Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm all pumped up because it’s time for Ask DottoTech, Ask DottoTech, the show where
you ask questions and I do my best to answer them.
So what do we have on the big show today?
We’re going to be talking a little bit about one of my favorite apps, Adobe Spark.
We’re also going to be talking about backing up your Gmail and getting photos into your
Contacts.
That’s all today on Ask DottoTech.
Ask DottoTech is the show where you ask questions and I will do my very best to answer them.
Now where do you ask questions?
Well, here is a good place.
If you’re watching this on YouTube, just going into the YouTube comments and posting
your questions there is a great way to get started.
Also, if you’re subscribed to your email, you can just reply to any of the newsletters
you get and I will do my best to answer questions.
Can’t promise that I’ll answer every question but I’ll do my best to answer as many as
I can.
Let’s begin with a question from Suzanne who asks, “Steve, you’re using Gmail online
which looks to be very handy.
I'm still using WLM,” don’t actually know what WLM is, “but I see that you do as I
do, creating folders on the left side to save and hold.
Do you back these up somehow?
If not, how do you ensure that you won’t lose all the information if Gmail goes away
or changes in some radical manner?”
What a good question.
Most of us never think about backing up our Google data because Google is so ubiquitous.
It just seems to be there.
It is always there and it is so redundant that we think we probably don’t need to
back it up.
But we probably should be backing things up and also we might want to also want to be
able to access all of our information to move to different services if we choose to move
away from Google.
So I began to look around and see exactly what maybe we should be doing in Google as
far as backing up and I found one fairly cool place within our Google account that I’ve
never looked at before called Google Takeout.
Google Takeout allows you to export all of your Google data—actually, I’ll slightly
change that—any or all of your Google data.
Look at all of the different things that you can export.
By exporting it, meaning you can back it up now yourself to a different media or you can
take the data, remove it from Google or copy it from Google and then use it to populate
a different service.
If you were going to move to a different email service, if you were going to say move all
of your contacts into a new contact manager, this would be a way for you to do it and you
see all of the different things that are available.
Now how it works is you can select everything or you can select none and then just go through
and choose exactly what it is that you want to back up.
Since we’re talking about email, you just have to make the check mark here to ask it
to back up your Gmail.
And then all you do is you ask it, you go in here down at the bottom, you go Next and
you then ask it to export, to create an archive of that type of that format that you want.
Now we’ll compress the archive so it will compress it as a zipped file here and then
you also select how you’re going to receive it, getting a download link, adding to Dropbox,
adding to OneDrive.
So you can determine exactly how you’re going to receive said data.
And then once you’ve clicked on this—it will take a few minutes for it to back it
up—but I backed up my Gmail just the other day and I have 5.4 GB of Gmail that I can
now download or I can bring into either another backup system or I can use it to say import
into another email system.
So Google Takeout, we will have a link in the description.
Pretty darn useful I think you will agree.
Now our next question comes from Wayne Ferro who says, “Hi Steve, how do I move a photo
in my Dropbox on my smartphone to a contact with a name and phone number on the same phone?
Thanks.
Wayne.”
Well Wayne, you don’t specify whether this is an iOS device, an Apple device or if it’s
an Android device so I'm going to cover this in both because how we manage internal resources
on the iPhone versus on Android are quite a bit different, in some ways easier, in some
ways more difficult.
And then adding another layer of having images in Dropbox which means it’s in a cloud service
beforehand adds a little bit more complexity to it.
It’s not that this is all that really difficult to do.
It’s just you kind of have to logically think your way through it based on your operating
system or your phone’s operating system.
So let’s start it out by taking a look at how we do this on the smartphone.
Now when we go into Dropbox on the smartphone—let’s just pop into Dropbox and let’s find an
image there and see exactly how it works—Dropbox will look pretty much identical in both iOS
and Android as far as this is concerned.
Now here I’ve got a nice photo that I've just uploaded into Dropbox from my computer
which means it’s now synced.
It could have been saved in Dropbox at any time but how we then manage to basically assign
that resource somewhere else in the iPhone is we just open the image itself or we open
the document itself within Dropbox and in all Apple iOS apps, you’ve got this little
box with an upward arrow.
