Picasa on Windows Vista

Michael Herf, the Picasa engineering manager, writes on his blog that running Picasa on Windows Vista is now almost as fast as on Windows XP, thanks to some performance work that Microsoft have been applying to the latest builds of Vista.

"Some of you know that I've been really worried about the performance we've been seeing of Picasa on Vista. Until now, blttest and ScrollWindow have been 5-10x slower on Vista when compared to XP.

I'm happy to say that Microsoft has turned this around in the latest builds of Vista, and you don't have to write your app in WPF or D3d to get good performance. Legacy GDI apps finally perform well too.

In build 5536 I'm seeing bitblt performance that's within shouting distance of XP, and so even our fullscreen screensavers are performing pretty nicely."

Blttest is a program Michael wrote many years ago to test Windows graphics performance. Vista build 5536 was released to testers a few days ago, and is labeled as "pre-RC1".

Other reports confirm that Vista 5536 has much better performance than earlier Vista releases.

As well as performance issues, running Picasa on Vista also brings with it issues about the down playing of admin accounts - which Michael has been looking into.

Google Image Tagger

Google has been registering some new domain names, and amongst those are googleimagetagger.com/net/org.

For the moment we can but speculate what sort of service this might be - whether the images are tagged automatically (such as face and object recognition via Neven Vision provided technology?), or manually as in the widespread tagging at flickr. Up to now, Google has tended to avoid "tagging" at least in name - though Gmail labels are close, and Picasa's keywords share some similarities.

Kim Photo Software

I'm not sure what the significance of this is, but the URL www.KimPhotoSoftware.com is an alias of www.picasa.com.

The domain was first registered in Jan 2004, and checking with the Internet Archive, which first became aware of it in Sept 2004, first shows it holding data from 2003 about Hello, Picasa's IM photo client.

In fact, there are 14 sites in total that share the www.picasa.com system:

1. dontswitch.com
2. kimphotosoftware.com
3. lifescapeinc.com
4. mypicasa.com
5. picasa.com
6. picasa.net
7. piccasa.net
8. wwwpicasa.com
9. wwwpicassa.com
10. wwwpicassa.net
11. wwwpiccasa.com
12. wwwpiccasa.net
13. wwwpiccassa.com
14. wwwpiccassa.net

Aside from KimPhotoSoftware, the dontswitch.com is also unexpected, and unexplained.  The rest of the sites are entirely understandable - Lifescape Inc was the company that became Picasa Inc (before Google bought it); Picasa in its com/net forms is the main version of the site; various domain typos are supported, and mypicasa.com is a perfectly reasonable variation to have registered.

Geotagging photos - first Picasa/Google Earth, now flickr

Picasa 2.5 works closely with Google Earth to make it easy to geotag photos - that is to mark them with the latitude and longitude of where they were taken. That information gets stored in the EXIF data of the photos.

Now a similar feature has been introduced by flickr. This uses mapping from Yahoo Maps (so its worldwide coverage lags behind its USA and Canadian coverage), but the drag and drop interface is quite easy to use.

Lacking an official solution, many existing flickr image had been geotagged by a combination of "geotagged/geo:lat/geo:long" tags - which worked, but was a bit clumsy.  Flickr plan to offer an automated way to remove these old tags, once the development community has had a chance to move to the new model.

Now users has a choice of how to geotag their images - either upload them to flickr, and use the online method there, or perhaps a better solution is to use Picasa / Google Earth to geotag the images before they are uploaded.

Lots of writeups of the feature, including TechCrunch, TechCrunchUK, Yahoo search blog, Thomas Hawk.

Flickr has around 220 million photos (growing at the rate of 1 million per day) - of these, in the first 24 hours the feature was available, geotags were added to 1,234,384 - and by 9 hours later over 1.6 million had been geotagged.

Update: Some interesting comments by the flickr developer Rev Dan Catt at the Ogle Earth report on this, though interestingly nothing yet on Rev Dan Catt's own site GeoBloggers.

Updated Picasa - Beta 3, Build 32.71

As reported in the Picasa online Readme

August 25, 2006
Beta 3, Build 32.71

• We fixed a couple of bugs with uploading to Picasa Web Albums- Picasa was crashing in some cases, and there was also a problem with detecting if a user was online.
• Problems importing into an existing folder, and an import crash bug have been fixed.
• We also fixed some problems with the Picasa Screensaver, incorrectly rotated thumbnails, and sorting files/folders by name.
• We really appreciate all of your feedback and bug reports! If something hasn't been working well for you, we would like to hear about it. Please visit the Picasa Web Albums Help Center to report bugs, or just tell us what you think of the new 2.5 features.

flickr images appearing in Yahoo search results

Whilst Google continues to keep Picasa Web Album images out of its search results, Yahoo who own flickr have just announced that they have begun to integrate selected flickr results into their search results.  Initially there are just 5 phrases that bring up the results:

• funny photos
• interesting photos
• travel photography
• nature photography
• black and white photography

(I'm not sure why the words are not a bit more interchangable - funny photography might not be all that common a search, but I would have thought that "black and white photos" was just as good a search to illustrate as "black and white photography").

Each of the 5 triggers ends up showing 4 flickr photos, with a link that takes you to an "appropriate" place on flickr.  This place differs for the different triggers, and includes both taking you to a particular pool (for Travel Photography), and simply doing a search (for "Funny").  The images themseleves are shown as a small square thumbnal, that shows the image title when you mouse over it.  The thumbnail links through to the flickr page for that photo, and the photographer is credited below, with their name linking through to their flickr profile.

Flickr say they have been holding back from doing this integration until they had an opt-out in place for those who do not want their images to appear in the search results.

Thomas Hawk has comments on the matter and there's a write up from TechCrunch.

Picasa, flickr, and Google Image Search

Thomas Hawk, whose comments on images uploaded via Picasa ranking higher than images uploaded to flickr were reported by Robert Scoble, has stepped up to provide a much deeper set of observations - Why Picasa Images Are Indexed Higher in Google Image Search Than Flickr.

He quickly dismisses the conspiracy theory, and elaborates on the fact that providing a good filename is key, which uploads to blogs made by Picasa do, but which files uploaded into flickr do not.

flickr users are discussing this in Google is Penalizing Flickr, Right?, where Thomas has made some more insightful comments - including that it is a problem that his own employer, Zooomr (which also replaces upload filenames with a number) may have to address in the future.

