Experiences batch editing with Picasa

James Mok is serious about his photography - witness his flickr pro account, his high end Nikon D2X digital camera, and his easy working familiarity with Photoshop.

So when he has a particularly important assignment - to produce a set of stylish wedding photos for a friends wedding, what does he reach for?  The answer is Picasa of course.  Although it's possible to achieve the washed out tinted and grainy feel that he wanted with Photoshop, the batch editing, and simplicity of the slider controls in Picasa made the job much easier.

Things didn't all go smoothly:

• Picasa works in RGB, rather than sRGB, so for his discerning eye, the end results were initially too saturated - so he redid the originals to desaturate them first in Photoshop, then reapplied the imaging editing to the desaturated images in Picasa.
• On exporting the files from Picasa after editing, the file sizes grew - no doubt a result of a change in the quality settings compared to the input images.

The resultant set of images is available as a flickr photoset.

Shutterfly goes public

Shutterfly, a photo sharing and printing website, has had a long association with Picasa - they were one of the original 4 partner sites (along with Ofoto, Snapfish, and Walmart) when Picasa 2 launched in January 2005.  It just held an IPO, raising about $87 million, and giving the company a market capitalization of about $354 million.

To reach the service from within Picasa, users in the USA who use the Create > Order prints and products... menu option can choose Shutterfly from the list of offered photo processors.  After logging in, Picasa then uploads your selected photos onto the service.

The Shutterfly service offers a fairly similar shared albums experience to Picasa Web Albums, with the added ability to order physical prints of the images.  Albums are nominally unlisted (there is no search facility within the service), and are viewable only by those who can get hold of the album URL - which would normally be by you sending out the URL of your albums via email.  However, like Picasa Web Albums, the URLs are general, and do not require logging in or validation to view, and many have made their way into the Google search index:

• Shutterfly albums via Google search - "about 8,950"
• Picasa Web Albums via Google search - "about 6,760"

However, Shutterfly goes one better, allowing collections to also be password protected if required, so just having the URL is not always sufficient.

Images from Shutterfly albums may not be hotlinked from other web pages - (PicasaWeb allows for limited hot linking).  Space for online storage is free and unlimited, though Pro Galleries are charged for, but give the opportunity to earn money when people order your prints.

You can also download the Shutterfly Studio, a Windows desktop application with similar functionality to Picasa, which allows for managing images, editing them, and uploading, sharing and printing them.  One feature it offers that Picasa is sorely lacking is the ability to view more than one image at once - for a side by side comparison.

More Picasa tutorial videos

Atomic Learning made available at techLearning a number of parallel videos showing how to do the same operation to photos using either Picasa on Windows, or iPhoto on the Mac.

The videos are all in the QuickTime format, which requires installing a player to watch them on Windows, though I guess that most Macs should cope with the format already.

The operations covered are:

• Importing Pictures from a Digital Camera (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Reducing Red Eye (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Straighten a Crooked Photo (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)

These were published in January 2006, so relate to the older version of Picasa, rather than to Picasa 2.5.

These videos are part of a wider set of short videos about Picasa available direct from the Atomic Learning site.  There are two additional free videos there

• Understanding the Library View
• Working with Folders on Disk collection

and the full set of tutorials available to subscribers includes

• Adding pictures to Picasa
• Importing pictures from digital camera
• Managing how Picasa finds pictures
• Moving and renaming pictures
• Adding a star rating to a picture
• Adding keywords to your pictures
• Adding a new collection
• Labeling a picture
• Adding an existing label to a picture
• Adding a picture to multiple label collections
• Deleting from a label collection
• Rearranging in label collections
• Saving changes (exporting pictures)
• Zooming and panning in the editor
• Cropping a picture
• Straightening a picture
• Removing red eyes
• Producing an ideal image
• Using Auto Contrast
• Manually adjusting the picture lighting
• Fixing the lighting in one click
• Making your picture warmer or cooler
• Applying amazing effects
• Writing captions for pictures
• Viewing advanced picture information
• Sending photos via email
• Adding your pictures to Blogger
• Sharing your picture via Hello
• Exporting pictures as a web page
• Viewing a slideshow of your pictures
• Using Timeline view
• Searching for your pictures
• Printing your pictures at home
• Exporting pictures to a photo processing website
• Burning your pictures to CD or DVD
• Creating a gift CD with slide shows
• Hiding and unhiding pictures
• Password protecting a collection
• Hiding and unhiding a folder
• Creating a movie from your pictures
• Making a screensaver
• Setting a picture as the desktop background
• Creating a poster
• Making a picture collage

Picasa and hardware devices

I've come across a couple of hardware devices that claim some sort of integration or compatibility with Picasa.

PhotoVu - wireless digital picture frame

The PhotoVu digital photo frame is mostly just like a computer screen (without keyboard, mouse etc) that displays photos.  These photos can be copied to the device via a number of different photo management packages, including Picasa.

The press release announcing Picasa compatibility is not very clear exactly what the integration with Picasa is, but it does mention that the frame can use RSS to directly download images from Picasa Web Albums.

Google Picasa remote control

This other hardware item seems to have even less real integration with Picasa - all it appears to be is a package for using your PC on your TV screen, via a TV like remote control device.

