Picasa uses real filenames when uploading - good for indexing

Robert Scoble (who was hanging out with Thomas Hawk earlier in the week), notes

Here’s one thing I learned from Thomas Hawk, though. He says if you want a lot of traffic from Google Images that you have to upload your images using Google’s Picasa instead of to Yahoo’s service.

Sounds like Google is penalizing Flickr, right? Well, probably not explicitly Thomas told me. Instead Google’s algorithm biases on URL names. So, if you are searching Google Images for “Cool Cars” then Google will bring back images with the name in the URL. Picasa, when it uploads, includes the file names you give your photos in the URL. Flickr changes those to numbers.

Although the point is a good one, Robert's post is slightly unclear, and there is a good clarification by Danny Sullivan in the comments, who notes that the point is to always have good words as the filenames of the images you upload. Picasa preserves the filenames when you upload [though there is no mention of where you might upload to!], whereas all files uploaded to Flickr by whatever means are simply assigned numbers, thus losing some very valuable metadata that indexing currently relies on.  However, you don't need to use Picasa to ensure the names are preserved - other systems, including doing it manually, work just as well.

Thomas was not just talking about Picasa Web Albums (which only half heartedly uses the the filename you gave the photo when producing the URL which displays it on the Web Album), but rather photos uploaded with the desktop version of Picasa, presumably to Blogger.  I note from his blog posts that Thomas is actually a great fan of that lesser known Picasa program, Hello, which offered image uploads to Blogger even before Picasa itself did.

The advantage of the good names for photos is when various image search engines index the photos.  Currently there are no search engines that index the photos in Picasa Web Albums, and the best way to find flickr images is still through the flickr provided search, rather than an external search engine, though the availability of a good API for flickr does mean that external engines have a good chance of accessing the flickr data.