Tag Archives: Windows Tricks

Facebook, Facebook Tricks, Fotobounce, Photography, Social Networking

Fotobounce – downloading a Facebook photo album

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I’ve written about Fotobounce before. If you share photos from one social media site to another, Fotobounce is a great tool. It allows you to download complete Facebook photo albums to your computer. What you do with them after that is your business, I guess, but you really should ask for permission if you are going to share anything that isn’t your own. Here is an explanation about what Fotobounce is: Fotobounce Made Simple   (The original post wasn’t named that but it sounds good, right?)

While Fotobounce is a cool app, the actual downloading of albums can get tricky because of the way the instructions are worded. In this post I’ll try to help you figure out the odd English that they use in the selection process. Before I forget, Fotobounce is available here: http://fotobounce.com/

1. Download and install Fotobounce…duh!

2. Open the program and head over to Facebook. Sign in to Facebook with Fotobounce. You’ll have to allow it access but, according to the makers, they don’t save your password. You can always remove the access after you’ve downloaded the albums that are of interest.

3. Find the album you want to download. You have to sort through your friends, your likes and your acquaintances to find the right album(s) but that’s pretty basic.

4. Once you find the album, right click it. You’ll see the ‘Download’ button. Click it and the following menu pops up:

Choose where you want the album to be downloaded.
I've selected Events by clicking on it but I haven't started the download.

5. In this menu, you are choosing the main folder for the download. If you click ‘Select album’, Fotobounce will start the download to, in this case, Events. That’s not what I want. I want to create a sub-folder and then maybe a sub-sub-folder. Let’s do that. We’ll make a sub-folder inside of Events.

6. Click New Album. Fotobounce will show you a new album dialogue, as pictured below, and it will have the same name as the album has on Facebook. We don’t want that. We need to sort out the downloaded albums according to whose they were on Facebook, right?

Make a new album in Fotobounce
Type the new name of the album in the box and hit Enter.

 

7. Instead of Profile Pictures, I want to name my new album ‘Joe Nemechek’. (Joe and I are lookalikes to the point that I get stopped in stores. If I ever headed South and wore a NASCAR jacket then I’m sure I’d eat free wherever I went.) Type in whatever name you want and hit the Enter key. A new album will be created and Fotobounce will give you a notice at the top of the page.

8. Once you’ve found your new folder, click on it and you’ll see the same menu window come up same as before, giving you the option to Select that album or make a New album inside of it. This time you can leave the name the same, if you want. The default name is the same name as it was on Facebook.

9. If that name is fine, click on the Select Album button and Fotobounce will download the album inside of the album that you just created.

This sounds pretty simple, right? It’s not. Here’s the problem, as I see it. When I see the words ‘Select album’, I expect to get a choice. Instead of the normal ‘OK” that everyone else uses, Fotobounce uses ‘Select album’ as the button that starts the download. Unless you make a folder or a folder within a folder, Fotobounce will happily download your albums into the same directory. Good luck trying to figure that out when you’ve got more than a few albums in your collection. You have to create new albums if you are ever going to figure out which album is which. Sure, you could to all of this within Windows Explorer but it should be a one-step process or the wording should be a bit clearer. That’s what I think, anyway.

Fotobounce does a lot more than simply saving albums in Facebook. Check it out. I’ve just scratched the surface here.

Thanks for reading!

Computers, Troubleshooting, Windows, Windows Secrets

Lost Desktop Folder

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I ran into this problem this morning. Somehow I had lost a folder on my desktop. Maybe Windows got confused. Maybe I had moved it off-screen. Maybe it was under another folder. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get it back Here’s how I solved the problem.  (It’s so simple that you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it. I know I did!)

1. Right click your desktop. The following menu appears:

A Selection of Options for Your Desktop
Right click then choose 'Sort By'

Once you see this menu, choose ‘Sort by’ and this next menu will come up:

Right Click the Desktop to Get This Menu
Choose any arrangement you want. They all work to recover the lost folder.

These are the choices to sort all of the items on your desktop. If you sort by type, everything will be lined up on the left side according to file type with folders at the upper left. Your missing folder will be among them…hopefully.