Raw file support in Picasa

Raw files can provide the highest quality images, by keeping all of the data that the image sensor in the camera is able to capture.  Unfortunately, each manufacturer uses their own raw format, and indeed raw formats from different cameras in a manufacturer's range may be quite different from each other. 

Picasa supports a number of raw formats.

There is an (undated) support page which provides the following list of supported raw formats:

Picasa currently supports RAW images from most of the cameras by the following manufacturers:

• Canon (.CRW, .CR2) (EXIF data from RAW images is only supported with CRW files that have associated .THM files.)
• Nikon (.NEF)
• Olympus (.ORF)
• Pentax (.PEF)
• Kodak (.DCR)
• Sony (.SRF)
• Minolta (.MRW)
• Fuji (.RAF)

At this time, we do not support RAW images from the following cameras:

• Kodak P850 (.KDC)
• Adobe file format (.DNG)
• FUJI S5200-S5600 (.RAF)
• OLYMPUS E-300, E-500 (.ORF)

Raw support has been expanded in the 2.5 beta, compared to the previous 2.2 version.  However, there are still formats such as the .ARW format raw files produced by the Sony DSLR-A100 that are not supported.

If you have a raw format image that Picasa does not support, then Google would like to have an example of that format - they have a standing request to send such images to raw@picasa.com.

Blogger Beta and Picasa dont mix at the moment

Picasa offers the ability to post to Blogger.

Blogger has just launched a new beta version, that offers a number of improved blogging features.

Unfortunately, the two are not compatible - Picasa cannot post to blogs that are hosted by the new Blogger Beta.

This is a known problem - which is due to be fixed in due course.

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. 

Thomas Hawk - evangelist at Zooomr

Robert Scoble writes of a evening photo walking with Thomas Hawk.  In it he describes Thomas Hawk as

... one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen ... an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.

Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the Photo Sharing Site Zooomr, and writes about the same evening in Had a Great Night Hanging out With Scoble.  Robert was filming the evening for his new job At PodTech, and we should be able to see the results some time in September.

I had a look through Thomas' blog, to see what he's shared with his readers about Picasa:

• Better Than Flickr, Better Than Picasa... it Just Doesn't Exist Yet, Photohawk is a insightful look at what various photo programs and sites offer, and how a fictional Photohawk site would take image search to the next level. [January 2005].
• Google Acquires Picasa noting it was a good move, and hoping that they made it possible to upload from Picasa to Blogger (which is indeed now possible) [July 2004]
• Does Hello Picasa Effect Google Image Search Placement wondering whether uploading images via Hello provides a boost to ranking in Google image search. [September 2005], a theme also mentioned in Stockpipeline Wants to be the eBay of the Stock Photography Business [September 2005],  Is Something Up with Google Image Search? [January 2005], I Think Google is Reindexing Their Image Search Again [October 2005]
• BusinessWeek Online Pans Google's Picasa consisting merely of a link to a review of Picasa by BusinessWeek. [November 2005]
• Why an Open API is Important to the Web 2.0 Social Contract covering the need for user data to be portable amongst photo programs and sites (and by implication, criticising Picasa which does not make an API available). [June 2006]
• My Dinner With Microsoft Exec Jim Allchin in which he reveals that Windows Vista will have photo editing and tagging similar to many of Picasa's features built in [January 2006], which is also mentioned in CES Day One [January 2006] and dealt with in much more detail in Photo Tags in Vista Media Center [July 2006]
• 10 Tips for the New Digital SLR Photographer in which after urging the photographer to get hold of Photoshop, notes that "If you really, really can't afford Photoshop or want something else for a laptop on the go or something, also take a look at Google's Picasa. It's pretty good for free software. Not as good as Photoshop, but you can't argue with the price and it does do a lot of the basics nicely." [April 2006]
• Pixoh: Edit Pictures Online commenting on the prograssion from Photoshop (expensive and complex), to Picasa (free and easier to use), to Pixoh (online, and very easy to use). [March 2006]

Certainly plenty of insightful comment there, backed by plenty of real experience.

Hello, or Hullo

When Google bought Picasa, as well as the photo organizer, there was a second program that the company also produced - an instant messaging client (with photo sharing) called Hello.  That program is still available for download, at Hello.com, though it's not been updated for a long time.  (The current version is 1.0, build 651, and this dates from before the Google purchase - it has not even been updated with any mention of Google - all the email and web addresses it refers to are of the form picasa.net).

Google has gone on to produce its own instant messaging client in the form of Google Talk, which offers so much more - including voice calls, voicemail, file transfer, music trends, and integration with email.  The one Hello feature it is missing is integration with Picasa.

Interestingly, though somewhat inappropriately, the Ask blog search lists googlehello.com as a Top Feed when searching for "picasa".  Googlehello.com looks like a blog about the Hello program, but this was last updated in November 2004 (in fact all content seems to date from the same day!)  I can't see what definition of "top feeds" that would fall into.

It's clear that Google still dont really know what to do with Hello - but they are at least continuing to allow it to be used.

(... and as a postscript, an unrelated service called Hullo has just launched, which indicates that the real value in Hello may be its domain name.  Hullo is a VOIP service, providing free phone calls - there's more comment to be found at TechCrunch and an informative despite itself piece I rather like at Dead2.0.  I think it likely that due to the confusion in names, Hello may get a bit more publicity and interest out of this).

Google.cz domain acquired by Google

Google was lax in securing a number of its domains in the Czech Republic.  It has just secured google.cz, but picasa.cz is still in use for a blog - I cant tell exactly what the subject of the blog is, but the tags used (which are mostly English words) include "internet" and "software" as the most popular.

The links section of the blog also includes a link to picasa.com, so the blog owner is certainly aware of Google's product and site.

Picasa Web Albums being hidden in Google search results

I was doing some searches in the main Google search when I noticed that it's now apparently got much harder to find Picasa Web Albums in the search results.

