Import videos from Google Photos to YouTube

Google Photos is GREAT.  You can set your Android phone to back up all the pictures and video you take, and can easily access and view your photo and video via the web through Photos.Google.com.  Sharing these photos and videos outside of Google Photos, however, is cumbersome or not so user-friendly...  

For example, if you want to share your video in Google Photos on Facebook, you generate a share link and copy it (to the clipboard) then past it into Facebook, and it generates an image link on Facebook... NOT the video, so the viewer needs to click on the link, that opens a new browser window or tab which loads the video via Google Photos.  But if you copy and past a link from a YouTube video, it shows similar like an image link, but when clicked on, it plays the video right there on Facebook.

So, you can import your Google Photos videos into YouTube and share them via YouTube.  Go to https://www.youtube.com/upload and on the right, you will see a button to Import from Google Photos.  The next window that shows will show all your videos you have in Google Photos.  Select the videos you wish to import and click the Select button.  Depending on the length of your videos, it may take a while for it to be imported and converted to YouTube format.  Yes, you can choose multiple videos to import at once.

Oh, and this process is the only way to get your videos from Google Photos to display in your Blogger blog.

Nature Photography June-July-August 2017

It's time to share some nature pictures I shot in the last 3 months.  As my kids know, I love to take pictures of nearly everything, including nature, little critters, plants, clouds, waterfalls, outdoor reflections and more.  But who wants to lug around their 35mm digital SLR camera every day, where ever you go.  Oh, wait... I have a smartphone.  Smartphones are great for many reasons, but for me, I always love having a camera with me... a good quality phone camera (size in MP, lens quality, its ability to capture good images in low light and great video) is important.

Yeah, the quality is NOT the same in MP, lens, etc... as a DSLR but my phone camera is great as a point and shoot, but can also be manually configured for aperture, shutter speed, White Balance, and more, so it makes it a real close runner up to my Nikon SLR.  Lately, my phone (camera) choice has been with LG, with their G4 and now with their G6.  Samsung's are a good second choice, but iPhone on the other hand, I rarely see good pictures from friends that have iPhones, and besides the pictures are often square... what is up with that?  Then again most other phone camera users wield their phone around taking pictures without realizing the complications of low light and shutter speed will cause images to look lousy.  For those... there are PLENTY of videos on YouTube explaining how to take better photos with your smartphone.

Enough of that.  Here is a collection of photos (nature, little critters, flowers, clouds, etc...) I took over the past 3 months.  Click a photo to see it larger, then at the bottom just advance to the next picture.

      

The above plant is INDIAN PIPE PLANT OR GHOST PLANT.  

Tere are actually health benefits to this plant if you want to learn about it.

The flower of a Citronella plant.

   

Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea)

Moth, love the detail in its antenna.

   

   

Rolls of hay just harvested on back roads to my office.

   

Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea)

We have a BIG family of Green Treefrogs at our place.

In this picture, 8 can be spotted on the railing.  We have counted as many as 13 at once.

Our cat Moonshine just loves watching and jumping after the Green Treefrogs 

that spend their evenings catching and eating bugs on our back door.

   

New River in VA.

   

These frogs are great subjects to take pictures of... 

they are small, colorful, look fun and silly, there are plenty of them, least around my house... 

best of all they don't scare easily so you can get the camera right up close to them.

   

   

   

 Southern Leopard frog, found in our pool skimmer.

Visual Studio Code Outliner

The other day while working in many large code files, I wished I could shorten them so scrolling up and down the code would be easier.  I remembered having an extension or addon to Visual Studio that would add the ability to expand and collapse blocks of code making the overall height or length of the page shorter.

So I went and found it, or rather a tool that provided what I needed, the one I used at a previous employer may have been different.  Visual Basic and C# Outliner is a Visual Studio extension that makes the IF, ELSE, ELSEIF, WHILE and other blocks collapsible in Visual Basic .NET and C#.

For me, it is quite handy, but others may feel it is unnecessary.

Code, showing collapse boxes on the left side.

Code, showing IF block now collapsed.

Code, mouse over the 3 dot ellipse and see context popup showing the collapsed code.

Code, command keys to collapse all [CTRL M], or expand all [CTRL P].

Total Eclipse with the Fireflies in Columbia SC

August 21, 2017, a total eclipse of the sun occurred across the length of the united states.  Here in NC, we would see a nearly full eclipse, maybe 95% covered, but not a full eclipse.  However, down in Columbia SC, approx 3hr away, there would be a full eclipse.  We found that they have a baseball team there, The Fireflies, and they had a game scheduled that afternoon with pre-game STEM activities for kid.  Heck Yeah, let's do that.

The pre-game STEM activities were more for middle school students, but our kids made the best of it collecting some freebies along the way.  The weather started out questionable, HOT and muggy and scattered clouds.  The game was a nice distraction while we waited for the moon to arrive and while we checked from time to time with the provided solar eclipse viewing glasses.  Our tickets included a lunch buffet with hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled chicken and pulled pork BBQ.  The pork BBQ was just fantastic.  We got a few extra drinks while the buffet was open to last the rest of the afternoon and keep us hydrated.

Now... watching the moon slowly cover up the sun was kinda cool in it self, but when it reached totality... now THAT was cool.  Just minutes before totality, the game was put on hold, all the players and people in the stands put on their eclipse glasses and stared towards the sun.  It was quite the thing to experience and when the totality occurred the crowd of spectators cheered and clapped.  It was like a white light glowing halo in the sky, and all around the horizon looked like it does just before the sun comes up in the morning or just after going down in the evening.  The rest of the sky was very noticeably darker if not black.  2 and a half minutes later, it was suddenly becoming quite bright again.

     

    

    

    

    

Thank you to Aunt Julie for sharing this idea with us as soon as she learned of it.  So sorry Collin was not able to join us, but it was his first day back at school as a Sophmore at UNCC.