If the folder still isn’t there but you can see it in Windows Explorer, see if you can find out where it is by choosing ‘open file location’ in the right click menu. Then you can track it down. Good luck!

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Rip Audio from Video, Video Capture, Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker – How to split audio from video

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The problem: my digital camera records video in the MP4 format. Because of that, I can’t split the audio from the video in most video editing programs. I use Windows Live Movie Maker most of the time and this free program doesn’t offer splitting audio from video anyway. The video is in high definition and looks great but today I had to shoot a scene where only the audio could be used.

The solution: This is a multi-step process. Here’s how I edited the whole thing to create a movie using only the audio from the original shoot.

1. Edit the video (sound and all) in Windows Live Movie Maker, removing all the extra sections. Make sure you remove everything you don’t need. WLMM will edit MP4s but it outputs the file as a WMV file, which isn’t a problem.

2. Take the completed WMV file and convert it to a WMA audio file in Format Factory. Format Factory is available here: http://www.formatoz.com/ (you can use any converter you want, obviously, but I like Format Factory.)

3. Open WLMM again and put in the visuals that you want to use, could be video or photographs.   Try to make sure it is the same length as the audio track you have created in the previous step. I used a series of photos to create the video portion.

4. Add the ‘music’ (the WMA file that you created with Format Factory)  that you created in step 2. It could be music or spoken word, doesn’t matter. Your timeline will have to be adjusted to make the audio match the photos/video but that’s easy.

5. Save your video as normal and WLMM will put the two together in the final WMV that it creates.

 

That’s it! It took me a few hours to figure this out but now I know how to do it. So do you!

Thanks for reading.

Computers, Hardware, Troubleshooting, Windows, Windows Secrets

Enable Your Microphone

If you have disabled your internal microphone on on your netbook or notebook, here’s how you can get it back. This post also shows the value of  Window’s right click menu system. Sometimes we forget how powerful it is.

I was making a video today and tried to use an external microphone instead of the internal one on my netbook. Well, the external one didn’t work but I had disabled the internal one, thinking it was causing some interference. Once I decided to use the internal one again, I had to search for a way to enable it again. Here’s how you do it:

1. Right click the little speaker icon on the lower right of your taskbar. Choose ‘Recording devices’ as you see here:

Choose Recording Devices
Right click the speaker and choose Recording devices.

2. Once the recording device dialogue is up, right click anywhere in the blank space to get this menu:

Right click dialogue showing disconnected devices.
Right click in the open space and you'll see how to enable disconnected devices.

3. Once you get to this point, click ‘Show Disabled Devices’ and you will see a list of things that you may have disabled. Simply click ‘enable’ to get them back again.

 

This is a simple solution but it’s also something to keep in mind when you get lost in Windows. If what you want to see isn’t there in front of you or if you can’t seem to find something, try the right click menu to see what comes up. In this case, a simple right click solved what seemed to be a difficult problem.

Thanks for reading!

Computers, Hidden Windows Tricks, Windows Secrets

Undo Mistakes

We all make mistakes. We all wish we could turn back time. Here’s a quick, two-fingered way to do just that.

If you’ve used Photoshop or G.I.M.P. or just about any other photo editing program, you’ll know that you can undo any action that you’re performed  by clicking edit/undo. Those of you who use macros or keyboard shortcuts know that you can do the same thing by hitting the Control key and the Z key at the same time. Did you know that the Ctl/z combination works just as well in Windows and virtually every program, including browsers, that you use? Well it does.

Even if you delete a file and send it to the Recycle Bin, hitting Ctl/z will bring that file back again. If you accidentally hit the wrong keys in Word and your document disappears for some reason, make sure you hit Ctl/Z before you do anything else.

Tip: If you delete a file while holding down the Shift key, the file is gone forever. That’s a good thing and a bad thing sometimes. Unless you are sure that you won’t need the file again, send it to the Recycle Bin and think about it for a while.

Try getting used to this key combination using different programs in Windows. Once you get used to it, you’ll find it a life saver, I think. It’s saved my bacon a few times, I can tell you that!

Thanks for reading.