I wrote quite extensively about searching Picasa Web Albums on Google before and at the time the search results were reporting around 30,000 results (and I saw higher figures after that). However, today the same search I did then, site:picasaweb.google.com, claims just 3340 results, and shows just 1 (the main Picasaweb page), together with the message

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

If I search for the same "popular" words that I looked at before (photo, picasa, here...) then the reported number of each of those seems to have mostly stayed the same or maybe increased slightly.  Thus these results are compatible with a fairly straightforward algorithm change - one that spots that Picasa Web URLs are pretty similar to each other, so collapses them all as "omitted results".  The change in numbers would seem to indicate a more accurate number is being reported - though an order of magnitude change brings new extremes to the definition of the word "about" that always precedes the counts on Google's result pages.

Googlified is reporting a similar number of results to me, so I don't think this is just a blip in one of the datacentres.

Update: MSN also shows about 3000 URLs pointing at Picasa Web Albums, so this looks to be a fairly accurate figure, and an indication that the previous 30000 was very inaccurate.

Digital Photography : The Missing Manual

I've previously listed the two books on Picasa that I was aware about.  However, I've just found out about another book, published in June 2006, which despite not having Picasa in the title, does have a substantial part of its content dedicated to using Picasa.

This book is:

Digital Photography: The Missing Manual by Chris Grover and Barbara Brundage.

In the authors words:

This book is divided into four parts, each containing several chapters:

• Part 1, Digital Camera Basics, equips you with the knowledge you need to choose the right digital camera—or navigate your way around the one you've already got—and how to take great photos. You'll learn what makes digital photography different from film photography and you'll also learn how to cut through the camera sales hype when you're shopping for a camera. And since there's a difference between operating a camera and taking good pictures, you'll also find important but easy-to-follow tips for taking great photos in every situation—from school performances to underwater photography. By the end, you'll know some of the time-tested techniques the pros use to take great shots.

• Part 2, Organizing Your Photos, gives you real world tips for storing your digital photos on your computer and on the Internet. Just as important, you'll learn how to find the photos you're looking for later on. This section introduces three programs that help you store, organize, and search for your photos. Two of the programs are free: Kodak EasyShare and Google's Picasa. And one, Photoshop Elements, descends from the all time champ when it comes to digital photo software (that would be Photoshop). You'll also be introduced to online photo services like Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. These companies let you store your photos on their Web sites in the hopes that you'll order prints. Another online service you'll learn about, Flickr, is more like one big photo club where you can store, organize, and share your photos.

• Part 3, Editing Your Photos, shows you how to fix up pictures using your computer—no more locking yourself in a darkroom or sending jobs out to the photo lab. You'll learn how to use the free programs EasyShare and Picasa for basic fixes like cropping your photos and removing those annoying red eye blemishes. You'll also learn how to add special effects—everything from transforming your photos into cartoon-like images to creating panoramas from multiple pictures.

• Part 4, Sharing Your Photos, details the many new ways you can share digital photos with friends, family, and other photo enthusiasts. You'll find out how to create and share online albums and you'll also meet two special Web sites, Photo.Net and TrekEarth, where you can share your photos with other photographers from all over the world. This section also gives you the lowdown on how to print photos at home and how to order prints through online services. And, as the man on the TV commercial says, "Wait, that's not all." Part 4 shows you how to create photo books, calendars, coffee mugs, and dozens of other cool things with your photos.

You can see more about the book at the publishers site, or at Amazon.

 

Updated Picasa 2.5 build 32.67

As reported in the Picasa online Readme

August 16, 2006
Beta 3, Build 32.67

You will notice that we are doing another update of your Picasa thumbnails, please let us know right away if you encounter any problems with this.

Add your Picasa Web Albums photos to your screensaver! Check it out under Tools> "Configure Screensaver". There's also a new "Pan and Zoom" effect we added to the Visual Presentation options.

We fixed issues with movie file support, finding pictures in your watched folders, and getting stuck on the "Refining" message.

We also made some improvements to the import process, and to the hierarchy view options.

Displaying photos from your Picasa Web Albums in the screensaver is described as an experimental option. The screensaver is a separate program from Picasa, and it currently requires you to enter logon credentials again, even if you are already logged in in the main Picasa program. It offers options of displaying the newest pictures, and of displaying photos from unlisted albums.

Neven Vision adwords campaign still running

With the flurry of blog posts about Neven Vision, there are now loads of pages whose content matches up with Neven Vision's adwords campaign.

Despite Google's efforts to wipe Neven Vision off the web (clearing its main and Japanese websites completely), they seem to have missed the fact that the adwords campaign is still running...

The ad I've seem most is

Fastest Face Recognition
and Facial Feature Tracking SDKs and Custom Solutions
www.nevenvision.com

which points to the (now non-existent) page www.nevenvision.com/biometric.html

Visual searching via mobile phone

One of Neven Vision's previous investors was the venture capital firm Zone Ventures, who generally provide $1M - $3M level of funding.

Via the links page they maintain on their portfolio companies, there is this link to a video from June 22, 2006 titled "Neven Vision - The Next Big Thing in Merchandising!"

It's a short (2min 40sec) clip from an NBC4.TV news program, showing Neven Visions mobile phone search application in action.

• Take a photo of a CD on your mobile phone camera, and link to the groups latest video, or to the album lyrics
• A photo of a Coca-Cola can links you to info on the 2008 Olympic Games (which Coke sponsor)
• A photo of a Starbucks cup gets you a coupon
• A photo of a movie poster links you to the relevant website
• Consumer electronics, link you to reviews of those products
• A car, allows you to access blue book values
• ... and perhaps a photo of a person, to get info on that person.

"Neven Vision's first US campaign using this technology will be for a car maker. It debuts this fall."

Riya and Google - from the inside

Many commentators have picked up on the hidden story in the Neven Vision acquisition - that this rather closes the door on a Google / Riya hookup.

Munjal, the Riya CEO, has responded to the questions with a second blog post.  He states that he is under NDA, so can't say all he wants to (but will be checking as to when this expires, so that he can tell all then).

