Reader Digest lists 10 ways to look a little less crappy in those pictures.

Here’s five of their hints that I like — visit the RD site for the rest.

1. Focus your eyes just slightly above the camera lens, move your face forward a bit, and tip down your chin.

2. Put your tongue behind your teeth and smile, which will relax your face.

3. Keep your arms by your side—but not glued there. To look natural, they should be a little away from your body.

5. As a rule, avoid patterns.

7. Practice the classic model pose: Turn your body three quarters of the way toward the camera, with one foot in front of the other and one shoulder closer to the photographer. When you face forward, your body tends to look wider.

Image by confusedvision via Flickr

The marketing hype for digital cameras always stresses how many megapixels a camera has, the usual “bigger is better” sort of argument. 

Thanks to a gizmodo article, I now understand that all pixels are not created equally.  It seems that small cameras and mobile phones likely have small pixels and the bigger digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera have bigger pixels.  Bigger pixels are able to more accurately capture and display colors.  Less bigger pixels will probably yield a better digital image than more smaller pixels.  

I’ll take this logic to explain why my zilla-pixel mobile phone camera doesn’t take a better picture than my slightly elderly Canon Rebel XT DSLR.

Read the gizmodo.com explanation.

I’ve happy to report that at this week’s MacWorld, Google has released a beta of their superb free photo organizer and retoucher, Picasa. 

Picasa was available first on Windows, then curiously on Linux, all before the Mac.

My own first use and other reports show that the Mac implementation of Picasa is both very feature-true to the Windows version and seems faster than Apple iPhoto which since included with a Mac has always been the top choice for Photo organizing on that platform.

I could say that having Picasa now available for the Mac eliminates on the few remaining deficits in the Mac vs. PC debate, but it’s probably more accurate to say, having Picasa for the Mac eliminates one of the last reasons for using Parallels or VMware Fusion to  run Windows on a Mac.

From the Google Press Release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

• A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
• A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes – and repair old photos
• A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
• Smart auto-cropping that guides user

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users’ iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows — and we’ll be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.

Download Picasa for Mac (beta)

Picasa for Mac running on my laptop.

Everyone knows about “red-eye” in pictures of people and now most digital cameras even correct for it right in the camera, but what about those spooky glowing eyes of your pets?

Sandra, my SO, writes about dogs, sansanpups.com.  Besides the shameless plug, the relevancy is that people are always sending her pictures of their dogs.  The dogs in most of the pictures look like refugees from “The Night of the Living Dead”-pet edition.  See our dog, Kaley, above.  Pet eyes have a reflective quality that, well, reflects back the light from the flash in an even more eerie way than the red-eye in humans.

What to do? What to do?

The easiest way to fix your pet photos is also free.  I’ve mentioned picnik.com before, it’s a very useful online site for repairing and enhancing digital photos.

What sets it apart from the rest is while attempting to fix your pet’s glowing eyes you usually have to play with the normal red-eye settings or go to elaborate steps using something way high-end like Adobe Photoshop, while picnik.com actually allows you a furball option for correcting your pet’s eyes.

Here’s the sequence.

Visit picnik.com

Upload your pet’s pic

Within the Edit tab, choose Red-eye and

there, lo and behold, you’re given a choice between human and furball.

Furball will work great at making your pet’s glowing eyes, stop glowing.

When you’re finished, save your results.

Kaley corrected below.

More examples after the jump.

Here goes:

1. How to Raise a Charitable Child? – I’m happy this post was popular. I try to pepper the website with a few articles other than technology, especially on raising great kids since I’ve started so late, myself.  Is it off topic?  Not if I define the topic.
2. Big Boy Competition for Google Docs and Zoho Office Coming from Microsoft – Pretty straight news with a snarky title.  Microsoft moving some of Office to the web is consistent with stories about web services that we normally cover.
3. You Tube Challenge: Make an Actually Good Video – The Onion -  Straight satire.  Very funny and on-topic to the extent that I’ve found humor in the mania for watching YouTube before. Do readers like satire better than straight articles? We do get our news from Jon Stewart.
4. Making Picasa and Flickr Play Nicely Together – Straight “how to” article, useful if you’ve tried to make these two work together.
5. Our Two Worst Posts of October and one (dis)honorable mention – Enquiring Mimes Last month we picked our worst posts of October. Readers must like to share our humiliation. Q:Write more bad articles? Probably.
6. XMind Mind-mapping is Now Open Source A short review and download link of a good previously, for sale, now free tool. I like free things.
7. Read It Later, A Must-have Firefox Plug-in Good short review for a Firefox plug-in, if you’re using Firefox. Our November stats say that your probably were using Firefox more than any other browser. More plug-in info?

Tell us what you liked and hated in the comments.

