Gmail, Picasa and Flickr

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I’m a big fan of the Flickr photo sharing and publication service. It is an amazing web application that lets you present your photographs on the web. It uses a tagging system to allow you to easily categorize your photographs. One of the neatest features, is that you can also view photos from other people who use the service, and because of the tagging features, you can easily look for photographs from other people that share the same interests or tags.

But, I’ve always found it a bit tedious to upload images to the service. You can use Flickr’s web based image upload tool or you can use their small Windows application to upload your images. Both methods are extremly inefficient especially if you have alot of photos. The other problem is that if you use their free accounts, you can only upload 10MB worth of images every month. With my Nikon Coolpix 5000 camera, each photo I take is about 2MB in size. This means that I can only upload 5 high quality images per month. But I’m not really interested in uploading high quality images, so I resize my images before I upload. This means going into Fireworks, resizing, saving and uploading. Quite a few steps.

The third way you can get photos to your Flickr account is by using email. Enter Picasa and Gmail. Picasa is a great free photo management tool that lets you organize and perform simple edits and manipulations to your photos.

With the recent release of Picasa 2.0, you can now email directly from this great image management software. When you email from Picasa, you can tell the application to automatically resize your photos before sending them. So uploading to Flickr has become much easier.

Here are the steps:

  • Login to your Flickr account. Near the bottom of the page click on the link that says Upload by Email
  • Copy the email address that is presented to you. This is a personalized email address that you can use to send photos to your Flickr account.
  • Now, open Picasa and click on the Tools>Options… menu.
  • On the Email tab, choose Use my GMail Account then set the picture size (using the slider) to whatever size you want. This is the size that Picasa will scale your image to before sending it.
  • Click the OK button and you’re ready to start sending images to Flickr.
  • Click on the image that you want to upload then click on the Email button near the bottom of the Picasa application window.
  • Picasa will ask you to enter your GMail login details
  • In the To field, enter the email address that Flickr gave you.
  • Enter the title of the picture in the subject line. This is the title that Picasa will use when it displays your picture.
  • Enter the description of the photo in the message area. This is the description that Picasa will use when it displays your picture.
  • Finally, click the Send button and the photo is uploaded to Flickr.

The only limitation with this method is that you cannot tag the image. You will need to login to Flickr to do that.

Happy uploading, and if you want to check out my photos, you can find my photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimrutherford/

Printing SQL Server Database Schema

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I’ve been working with SQL Server 2000 for about 2 months now, and it completely frustrates me that I cannot print table schema from Microsoft’s Enterprise Manager. I’m one of those people who like to have printouts of the table’s I’m working with as it makes it easier for me to generate my SQL statements.

Doing some searching on Google, I found a couple of tools that will print schema, but they wanted at least $59US! So I decided to write my own script and offer it up for free.

The script uses ASP classic, so it will need to run on an IIS server. You will need to modify the script and specify data source/ip address of your SQL Server, choose an Initial Catalog/Database”, and supply a *username and password. When you first run the script in your web browser, you will see a navigation bar along the left side of the page that lists the tables for your selected database. When you click on a table name, the schema for that table will appear. The action of clicking on a table name invokes an xmlhttprequest object to display the table schema. This means that the table list is not being regenerated with each request. It also means that you can click on multiple tables to stack them up! To remove a table from the display, simple click on the table name and it is removed from the DOM.

The Hide Table List link that appears above the list of tables is simply there to hide the table navigation bar when you want to print your table schema. Once you hide the list, you must refresh the browser to bring it back.

So, here is the file. Help yourself and I look forward to any feedback!