In the meantime, he gives a timeline of

a) In Nov'05 you heard a lot of rumors about Google and Riya
b) In January'06 you heard me say that we are still an independent company
c) In January'06 you heard Riya announce it just raised a large series B financing of $15.5M - large rounds are usually pre-cursors to fund large new bold (and risky) strategies.
d) In March'06 Riya launches Riya 1.0
e) In May'06 Riya launches an expansion of it's vision to Riya 2.0 Visual search for the web = bold big strategies
f) In Aug'06 you hear about Google buying Neven Vision to deliver Riya 1.0 functionality to Picasa

He then goes on to discuss what this means to Riya going forward.  He makes 3 points

1. Google is often not the best of breed solution outside of its core search competancy
2. Adding face recognition to Picasa adds a feature that Riya have now all but abandoned anyway
3. Now that Google is openly in competition with Riya, the partnership potential at Riya with other firms is looking increasingly rosy.

It's a positive message, but I think he may be missing the point.  I don't think that Google bought Neven Vision just to allow Picasa to catch up with Riya 1.0 (client side face recognition, with upload ability).

I think it more than likely that Google will be introducing "machine vision" (not just face recognition) driven features across far more of their services than this.  This puts them squarely in competition with the refocused Riya 2.0 - which is now positioning itself to be a visual search engine, based on similarity of images.  With the expansion of the Picasa brand into web galleries at Picasa Web Albums, images are just as likely to be subject to machine vision on the server as they are on the client.

In addition, Neven Vision has a strong presence in the mobile phone market (and the patent portfolio to back it up), and Google is increasingly making strong moves in the mobile data market.

Maurice Doucet - ex Lifescape/Picasa CTO

According to Maurice Doucet's CV at planetmoe.com, he is currently the CTO at Triton Imaging Inc.

However, from Oct 2002 – May 2003, he was Chief Technology Officer at Lifescape Solutions, Inc.

He describes his work there thus:

Lifescape was an Idealab funded startup and the creator of Picasa, a consumer level digital image management product. Responsibilities included:
• Management of cross-functional disciplines including software engineers, web developers, technical writers and quality assurance technicians.
• Management of the operations systems engineering team in the Boston office.
• Management of the software development team in Los Angeles.
• Responsibility for product release feature definition.
• Responsibility for partner relationship management.
• Technical leadership for Picasa ‘plug-in’ specification.
• Participation in idealab! Board level funding discussions.
• Press contact for corporate interviews (i.e. CNBC)

So even back then, Picasa had a plugin API - so I wonder why can't Google publish it, so that developers can get to work on producing companion applications to work alongside Picasa?

"Picasa Templates" - a failed business idea

Aesthetic Studios is a small two man web site design team that would appear to mostly serve a small local market in Texas - for example their portfolio includes a local high school football team.

In September 2004 they registered the domain name picasatemplates.com, and it looks as if they spent a few months thinking about what to do with it.  In January 2005, they put together a business plan, which effectively foreshadowed most of what Google is now offering with Picasa Web Albums - a service that offered to host galleries of photos, exported from the Picasa desktop application.

Income was to come from selling design templates to make the galleries look good, and from hosting fees, and future plans included a photo printing service via a partner photo developer.

Setting their sights high, they looked to partner directly with Google, so that Picasa would link to them when someone tried to export photos from Picasa, and so they could get free use of the Picasa name and logo.

Despite these lofty partnership hopes, the financial projections were decidedly low key - after the first year of operation they expected to run just 4 servers, with 218 galleries, and a total annual income of $7,500.

 

I've no idea if they ever sent their plan to Google, but the website is currently just parked, offering search/ads etc.  The project documents live on at the project extranet site, and make for an interesting read.  There was a business opportunity here, but I'm sure Google would never have considered the partnership proposed - there was just nothing for them to gain from it. Offering web galleries was also a very obvious extension of Picasa, and I'm sure Google didn't need anyone to tell them that.

Public information on Neven Vision - disappearing fast

One of the problems with the web is that information is often ephemeral, (as distinct from information in say books that remain available via libraries for perhaps hundreds of years).  Despite its mission to "make all the world's information accessible", and the strides that Google Books is making in unlocking some of the information locked up in libraries, Google itself is notoriously bad at preserving the information it is personally responsible for.  I've spoken before how it has withdrawn masses of useful information in its own products forums, and we are seeing the pattern repeated once again with its new acquisition, Neven Vision.

When I first posted yesterday on the Neven Vision sale, the main website was down.  It came back up later in the day, allowing a lot of background info on the company to be read, but by the end of the day it had all been wiped. Now the site merely contains the simple announcement: "Thank you for your interest. Neven Vision was recently acquired by Google Inc. and Neven Vision product information is no longer available on this site. Click here to learn more."

In an effort to preserve some of the knowledge that the site imparted, here are a few gleanings from notes I made earlier:

---

Products cover two areas - Biometric Identification, and Consumer Applications.

Products for consumer applications include

• iScout, which allows camera phone users to take photos to initiate a search process and get relevant information or content sent to their phone. 
• Photo management for phone handsets - where face recognition adds automatic tags to allow sorting of images by who they show
• Mobile security, where the phone handset only permits users whose faces it recognizes to do certain things, such as access email
• Masquerade - to add accessories such as hats, masks and glasses to photos
• Delegate - uses face detection and facial feature tracking to drive 3D avatars for enhanced chatting and video conferencing from a mobile camera
• Image search - facial matching to find friends wherever they may have posted their images, and to spot similarities to celebrities

Partners for consumer applications include Coca Cola, Jamster, NEC, Samsung, vodafone, Toshiba, Sharp, Logitech, NTT DoCoMo.

Biometric Identification products are used by a number of law enforcement agencies.

---

Summary of the technology

Computer Vision, also known as Machine Vision, is a field of technology engaged in teaching computers to "see" and understand visual imagery. Neven Vision is primarily focused on the subset of computer vision known as visual sensing , which is the automated extraction of information about objects or scenes in one or more images.

Neven Vision's computer vision technology is the fastest in the industry and represents leading accomplishments in this field. Several U.S. patents have been granted to Neven Vision for its unique inventions. U.S. government and independent observers have recognized the underlying technology as most advanced with respect to accuracy, speed and efficiency.

The core building blocks of the company's vision-enabled products and services are our patented face and object recognition engines. Below is a simple representation of how each of these engines work.