This is the sharing tool.
This is a magic button that basically allows us to do almost everything that we can do
with whatever is on screen.
That will be accessed through that sharing tool.
So here we see along the top, we can see that we can actually share this is as an image
directly with our social networks, with Evernote.
We can send it out as a Gmail.
We can send it to all of these different loaded apps and if we wanted to send it somewhere
else that doesn’t appear on this list, by tapping on more you can turn on and off all
of the different resources that are on your smartphone at that time.
When I say powerful, I mean really powerful.
This is the one menu that allows you to determine where something goes.
But this particular case, probably the easiest way to do something like this is to actually
just save this image from Dropbox and make it accessible as a part of the photo library
on the smartphone.
So here I'm just going to click on Save Image.
When I tap on Save Image, it then saves that image into my photo library.
Now in my photo library I can go over into my Contacts.
Let’s go into my Contacts here and I've got a brand new contact all ready to go and
I want to add an image.
I just go Edit Image, add the image.
I'm going to choose the photo and I can choose that photo right from the camera roll just
like that by just taking it, positioning it, saving it, choosing it and now that image
is saved to my contact database from the camera roll originating in Dropbox.
But that concept of basically opening whatever document you have in Dropbox and then use
that sharing menu to send that document to whatever application or service you want to
on your phone, that is information that’s going to carry you forward and allow you to
use your iPhone far more effectively in the future.
What about Android?
Next, let’s take a look at doing the exact same thing but this time on our Android phone.
Now when we open up Dropbox, the interface is slightly different in Android but you can
still work your way through it.
We have the menu here that will allow us to select different file types.
I'm going to choose photos and we’re going to choose the exact same photo.
Now the sharing menu in Android is slightly different but it does essentially the same
things.
We can quickly, using this little top one that has the three connected dots, we can
send links of the photo using basically the Dropbox sharing by selecting that.
But we want to get this photo onto the smartphone itself.
So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into the export dialog box or
menu item which is under that little arrow dropdown menu.
That is where we do the same kind of sharing things within Android as we were doing in
the sharing menu in iOS.
You can see here these are all the different services that we can now share this photo
with.
But what we want to do is we want to save it onto our local device.
Now saving it onto our local device basically is going to save it into the Download folder
on the device itself.
Now how we then access it is we go into our gallery and in the gallery there we have the
download available to us.
So how does that all resolve into the contacts in this particular case?
Well, for Contacts it will be the exact same.
Let’s just pop over into our Contacts, open our Contacts and there we can choose to add
a new contact and by clicking on the plus, we can now create a photo for that particular
contact.
If it’s an existing contact, we would have just opened that Contact.
But now we’re going to choose the image and there within our gallery is the photo
that we can choose.
We can choose that photo and we have the same sort of options as we did on the iPhone to
position it, save it and now we’ve got that photo to identify that particular contact.
Once again, this technique of downloading a photo into the device itself and then being
able to access that photo from the device, that’s just a great technique for working
with images in Android and in iOS.
So thank you very much for that question, Wayne.
Our last question today comes from TG Bears who says, “Thanks for this.
I’ll definitely try it out.”
We’re talking about Adobe Spark in this particular case.
“Can one change the template once a graphic is created, for example a Facebook post and
then resize it to Twitter without starting from scratch?”
Yes, you can.
Let me show you how.
Let us go into Adobe Spark.
Now here is the graphic.
Now I'm typically using Adobe Spark more for the video right now but I'm just going to
open up a graphic that I made actually as a part of that demo that we showed you.
Now if you want to learn about Adobe Spark, we have here a link to a tutorial where it
was my first look at using the app.
But here’s the graphic that I put together and you can see that we can choose to resize
this.
Right now it’s set as a Facebook cover image but we can resize this now as say a square
image that quickly and that easily.
So you can create a graphic once and now you can export it into a variety of different
sizes.
Once again, we’ve got this video here where we talked about Adobe Spark.
I'm a big fan of it.
This is an app that we are going to be looking at increasingly in the future.
But once you’ve created a social sharing graphic within Adobe Spark, you can resize
it quickly, easily export it for all sorts of different formats just that easily.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!