you want to use to trigger this emoticon, and enter its name in the bottom field. Now, after clicking “Add”, the new emoticon will be saved with the others.

How to change the window background

For this task, once again open the “Tools” menu and select the “Backgrounds…” option. Here you will see the available backgrounds that come with the program. You can either choose one of these or use the “Browse…” option to use any other image that you have stored on your computer. Once you’ve chosen the image that you like the most, click “Set” and the program will do the rest.

How to change the display picture

Once again, open the “Tools” menu and, this time, click “Change display picture”.

Here you can also choose between one of the images that comes with the program or, using the “Browse…” button, you can select any image stored on your PC. Once again, choose your favourite image, click “OK”, and this image will now be displayed in the chat window every time you have a conversation.

How to download winks

For this job, select the option “Select a wink” the next time you have a chat window open. This will open up a menu.

Now, click on one of the winks that appears in the upper part of this pop-up screen, under the heading “Featured winks”. Your chosen wink will be automatically downloaded and will appear alongside all the other winks that are already available to send to your contacts.

Windows Live Messenger is extremely easy to manipulate and set up. Almost all aspects can be customized to suit your needs. Take a pick and customize all the features according to your liking. As for the rest, continue chatting and share stuff with your friends.

Picasa is an application that enables us to organize all our pictures and photos in one place. You can also turn photos into movies, collages, slideshows and more . For this reason we introduce you to Picasa, the easiest easy way to find, edit, and share your photos.

Picasa

Thanks to the boom of digital cameras, a large amount of images and photos can be stored in your Mac, requiring a tool to manage and easily access them. Currently, Picasa may be the most used application to do it due to its wide range of features, web support and of course, its simplicity.

When running Picasa for the time, we can notice that most of its features are automated since a search box is provided to look for image files such as JPG, GIF, TIF, PSD, PNG, BMP, RAW, GIF and PNG, as well as video formats MPG, AVI, ASF, WMV and MOV.

All the content found will be organized by the so-called “Library View”, where albums and folders are added so we can modify them to our liking, specifying which images or folders should be displayed. Another interesting feature is managing labels, enabling users to group and organize images according to their own personal taste.

Among the multiple possibilities Picasa delivers for managing digital photographs, it´s important to highlight the possibility of importing image from several devices including digital cameras. We can also create slideshow presentations from a group of selected images, record a Picasa CD/DVD gift and make backups. Moreover, this program has a photo editor of its own and a video player, though they have basic functions and lack advanced user features.

Another feature worth mentioning is Picasa´s own album manager called “Web Albums”, enabling users to upload their favorite photos and videos. In case you are a blog administrator within this website, you can also add photos to Blogger straight from the program. As for name tags, we can include “geotags” (geographical tags) letting you match your photos to a specific location using Google Earth.

Picasa features a wide range of configuration options for advanced users familiarized with photos managing and in-depth functions.

In short, for those used to organizing images and photos, Picasa delivers an amazing alternative combining functionality, simplicity and web integration.