Face Recognition

1. Faces in an image are automatically detected by a robust face finder component that determines the position and size of the face in real world conditions (varying illumination, pose and expression).
2. A second processing stage determines the position of local features on the face, called “landmark finding”.
3. Then a Gabor Wavelet transformation takes place to compute the “face-template” from the local features by extracting the template from an image that contains the essential, condensed facial information needed to determine a person's identity (a “face-template” is only about 1kByte in size; min <350bytes max 1.6KBytes). Two templates are then compared to yield a similarity. Templates belonging to the same person produce high similarity while templates from different persons produce low similarities.

Object Recognition

Neven Vision's object recognition technology is based on a local feature approach:

1. Objects are recognized by identifying characteristic points of an object, deriving feature vectors from the texture in the vicinity of the characteristic points.
2. These feature vectors are then compared to a database of known objects to establish matching correspondences between the current object and the objects contained in the database.
3. If a sufficient number of local feature correspondences is found, a positive identification is accepted.

---

Office Locations

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Neven Vision
2400 Broadway, Suite 240
Santa Monica, CA 90404
PHONE
(877) 6-NVISION
(310) 828.0898
FAX
(310) 828.0479

TOKYO, JAPAN
DAI2 Okamotoya Bldg. 4F
1-22-16, Toranomon, Minato-Ku,
Tokyo 105-0001, Japan
PHONE
(81) 3-5251-5631
FAX
(81) 3-5251-5632

HAMBURG, GERMANY
Neven Vision Germany GmbH
Ziegelweg 5
D-26188 Edewecht
Germany
PHONE
+49 180 33 48899
FAX
+49 180 30 03331 2914

MUNICH, GERMANY
PHONE
+49 89 89 99 99 77
FAX
+49 89 89 99 99 78

UK
PHONE
+44 (0) 7956-264-27

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Executive Management

Alex Cory CEO
Dr. Hartmut Neven Founder AND CTO
Jordan Posell CFO

BIOMETRICS

Piet Lesage General Manager, Biometrics
Catharine Evans  Director, Biometrics

TECHNICAL & PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Detlev Schwabe VP Product Engineering
Ameen Ahmad  Sr. Director, Product Mgmt & Mktg

Hartwig Adam  VP Platform Technology

SALES

Stefan Fleissner  VP, Europe
Craig Patton GM, UK Operations
Paul Cushman  VP, US

Axel Boesche GM, Neven Vision Germany
Bret Crochet VP Bus. Dev., Southeast Asia

FINANCE

Steven M. Kantor, CPA VP Finance

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

William Woodward Managing Director, Anthem Venture Partners
Dr. Hartmut Neven CTO, Neven Vision
Niloo Howe Partner, Paladin Capital Group

Todd Jerry Partner, Anthem Venture Partners
Barak Bussel Partner. Third Wave Ventures

BOARD OF ADVISORS

Dr. Roland Deiser Managing Partner, Kingstone Partners
Jaron Lanier VISIONARY
Hiroshi Shin Ohashi CEO, Big Bridge

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List of patents

• EP1072018 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• 1072014 Face Recognition from Video Images
• EP1072018 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• 218457 Face Recognition from Video Images
• 218458 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• EP1072018 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• 1072014 Face Recognition from Video Images
• 6714661 Method & System for Customizing Facial Feature Tracking Using Precise Landmark
• 6222939 Labeled Bunch Graphs for Image Analysis (EYEM1160/ NE01)
• 6356659 Labeled Bunch Graphs for Image Analysis
• 6563950 Labeled Bunch Graphs for Image Analysis
• 6466695 Procedure for Automatic Analysis of Images & Image Sequences Based on Two Dimensional Shape Primitives
• 6272231 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• 6580811 Wavelet-Based Facial Motion Capture for Avatar Animation
• 6301370 Face Recognition from Video Imag

Picasa Web Albums adds an activity digest

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

Most wanted Google features survey

Google Blogoscoped is running another survey, this time on Which Google Features Do You Want Most?

All questions ask for a 1 to 5 response as to how much you want a given feature, and the image related questions include

• Higher storage in Picasa Web Albums
• Search for images using image comparisons
• Thumbnails of a page next to the web search result
• A Google API for image search
• Google Sets for images

Currently around 200 people have filled in the survey (again, remember this is a self selected group, of largely expert users) - it would probably get a lot more replies if it was easier to fill in - [Philipp, please use radio buttons not a drop down on future surveys!]

In the results so far, both the more Picasa web storage, and image searching by comparison are in the top 10 of wanted features (out of 53).  The Picasa web storage issue however is fairly polarized - with high numbers of replies for both 5 and 1 on the scale.

The comments on the survey are perhaps more informative than the results themselves.  These include

• a request for more integration, to make it easy to post "picasa [web albums] images + google videos easily on blogger"
• ... and a follow on request to include on the page creation tool
• "Why does picasaweb use a different contact photo than Gmail? Why can't I choose a picasaweb photo as my gmail contact photo?"
• Why dont the services linked to from the corner bookmarks in Gmail (which includes 'photos' which links to Picasweb) also offer corner bookmarks to be consistent

There's also the plea "Google, don't follow this survey, and continue to create services which made us "wowww" !"

Face recognition coming to Picasa - Google purchases Neven Vision

It looks as if face recognition is on its way to Picasa after Google announce on their blog that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

In announcing the move, Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager, notes that:

It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer.

We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Vision had offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Munich and Kuala Lumpur. It's unclear whether the team will all be moving to the Picasa offices (also in LA).

The Neven Vision site is unavailable just now slick to look at, but the downloads/demos are listed as "coming soon"! The Japanese operation site N-Vision is still up and running.

The team which grew out of university research in Germany are very well regarded for their machine vision technology - it's not just facial analysis, but also more general object analysis. The company was founded by Dr Hartmut Neven in 2003, and capitalized at 140million Yen, which is about US $1.2 Million.

Update: Plenty of comment on this across the web:

• Google acquires Neven Vision by Munjal from Riya.com (which also uses facial recognition).
• Google May Soon Tell You Where Your Picture Was Taken
• Object Recognition Is The Future Of Google
• Google Buys Neven Vision
• Google acquires biometric company Neven Vision

Update:

William Slawski has done some good research into the many patents that Neven Vision hold.

Advertising their visual wares

Google have made a number of changes over the past few days in order to publicise some services that may not be as well known as they would like.

