Intro and please HELP

cmittman

Member
Dec 19, 2011
1
0
I'm a retired physician, avid traveler and serious photographer ( see <mitty.smugmug.com>). I have used a netbook while traveling to uploaad my photos and back up to a portable hard drive. I hope to use my new Acer A100 instead for the same functions. I love it already for web surfing and reading my Kindle books. I took some photos using a microSD card, inserted it in Acer and opened photos with RawDroid. I can see the photo files on external SD (both the JPEGS and RAW files), but what do I do next (don't you just love newbies). I'd like to set up a series of folders under a master folder (MyPictures--like in Windows 7) and deposit the folders in other places for safe keeping and to free the space on the tablet so it can accept more photos. Uploading to Picassa seems like a good move. I'd also like to still use my portable hard drive. It would be nice to be able to look at the files on the hard drive, but that is not essential. I don't do any photo processing while I am away on a trip. Thanks for listening to a newby.
 

J515OP

Super Moderator
Staff member
Jan 6, 2011
5,172
899
Hi and welcome. It sounds like you next move is to get a file manager like ES Explorer or Astro. Then you can move the files from the SD card to the hard drive under whatever file system you setup. I'm not sure if your device supports a portable hard drive via usb but if it does, you just reverse the process and move the files off of the hard drive and on to the hard drive. You may also be able to move straight from SD card to hard drive but you will have to test and see if you can do that. If your portable hard drive is hooked up to a pc on the same wifi network as you tablet you should also be able to access the files over the network so that you can view them or move them to and from the tablet without having to hook up the usb drive.
 

Spider

Administrator
Staff member
Mar 24, 2011
15,785
1,813
Hello cmittman, welcome to the forum and congratulations on that new A100. Glad to have you with us as a member of Android Tablets. I think the best place to ask about setting up folders etc for your tablet would be the Acer Iconia A100 section where the owners of A100s are located. So, I'm moving your thread over there so they can help you out. Good luck!
 

BDiddy

Senior Member
Aug 19, 2011
83
11
Hope you're enjoying retirement! Uploading your pics to picasaweb.com (using the Picasa program for Windows on your laptop or desktop) is very convenient, because the pictures will then sync with your Android tablet (on your tablet, check Settings->Accounts & sync, then select your Google account under "Manage accounts." Assuming your Picasa account is linked with your main Google account, you should see "Sync Picasa Web Albums", and your photos should automatically sync. You can view them using the Gallery app. This is fine for casual viewing of relatively low resolution photos, but the main drawback is that Picasaweb only gives you 1GB of free cloud storage--you have to pay for more. So if you want to upload highly detailed non-compressed photos, you'll quickly run out of space online if you don't pay, and I'm not sure the tablet would handle syncing huge photo files.

Taking photos with a microSD card in your camera and then transferring the card to the tablet should work fine, but as J505OP mentioned above, you need a file manager like ES File Explorer or Astro File Manager (both free on the Android Market). Navigating around can be tricky, because the folders have unintuitive names, and part of the tablet's onboard memory is also labeled "sdcard," just to mess you up. Keep the following in mind:

* The microSD card is the folder or directory called "/mnt/external_sd"
* The folder "/mnt/sdcard" (which is also duplicated on my ES File Explorer as "/sdcard"--they're the same folder) is actually the tablet's onboard storage memory--essentially, a big chunk of the 8 GB or 16 GB that was advertised.

If you take photos with your tablet (and unfortunately, the A100's camera is pretty mediocre), you can save the pics directly to the tablet's onboard memory ("/mnt/sdcard/DCIM," represented on the camera app as the camera icon with a superimposed SD card) or the microSD card you inserted ("/mnt/external_sd/DCIM," represented by the icon of the SD card alone).

There are some really cool camera apps for Android phones and tabs that you might want to try: Paper Camera (very cool effects), HDR Camera (high dynamic contrast, takes about 3 successive pics with differing exposures and then combines them to eliminate annoying shadows and retain detail in bright areas), and FX Camera Zoom (lots of useful features including a stability feature that won't take the pic until it senses that the device is stable enough for a clear pic).

Hope this helps. I'm an MD myself--still a ways from retirement, but on some busy days I can't help but daydream about it!
 

bimbamboom

Member
Feb 2, 2012
1
0
Hope you're enjoying retirement! Uploading your pics to picasaweb.com (using the Picasa program for Windows on your laptop or desktop) is very convenient, because the pictures will then sync with your Android tablet (on your tablet, check Settings->Accounts & sync, then select your Google account under "Manage accounts." Assuming your Picasa account is linked with your main Google account, you should see "Sync Picasa Web Albums", and your photos should automatically sync. You can view them using the Gallery app. This is fine for casual viewing of relatively low resolution photos, but the main drawback is that Picasaweb only gives you 1GB of free cloud storage--you have to pay for more. So if you want to upload highly detailed non-compressed photos, you'll quickly run out of space online if you don't pay, and I'm not sure the tablet would handle syncing huge photo files.

Taking photos with a microSD card in your camera and then transferring the card to the tablet should work fine, but as J505OP mentioned above, you need a file manager like ES File Explorer or Astro File Manager (both free on the Android Market). Navigating around can be tricky, because the folders have unintuitive names, and part of the tablet's onboard memory is also labeled "sdcard," just to mess you up. Keep the following in mind:

* The microSD card is the folder or directory called "/mnt/external_sd"
* The folder "/mnt/sdcard" (which is also duplicated on my ES File Explorer as "/sdcard"--they're the same folder) is actually the tablet's onboard storage memory--essentially, a big chunk of the 8 GB or 16 GB that was advertised.

If you take photos with your tablet (and unfortunately, the A100's camera is pretty mediocre), you can save the pics directly to the tablet's onboard memory ("/mnt/sdcard/DCIM," represented on the camera app as the camera icon with a superimposed SD card) or the microSD card you inserted ("/mnt/external_sd/DCIM," represented by the icon of the SD card alone).

There are some really cool camera apps for Android phones and tabs that you might want to try: Paper Camera (very cool effects), HDR Camera (high dynamic contrast, takes about 3 successive pics with differing exposures and then combines them to eliminate annoying shadows and retain detail in bright areas), and FX Camera Zoom (lots of useful features including a stability feature that won't take the pic until it senses that the device is stable enough for a clear pic).

Hope this helps. I'm an MD myself--still a ways from retirement, but on some busy days I can't help but daydream about it!

Hi Bdiddy, you seem quite knowledgable about the Picasa album sync, so let me ask you a question.

I've set up my Picasa account and added a picture to it from my PC. I then noticed the album showed up on the Acer 100 Gallery app. I then tried uploading a picture from the Acer to "drop box". That worked too.

But my question is, how do I get the pictures I take with the Acer to automatically sync with Picasa? Is that possible? I've got all the
sync boxed checked off in Accounts and Sync. And just so you know, I've moved the save location for pictures to my external SD card.

Thanks
 

BDiddy

Senior Member
Aug 19, 2011
83
11
I think the Picasa sync is only one way, from Picasaweb to your tablet. As far as I know, there is no way to directly sync pictures you take with your tablet up to Picasaweb. I did a quick Google search, and found a few other forums where people were having the same problem. I wonder if Google corrected this with Ice Cream Sandwich.
 
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