Ideally you would store all you digital pictures on your Windows computer in Picasa and then be able to automatically upload them to your Flickr account.  Out of the box this process takes several steps.

If you’d like to make this workflow painless you need to do about five minutes of installing and configuring and then your uploading will be a breeze.

We’ll assume you’ve already downloaded Picasa, if not, get the version 3 beta, it’s great.  Got an account on Flickr? No, go to Flickr.com and sign up with your Yahoo! username and password.

Next download and install FlickrUploadr.  This is an official Flickr application that let’s you upload and configure bulk digital images from your PC.  Get it here.

Okay, now the last step.  Download a little piece of “glue” called “picasa2flickr”, sounds right, doesn’t it?  Download and click on this magic piece of glue will install a new button in the control panel at the bottom of your Picasa screen called “send to Flickr”.

So this is the way the magic will happen, you will choose the picture/s in Picasa that you want to upload to Flickr by selecting the picture/s, then press “Send to Flickr” which activates FlickrUploadr which will give you the opportunity to add titles, descriptions and keywords to you picture.  You’ll press “Upload Pictures” and when the pictures have been uploaded to Flickr, you’ll be given one more  chance to see and manipulate them online before they appear in your Flickr account.

See the entire sequence after the jump

In Picasa on the PC

Press Send to Flickr Button

Flickr Uploadr Screen

Your Pictures are on Flickr

This screen is optional, only if you want to further manipulate titles

On Flickr - Total time 24 secs

Related articles

• Microsoft’s New Photo Sharing Service: Live Photos

Working forever, as it seems, in tech marketing, I feel like I’ve spent my career (an exaggeration) looking at image files like jpegs, sorting them, looking at them again — just trying to find the right image for the story I was trying to tell.

I’ve used tons (an exaggeration) of Windows image viewers.

I’m always on the lookout for new viewers, here’s one and I like very much.  FastStone MaxView really is one of the fastest Windows Image Viewers I’ve ever used and fast is important when you’re flipping through large clip art collections or all of your digital pictures.

MaxViewer is free for non-commercial use — $19.95 for commercial use.

MaxViewer has more to recommend it besides just fast viewing.  Here’s a partial Feature List from the FastStone site:

• Full screen viewer with Select – Zoom support
• Clear and customizable magnifier
• View detailed image information including EXIF metadata
• Slideshow with 150+ transitional effects and MP3/WAV/MIDI/WMA background music support
• Lossless JPEG rotation and crop
• Internal editor that adds texts, arrowed-lines, highlights to images
• Undo, Redo and Mouse Wheel support
• Common image formats support, including loading of JPEG, JPEG2000, GIF, BMP, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, CUR, TGA and saving to JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, BMP, PNG, TGA
• Digital camera RAW formats support, including CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF and DNG

Download FastStone MaxView [via lifehacker]

FlickrDown falls clearly in that category.  It’s a free Windows utility that allows you to download complete Flickr photostreams, sets or groups.  It’s a great way to backup your own Flickr account or to grab other public sets or groups that you really enjoy.  If you want to download private pictures you’ll have to authorize their download through Flickr (you’ll be prompted).

The program allows you to search Flickr by username, e-mail address, tags, or groups.

The program needs Microsoft .NET 2.0 to operate.  If you haven’t installed that, there is a link to the download from the FlickrDown webpage.

Download FlickrDown [via LifeRocks2.0]

Related articles

• FlickrDown lets you archive all your Flickr photos

If you want to put your digital pictures on the Internet and share them, they are plenty of ways – Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums.

Here’s a different service with a twist.  PixnPals let’s you organize and share your pictures around events.

I can imagine this as a potentially great idea and lots of fun.  Remember the last wedding or picnic that you went to when everyone was snapping digital cameras?  Why not put your pictures on PixnPals and invite other people to the same event to upload their pictures.  The results would be fun to look at the event from many different perspectives.

While I’m not sure I’d use it as a replacement for Flickr or Picasa Web Albums, both of which I really like, the site is free and very easy to use and can be a great place to collaborate on sharing memories.

The name PixnPals might be a little hokey, but everyone can’t have something really clever like Enquiring Mimes.

Give PixnPals a try [via mashable]

We probably don’t provide enough help for those brave souls that have decided to use Linux as their desktop – these pioneers don’t use the Mac and certainly not Windows.

Unfortunately for these trend setters they’re also often forgotten by publishers of consumer-oriented software.  Today we’re glad to report that the Google team has made the new Picasa 3 available to Linux users. 

Our previous story on Picasa 3 beta.

The update provides much of what is available to the Windows crowd but does not include the rather cool slideshow movie format. 

Limitations in the Linux version come mostly from the rather quirky Wine technology that Picasa used to port Picasa to Linux.

Download Picasa for Linux [via webmonkey]

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• Google’s Picasa for Linux catches up to Windows