On the one hand they have juggled the entries on the search home page, so that Froogle is dropped in favour of Video.  (This has only happened on the google.com domain - other countries still have their own set of entries in place).

They have also added a link labeled "Photos" to the list of services along the top of the Gmail page (referred to as the CornerBookmarks by Google).  This one links through to Picasa Web Albums, opening this in a new page (or tab, dependent on what browser you use).  Like all actions in Gmail, its internally tracked, so Google can see how effective the link is.  Once at Picasa Web Albums, there is currently no link back to Gmail.

Personal or group photo experience

Another author has come up with their review of the differences between Picasaweb and Flickr. This is quite a deep review, by someone who is an experienced user of such services (and who has paid for the advanced versions of both).

The conclusion is that "Picasaweb is a personal experience and flickr is a group one". In looking for a way to share photos with their family, the author has decided to use Picasaweb, though notes that they still use flickr for other purposes.

The comments on this article are quite informative, and one summarises the difference as Picasweb is a "me" tool (where I share my personal photos for others to look at), whereas flickr is a "we" tool, (where groups of people can contribute photos and comments to family or other group albums). This author notes that they consider the paid for iPhoto flickr plugin that allows uploading to flickr to be a good investment.

Google's Flickr Killer (should that be killr?)

Red66 has made a couple of posts in the past few days about Picasa / Picasa Web Albums, and how they compare to flickr.

Google’s Flickr Killer is about how Picasa's simplicity is key, and the reason why Yahoo (who own Flickr) need to get their hands on a desktop photo application. Whilst Red66 would like to upload from Picasa direct to Flickr, he sees that it's unlikely that Google would provide such a feature, now that they have their own web albums service.

In Google’s Flickr Killer - Part 2 there is more consideration of what Google need to do to Picasa to make it the killer application he believes it can be - merging the convenience of the desktop application, with the best of breed web albums service.

His list of 10 necessary improvements given is below [my comments in square brackets thus]:

1. Provide more storage space
2. Allow direct links to images at multiple sizes, so they can be placed on blogs etc
3. Tags - both making this easy in the desktop app, and making sure those tags get uploaded to the web version
   
4. Geotags [well Picasa has this on the desktop side, so I guess the point here is to do things with them on the web albums]
5. A powerful API [Not sure if this is mean to be an API for the desktop app, or one to the web service - I argue that both are needed]
6. Ad-supported, with revenue share to the photo owners
7. Comments and notes [Comments are allowed now - I think this may be a new feature just added to the web service]
8. RSS Feeds for everything
9. Better GMail and Blogger integration
10. ... and search

Well, I agree with most of this - though as I've already written about earlier, I think that search is the key point that needs addressing above all others. The lack of an API is close behind, and I think this is necessary both on the desktop client side, and on the server side. With these two in place, I don't so much care about most of the other points, since they can then if necessary be addressed by third parties - though the need for more storage space would then perhaps become a limiting factor.

(The current paid upgrade on storage space, is only available in the USA - so at a minimum this needs to roll out worldwide, but an increase in the base allocation would be welcome as well.) I see the "ad supported, revenue sharing" as being the least important of this list.

How did the search get lost?

Google knows a thing or two about search, so you would think that they would provide a search feature in whatever new services they introduce. Why then does Picasa Web Albums not have a search facility? Whilst the roll out of Web Albums is kept to a slow pace by the invitation process, the number of albums is climbing, and if the service is to have a future, people are going to want to find images that other people have placed in their albums.

At the moment the only presence Picasa Web Albums have in Google search results is shown by doing a search for "site:picasaweb.google.com", which shows around 30,000 results. (Such figures are rarely accurate, but I'll ignore that for the moment).

Since Google is not indexing the picasaweb site (its robots.txt file excludes all indexing spiders), what this shows is that there are links from other webpages that point at around 30,000 different galleries or albums hosted at picasaweb. Note that the results do not show any text snippets - which is further indication that Google only includes the items in its index because there are incoming links, and the page itself has not (and will not) be spidered.

If the page contents are not in Google index, then the only information that can be indexed for these pages consists of the page URL, and the text of the link pointing at the page. Thus, the obvious search strategy of using "site:picasaweb.goole.com {queryword}" has very limited success.

In fact, this is so little information that even words which represent hugely popular photographic subjects such as "wedding" or "vacation" provide less than 10 matching results. A little more investigation came up with the following as being the top search words for finding albums:

• photo (391 results)
  
• picasa (316 results)
  
• here (252 results)
• album (233 results)
• photos (179 results)
• my (166 results)
  
• pictures (130 results)
  
• gallery (124 results)
  
• the (93 results)
  
• 2006 (70 results)
• fotos (62 results)
  
• click (58 results)

• wedding (6 results)
  
• vacation (5 results)
• baby (1 result)

So, the general result is that there is no way to reliably search for Picasa Web Albums - all the top results are simply words that are regularly used in link text, but which convey little information about the target contents - including a big contribution from that most useless of links "Click Here".

The other aspect of the information available for searching is the URL, which consists of upto 3 parts:

• the fixed part "picasaweb.google.com"
• the account name
  
• possibly the album name

The account name may be a gmail account name, or may be an alternative name chosen so as not to expose the gmail account name. As such, these names follow the gmail naming conventions - which is that they contain at least 6 characters, and that by-and-large they are not to be found in a dictionary (Google seemed to remove most dictionary words from the gmail namespace, to cut down on email spam via dictionary attacks). This generally means that the account name is little clue to the photos you may find within its albums - beyond the fact that the name (somehow) relates to the photographer, and so may be relevant if you already know of the photographer.

That leaves the final component of the (optional) album name. Many albums have multiple word descriptive titles, which are used to construct the album name part of the URL by removing spaces from the title. This results in a lot of album names being (from an indexing perspective) nonsence names, since the compound text is not being indexed under its component parts.

In conclusion, Google needs to introduce an internal search facility for Picasa Web Albums as soon as possible - external search systems cannot substitute, since they cannot get at the data necessary to build an index.

Picasa Web Albums, without Javascript

Like many modern websites, Picasa Web Albums makes extensive use of Javascript.

However, if you dont have Javascript enabled, the Web Albums are still usable, though with slightly different behaviour.

