Adding field area to photos for text.

[Windy in Kansas]

I am wanting to add a field banner area to photos so that I can enter identification text.
It must remain present during printing of such, not just a tag that disappears once the cursor is no longer over it.

What would work for that? I asked my daughter if Paint would do that and she sure didn't know how but had never tried it either.

I prefer simple. I am doing some sorting and editing with Picasa but don't think it has anything like that to use unless there is an advanced feature which there may be.

Thanks. On again later today but can't answer any questions until then.

[Windy in Kansas]

I just learned that Picasa has a text adding feature, but it does not provide for a solid field to add the text too. It instead adds the lettering over the image which can be difficult to read unless done in color. I'm wanting to deal mainly in black and white.

[PNP Katahdins]

Windy, I use Ultimate Paint for sheep photos to email to potential buyers, and put the sheep's ID on it. Lettering can be any color or size including black or white. A variety of fonts is available but I usually use Arial Bold in black or white, depending on the background. You may be able to put in a solid filled box and put the text on top of that, but I haven't tried it.

Free download from http://www.ultimatepaint.com/

Peg

[HermitJohn]

Something like this?

I used mtpaint, small image editor that is included with Puppy Linux. Just made a white field in the pic, then applied black text. Can do it with any combination colors you want. Or did you want to extend the pic with the tag area outside the original pic? What I did was on the existing pic.

I assume you could do it with one of the free windows image editors too??

[Windy in Kansas]

HJ, that is precisely what I want to do, not extend the photo although for some that would be nice too.

I expect it is just a matter of finding the right editor to use and then learning to use it.

Thanks to both of you.

[HermitJohn]

I could give step by step instruction how to do it with mtpaint but sure whatever small windows image editor you use, though simular, isnt going to be identical. The only windows image editor I've had any dealings with was that horrible paint thing that came with win98 and winXP. Then only cause I was at friends house and they wanted me to help them resize an avatar pic on their computer. I think M$ intentionally made it a pain to use just so they could "upgrade" you to one that they sold for more money. Probably some free small third party windows image editor much like mtpaint out there.

Course you could just boot from a live Puppy cd..... I am using Puppy 4.3.1, but assume mtpaint is still standard on newer versions of Puppy. I am on dialup and just havent had a reason to upgrade to newer version. I get to library again, have to download newer Puppy iso just to try it.

[HermitJohn]

http://lmadhavan.com/software/fotografix/

This a good little windows image editing program I think. It however works bit different than mtpaint so I still havent got how to select a section and fill it with a color. Adding text however is just as easy as mtpaint.

This is powerful little program though and can run as an executable file in windows without changing/adding any registry entry. That is always a good sign of a quality program. And of course its freeware.

[HermitJohn]

Ok, dont think I have proper finesse method of using fotografix to do this but I bludgeoned it into submission and got the result:

[Windy in Kansas]

Hey, that's pretty neat.

I have my photos in Picasa and since discovering they have a text adding feature I am trying to read more to see if it can be added to a solid color field. Picnik editing is within Picasas and their text was a lot easier to read and can be relocated simply by clicking and dragging. Still exploring and reading.

[Cabin Fever]

I do the same thing that HJ shows but using Powerpoint. I them save the Powerpoint slide as a jpeg and upload the photo (jpeg) to Photobucket.

[HermitJohn]

Originally Posted by Windy in Kansas

Hey, that's pretty neat.

I have my photos in Picasa and since discovering they have a text adding feature I am trying to read more to see if it can be added to a solid color field. Picnik editing is within Picasas and their text was a lot easier to read and can be relocated simply by clicking and dragging. Still exploring and reading.

At least if nothing else you now know you can do it in windows with very small freeware program. Fotografix is only like 400k download and could be run from a floppy if your computer still had a floppy drive. Nothing to actually install, its just an exe file.

Is Picasa part of google?

[Windy in Kansas]

Originally Posted by HermitJohn

Is Picasa part of google?

Yes, Picasas is a Google product. They also have Picnik for photo editing, etc.