Picasa upgrades to version 2.6

As well as upgrading Picasa Web Albums, Google have rolled out a new version 2.6 of Picasa on the desktop.

The Picasa readme page notes the major changes as being:

• Added Vista / Internet Explorer 7 support
• Changed update behavior so that it now automatically downloads updates in the background
• Picasa Web Albums is now available in 18 languages

In addition, the release notes page has been updated with news of both this release (build 35.94), and also the previous builds of 32.97 and 32.95 which had not previously been documented.  This adds more details to recent changes, which notably include:

• New autoupdate behavior for Windows Vista support
• New CD/DVD-burning engine (supports more devices)
• Improved upload reliability to Picasaweb
• Added support for 18 new languages
• Added XMP metadata parsing
• Fixed a problem where incorrect GPS values were being saved under certain conditions.

Removed functions

What the readme and release notes do not list is that some functionality appears to have been removed with this "upgrade".  Specifically there are now just 2 items on the Experimental menu under Tools.  This menu also used to have "Publish via FTP..." and "Upload to Google Video..." on it.  It's the nature of experimental things that they may not work out in the future, but I think it's worth a comment on both of these lost items.

Upload to Google Video...

I guess that this was seen as unnecessary since anyone can now upload videos to their own Picasa Web Albums, and having two upload destinations for video may have been too confusing.  It must be noted however that uploading videos to Picasa Web Albums is not the same as uploading to Google Video for two very important reasons:

•  videos in Google Video have a search engine available, so that people can find them easily
• videos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums count against your storage space limits, whereas Google Video essentially has unlimited space

Publish via FTP...

Not sure exactly what the use case for this was expected to be.  It's possible that this was also deemed unnecessary now that Blogger Beta has improved integration with Picasa.