Transfer High Quality Pictures from Kodak to Picasa

In this post, I'll let you know on how to automate the transfer of your photos (in original quality) from Kodak to Picasa.

Lately each of us would have heard that Kodak has changed its policies and has mandated to make atleast a minimum purchase every year so that they would maintain your photos in their system. Some of us (including me) would have thought, why should not I move my photos from Kodak to Picasa (which is free as of now). Yes, you could do that in an semi-automated way, by following the steps below. I thought of fully automating it, but the global meltdown has showered a few other important problems on me, which I have to work0ut now!

Okay. Let us get our hand's dirty now. You would need the following, which are all available for free and if you are computer enthusiast you might already have it!

Items needed:

1. Firefox 3.0 or above (http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/)
2. iMacros for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863, Click "Install now" and then select the add-on from the dialog box and click "Install now" button. Restart firefox, once.)

Basic Strategy

1. Get all the photos in a album from Kodak to a directory in your local computer, using macro
2. Upload all the photos to Picasa
3. Repeat the above steps for all your albums

Setup steps

Note: If these steps do not work. Then follow the steps that is mentioned in the youtube video below.

1. Create a file as detailed below (Note: My earlier approach of choosing file based on resolution won't work, as there is another factor [zoom], which could change the cartesian co-ordinates under consideration!. If you don't understand the note, just ignore it, it is written for the sake of the people who post the valuable comments, which made me rethink the whole approach. Thanks anonymous commentors. :-) )

Save the snippet 1 below as "C:\FromKodak\macro1.txt" using notepad.

Snippet 1:
VERSION BUILD=6210326 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
ONDOWNLOAD FOLDER=* FILE=+_{{!NOW:yyyymmdd_hhnnss}} WAIT=YES
CLICK X=[##Number1##] Y=[##Number2##] CONTENT=EVENT:SAVETARGETAS
CLICK X=[##Number3##] Y=[##Number4##]

[##Number##] will be substituted with numbers based on the steps mentioned below.
a. Click "Click Mode" button in the "Rec" , select "Use X/Y position" radio button and click "Ok"
b. Open a new firefox window and visit "http://www.kodakgallery.com/"
c. Enter your E-mail address/mobile number and click "Sign-in"
d. Click "My Photos"
e. Select the album from which you need to download all pictures. You will see picture list in the album
f. Click on the first picture in the picture list
g. Goto "Rec" tab and click "Record. Now we are in the recording mode.
h. Click on "Download high-resolution " link
i. Click on the "next" navigation button
j. Click "Stop" button in the "Rec" tab of iMacros frame
j. Goto "Edit" tab and click "Edit Macro" button. You would see something like this in new iMacros editor window (Say MacroEditWindow).
...
CLICK X=704 Y=569
...
CLICK X=987 Y=159

Now substitute the above four numbers in "c:\FromKodak\macro1.txt". You would get

Snippet 2:

VERSION BUILD=6210326 RECORDER=FX

TAB T=1

ONDOWNLOAD FOLDER=* FILE=+_{{!NOW:yyyymmdd_hhnnss}} WAIT=YES

CLICK X=704 Y=569 CONTENT=EVENT:SAVETARGETAS

CLICK X=987 Y=159

2. Substitute the existing macro in "MacroEditWindow", with content of "Snippet 2".

3. Click "Save & Close"

Now we have created a macro which now can download pictures in an album automatically. Now with just one click you could download all pictures in an album. So if you have 5 albums and each album has 200 pictures (totally 1000 pictures), you just click 5 times, viola your pictures will be in your local drive/disk. Look into steps below for running the macro once for each of the albums.

Look into YouTube video below for more clarity.

Download all pictures in an album to your Computer in three easy steps

1. From logged in KodakGallery.com site opened in Firefox browser, click on the album you wish to download from the album list (How do I do this)

a. Open a new firefox window.

b. Visit "http://www.kodakgallery.com/"

c. Click SignIn

d. Enter your E-mail address/mobile number and password and click "Sign-in"

2. Click on the first picture in the picture list of the album you are interested in.
3. Enter the number of photos you are yet to download in the "Max" textbox and click "Play (Loop)" button.

Where are my saved photos?

1. Click "Options" button in "Edit" tab

2. Click "Paths" tab in the "Options dialog

3. Look into "Folder Downloads" textbox value. That is the folder where-in you have all your files.

Tip: After everytime the macro is run, create a new folder and move all the harvested photos into the new folder. This way you could keep your photos organized by folders. Without doing this, all your album photos will be in a single folder and it might be a headache later to sort them out.

Now that you have got all the files in your local drive/disk, you could move it to Picasa as usual.

Lesson learnt:

The lesson learnt from KodakGallery policy change is that, use online services just to share media files and information. Things that are closer to your heart, should be closer to you. I mean, have back-ups on optical disks and you will not be worried, about the policy changes.

Any issues or do you want to share something? - post as comment
Feel free to reach me, if things does not work, or you would like to know how to do write the macro and retrieve the photos from KodakGallery yourself, post your requests through comments.