Before we set off on our trip I had had thought that I would be able to upload photos to my Picasa site quickly and easily. However, within only a few weeks of our trip starting I discovered that this was not likely to be possible.
At home I make use of Picasa software for managing my photos and uploaded them. As we don’t have a laptop with us, I had worked out how to upload photos directly through the web browser. What I hadn’t accounted for was computers without working USB ports and very slow internet. Of the four hostels we stayed in whilst in Peru only one had a computer with a working USB port. In Sucre, Bolivia, I spent more than 90 minutes in an internet cafe and only managed to upload 17 photos. It was after this experience in Sucre that I decided I had to work something else out!
Fortunately I had had brought a few things along on the trip with me – namely a USB host cable, a USB SD card adapter and my phone (Samsung Galaxy S2).
The bits I had brought with me
Back at the hostel I started researching the best apps for uploading images to Picasa from Android devices. After a while I happened across Tool for Picasa. This app allows me to very quickly select which photos I would like to upload, resizes them and then uploads them to Picasa in the background. I have now uploaded more than 600 photos using this app! The only downside to this app is that I seem unable to set the order of the photos in the online album. There may be a way but I am yet to find it. Instead I have to navigate to the desktop version of the Picasa Web Albums site and do it from there.
All set up
It takes a while for the phone to scan the SD card and find all the images, and the whole process is heavy on the battery, but this has made a massive different in allowing me to keep this blog up to date. All hostels that we have stayed in to date have had free WiFi. The speed of it varies massively but I have always been able to upload photos using this setup whenever I have tried.