• The pages display a banner across the top which warns you "Your browser does not support JavaScript. Many features are unlikely to work without JavaScript enabled, but you're welcome to look around."
• There are no missing feature apparent on the Public Gallery page, and you can still get into individual albums.
• On the album page, the album shows the album image over to the left of the page as normal, but no other thumbnail images are shown. The selector for each of the 3 thumbnail sizes causes the page to reload, but still no images are shown.
• The slideshow button still takes you to the slideshow - but nothing appears to be happening. However, the page then reloads a few seconds later, to a manual slideshow view, rather than an automatic one.
• This view has a "1 of x" counter above the image displayed, together with forward and back arrow buttons as appropriate.
• On the right of the image are links to
  
  • "View largest photo" which causes the browser to show just the jpeg image in a new window, at its full size.
  • "Download largest photo" which goes to the same image, but served in such a way that most browsers will prompt you to save the file to disk rather than display it.
  • "Javascript version" which switches back to the Javascript version (useful if you have reached the non javascript page because someone emailed you a link)

All in all, this is quite a usable subset of the features (though why no thumbnails are given for the album view I dont know - basic album views have existed for years without the need for Javascript). In fact, the non Javascript slideshow view may even have advantages over the normal one, in that it makes it easier to view the full sized images direct in the browser.

Interview with Dan Engel, ex-Picasa marketeer

Dan Engel led the marketing at Picasa, before it sold out to Google, then transferred to Google running online marketing for Google AdSense and Adwords.

He's now CEO of another photo related company, Morpheus Software, which produces photo animation software, particularly morphing software.

socalTech has an interview with him, that covers the company, the software, his background, and some wider considerations of the business model, funding, and the digital photography market in general.

Empty web albums should be filtered

... but they are not!

Robert looks to be part of the Picasa team, based on the contents of his Picasa Web Albums gallery.

He has called one of his albums "Empty albms should be filtered from non-owners view!" (yes, there is a typo in that), with the album description "Isn't this pretty? Owners should see any empty albums, but not visitors." The album is empty (as is the case when you first create it), and Robert is making the point that there is little reason that such albums should appear in the public gallery. The album was created on June 14th, but I guess that the Picasa team have not got around to fixing the bug yet.

Picasa 2.5 video introduction

Following on from my previous post about Dennis Daniels short videos about Picasa 2, there is also a much longer, and in many ways more polished video by Wickate Video Productions also available on Google Video.

This video, at 29 minutes in length, has time to go into a lot more features of the program, starting all the way from how to download and install it. The video is just a couple of weeks old, so deals with the latest Picasa 2.5 beta, and the Web Albums integation that that version offers.

Short instructional videos about Picasa

Dennis Daniels has placed a number of short instructional videos dealing with aspects of using Picasa, up on Google Video.

These videos, consisting of a screen capture with an audio commentary, were mostly made in the early months of 2006, so deal with Picasa 2, rather than the latest Picasa 2.5 beta.

For example, this video deals with "Basic Photo Management in Picasa":

Detecting if Picasa is installed, from a web page

It's possible to detect, from a web page, whether the client machine has Picasa installed or not. Picasa Web Album uses such detection code, so that it can know whether to offer such features as "download album to Picasa" which only makes sense if the client has the application installed.

Detecting Picasa in Firefox and Mozilla

This is achieved by checking the mime types installed on the system. When Picasa is installed, it registers some new mime types.

<script type="text/javascript">
var _picasaInstalled = !!(navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-picasa-detect'] || navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-picasa']);
</script>

I'm not sure why the !! double negation appears in this expression, but that's how its currently written - perhaps it's to avoid problems in certain browsers that I've not come across.

Detecting Picasa in Internet Explorer

This is achieved via the use of IE conditional comments:

<!--[if gte Picasa 2.0]>
<script type="text/javascript">
_picasaInstalled = true;
</script>
<![endif]-->

It looks at first glance as if this could be used to distinguish which version has been installed, but Picasa 2.5 beta still sets the Picasa variable being tested in the condition to the value 2, not 2.5.

Broken pictures when embedding Picasa Web Albums

When viewing your own albums, Picasa Web Albums offer a link that says "Embed in Blog/MySpace".

This gives you an HTML fragment that you can paste into your blog, MySpace page, or similar, which produces the following output:

Sunsets

Sep 9, 2005 - 11 photos

Unfortunately, Google have not thought very hard about this, and consequently there are a good number of broken embedded albums appearing. The major problem is that the vital link that shows the album thumbnail contains "&amp;" - which dependent on the blogging software used, may end up being transformed to something else. If that happens, the album displays with a broken picture as follows:

Sunsets

Sep 9, 2005 - 11 photos

Google should have anticipated this problem, and produced a URL format that does not involve the ampersand character. For the moment the manual fix is to carefully inspect your HTML, and to check that the ampersand is either a single character, or at most singly encoded as "&amp;", and not as "&amp;amp;".

Books on Picasa

There are two books currently available about Picasa:

• Organizing and Editing Your Photos with PICASA by Steve Schwartz, published in May 2005
• Google Picasa : Foto-Managment, Foto-Editing, and Fotoshow a German language book by Christian Immler, published in June 2006

Both of these books are fairly lightweight guides (160 pages each) to how to use Picasa, covering the Picasa 2 version.

Oops, Google broke it again

According to Google's company overview

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

That doesn't seem to apply to information about Picasa, where Google seems to be doing just the opposite - taking the few useful sources of information that do exist, and making them no longer accessible.

• When Picasa was first purchased by Google, the online support ran very useful forums, where there were authoritative postings by the Picasa developers themselves. These were to be found at http://forums.picasa.com
  
• Then Google scrapped the forums, losing all the collective information they contained, and instead switched online support to a (beta) Google group. For example, there was a very useful list of keyboard shortcuts at http://groups.google.com/group/picasa/browse_frm/thread/5b0013ca646149db
• In July 2006, Google again scrapped their existing Google groups, and created new ones, again making all the old accumulated questions and answers inaccessible via existing mechanisms.
  

The current situation is that the old forum URL redirects to the new Google Group, but bookmarks and links to posts in the old groups simply take you to a dead page.

The current set of Picasa related groups is:

• Picasa - the top level group that contains the other groups
• Picasa-Past-Discussions - where posts to the old group have been moved, so you can still search them, but your existing links and bookmarks are all broken. This group is read only, so no chance to make corrections or additions to old posts.
  
• PicasaGuide - Learn about and discuss the basic features of Picasa.
• PicasaSomethingBroken - Discuss tricky problems, find troubleshooting tips and check for bug fixes.
• PicasaWebAlbums - Discuss information about the new and improved features of Picasa.
• PicasaCommunity - Learn tips and tricks from other Picasa users.

In theory, whenever a Google employee posts to one of these groups they should do so using the name "Google Picasa Guide", but actually, the most active Googler (Tara Morrison) posts under her own "Tara" profile.

For those trying to find the shortcuts posting referenced above, its now at http://groups.google.com/group/Picasa-Past-Discussions/browse_thread/thread/5b0013ca646149db which is a trivial transformation of the old URL - so something that Google's system should be doing automatically.

Unofficial Picasa Blogs

I mentioned in my first post how the short lived official Picasa blog had died after just 5 posts.

There are however some unofficial blogs that cover Picasa

• Picasa Fun - "Discussing tips and techniques, and having fun with Google's Picasa.", currently with around 30 posts over the last 6 months
  
• Picasa Musings with about 6 posts over the last couple of months

There are also a number of other blogs that show up in blog searches, but which seem to be splogs when you check them out. I'll list them for completeness, but not link to them to avoid being dragged into their sploggy mire...

• picasaweb.blogspot.com - claiming to be the "Picasa Web Albums Blog", but consists of just 2 short posts, once you get past the ads at the top of the page
• picasadownload.net - nothing but auto generated spam and lots of ads
  

How often do people use Picasa

Google Blogoscoped ran a survey of how often people use various Google services.

The results are currently showing, that of the 863 people who have so far taken the survey (which given the subject matter of the blog, is highly biased in favour of advanced Google users)

• Picasa comes 22nd out of 55 in the list of the most used services
• Picasa Web Albums are 28th

• 1% of respondents use Picasa hourly
• 13% use it daily
• 13% use it weekly
• 20% use it monthly
• 39% do not use it at all
• 5% have not heard of this service

Most of the other services in the survey are web based - though Google Earth does appear 4 places ahead of Picasa at number 18. It's not entirely clear how the overall ranking is given - more people use Picasa daily than Google Earth for example, but on a weekly basis, Google Earth is ahead. Personally, I use both of these almost daily, and with the latest betas of each working closely together, I would expect a lot more people to be doing the same in the future.

Colors, duplicates, and geotagging

The Google Operating System blog has a quick run down of 3 features of Picasa 2.5 in Picasa 2.5 Has Interesting Features.

The features which get a quick mention are

• searching by color
• detecting duplicate files
  
• geotagging images via Google Earth
  

Picasa (web albums) integration with the Mac

Whilst there is no news on a full version of Picasa for the Mac, Google have released a set of uploaders that allow Mac OS X users to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, either directly within iPhoto or using drag-and-drop from a standalone application.

For iPhoto users
The Picasa Web Albums Exporter lives right inside iPhoto. Select photos, choose Export in the File or Share menu, and upload them directly to your web album.

For a standalone application
Use the Picasa Web Albums uploader -- just drag photos from the Finder and click the Upload button.

Requirements:

• - You must have a Picasa Web Albums account to use the Exporter or Uploader.
• - Requires OS X 10.4 or later.

The Google Blog post announcing the Mac uploaders notes that this started as a 20% time project. Its been worked on by Ted Bonkenburg, Greg Robbins, and Mike Morton.

Good comments on the uploaders from TechCrunch and Factory Joe amongst many others.

Whatever happened to the Picasa blog?

For a brief period in December 2004 and January 2005, the Picasa team at Google ran a blog at picasa2.blogspot.com.

That URL now returns Blogger's generic "Blogger: 404 - Page not found" error message.

In its brief existence, the blog had just 5 posts:

1. Sunday, December 05, 2004 - A teaser post by Lorna, titled "Picasa 2?" and saying just "Wouldn't *you* like to know!"
   
2. Monday, January 17, 2005 - Another short post by Lorna, announcing the actual release of Picasa 2 thus: "Welcome to Picasa 2! We're so happy to release this software after many months working on it. We'll be posting tips and tricks on how to use Picasa 2 in this space, so come back soon for more."
   
3. The same day - A picture posted by Tara
4. Wednesday, January 19, 2005 - A useful post about the new collage functionality posted by MikeNitro

   Collage Tips and Tricks

   Making a collage in Picasa 2 is an easy and fun way to present a group of pictures. Here are a few tips for creating exactly the collage you want:
   

   • By default, the image used for the background is the last one in your selection.
   • Use captions! If you add captions to your pictures, they will appear in Picture Pile collages.
   • You can shuffle the picture ordering by clicking on the preview (this will also affect the background image if you are using one).
   • For Picture Piles, you can shuffle the picture locations by holding down SHIFT and clicking on the preview.
   • Remember that your collage will be made from all of the pictures in the Picture Tray, so you aren't limited to the pictures in just one folder or label. Just drag all of the pictures you want in the collage to the Picture Tray before pressing the Collage button.
   • Don't worry if pictures look a little fuzzy in the preview. The preview uses low resolution images, but the final image will be rendered using full resolution images.

5. Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - Another very useful tip by MikeNitro, this time on the full screen keyboard shortcut:
   

   Full Screen View of Your Pictures

   
   Picasa 2 has a nifty keyboard shortcut for quickly viewing a picture at full screen size, without having to enter Slideshow mode!
   
   In Library View, place the mouse pointer over the image you want to view then press and hold down the CTRL and ALT keys simultaneously. The image will display for as long as you keep the keys held down. (In Edit View, the current picture is already selected, so just press and hold CTRL and ALT).
   
   NOTE: The image may look blocky at first, but it will refine momentarily, depending on the size of the image.

After that, the Picasa blog simply died, and Picasa remains one of the worst documented and supported of the major Google applications and services. Documenting Picasa aims to go some way towards redressing that balance, by providing a web site and blog that researches and brings together available information about Picasa.