I'm not going to provide a direct link to it, since it looks to be very spam like - and it's promoted by x10 - those masters of the popunder ad.  If you really want to find it then this Google search will currently show you it as the top result.

Using Picasa for student creativity

techLearning has a article entitled "How To Use Picasa for Student Creativity" which is a useful reminder of some fun things even junior school students can do using Picasa.

It suggests:

• create a slideshow
• create a timeline
• create a picture collage
• editing and adding effects to photos
• cropping photos
• making a webpage

The article is accompanied with well done screenshots, with a torn paper edge effect (those weren't done in Picasa!), though unfortunately despite being written just recently, these all show the old version of Picasa, rather than Picasa 2.5.  Some details have changed in the current version, in particular "Make a webpage" is now called "Export as HTML page...", but the activities all still apply.

Just a few days earlier, another article "Going Ga-Ga for Google" on the same site had briefly touched on a number of Google products and sites of great use to educators, mentioning Picasa, video, scholar, calendar, and spreadsheets.  I think they rather missed out an obvious other one there - Google Earth, which has immense educational opportunities. 

Delete thumbnails and the photos vanish too...

Last Sociable Hacker relates a story about his father's use of Picasa.

His father has Picasa installed, and one day found that all the photos had disappeared from the My Pictures folder in Windows. This was strange, since he didn't think he had done anything to cause that, though he did say that "I recently deleted some photos within Picasa but I don't think it had anything to do with it."

It turns out that he thought of Picasa and the underlying disk folders as being quite separate, and saw no reason why deleting items in one should affect the other.  This had been "proved" by deleting some items in the My Pictures folder before, when they remained visible in Picasa (well at least momentarily before the thumbnails were updated).

It's a tricky issue for Picasa to educate their users on.  One of the great points of Picasa is that it does provide isolation between the Picasa view of a photo and what is stored on disk - the Picasa view may include rotation, cropping, and image enhancements which are not visible if you view the image in another program, since (unless you explicitly use the "save changes to disk" feature in Picasa 2.5) Picasa does not affect the original on disk image.  However, this isolation does not extend to deleting images not affecting them!  To be fair to Picasa, it does put up a confirmation box when you try and delete images within it - but if your mindset is that you are only deleting Picasa's (thumbnail) copy of an image, then that confirmation box is unlikely to stop you from going ahead with the delete.

Folder properties in Picasa 2.5

Folders have a large part to play in organizing photos within Picasa, and it is therefore useful to take a close look at what Picasa allows us to do to a folder.

The current folder may be selected by clicking on one of the folders shown in the folder tree at the left of the screen, and this causes the folder and its images to scroll into view on the main pane to the right of the screen.

The display shows

• A folder icon - which if you move the mouse over, the icon shows a more open folder, and a tooltip showing the location of the folder on disk (and clicking this will open that folder in Explorer).
• Alongside the icon is the name of the folder (which Picasa tries to keep in sync with the name used to store the folder on the disk) - double clicking this brings up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the name is the date for the folder, followed by optional "place taken" text - double clicking these also bring up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the date and location is a row of buttons, which depend on which options apply to this folder, and may be hidden or grayed out if they do not currently apply.
• Below the buttons is an optional description for the folder, or the grayed out text "Add a description" if no description has been given. This description can be changed in view, simply my clicking on it, and making the changes in place.
• Finally below all of that, we get to see the thumbnails of items in the folder.

Buttons that may occur in the row of buttons include

• "Select Starred" - which is always present, but grayed out if there are no starred items in the folder
• "Save Changes (x)" which only appears when there are items whose appearance in Picasa differs from their appearance in their on disk form

The folder properties dialog allows you to change all of the name, date, location, and description.  It is brought up either from the "Folder > Edit Description..." main menu item; the "Edit Description..." entry on the context menu which appears when you right click on the folder name; or by double clicking the existing folder name.

 

The various text entry boxes do not limit how much much text you enter.

The description box allow for multiple paragraphs of text.  You can separate each paragraph by typing Ctrl-Enter between paragraphs, or you can prepare your description text somewhere else, and then paste it into this box.  These text boxes allow the full range of characters to be included, but there is no control over formatting beyond the use of separate paragraphs.

The date may be changed by overtyping, or by clicking on the drop-down arrow, which brings up a calendar chooser.

The name, date, location and description fields are all redundantly stored in the picasa.ini file inside the folder, so have an existence outside of the Picasa database.

Bugs in folder properties and display

Trying all the options in folder properties in sufficient detail to write the description above uncovered a few bugs:

1. The display of the date does not follow the configured regional settings - it appears to use a fixed American form of date "Sep 27, 2006" rather than using either the short date or the long date formats from the Windows Regional options configuration.
2. Entering a long piece of text for the place taken field (for example pasting in a paragraph of text about the place) causes the text to display on top of the buttons below it, and if sufficient text is entered, to also draw on top of the description text, and the thumbnails themselves.
3. Entering a long description, perhaps several paragraphs of text about the pictures in the folder, also causes display problems - when the text is long enough that it takes up all the available height of the screen, then on scrolling the thumbnails into view, the thumbnails often get caught up in a continual repainting cycle.
4. Spotting that you probably should not have entered as much text as you did, and going back to the properties and deleting it, may not fix the problem - the folder view does not resize if you remove text from the description, and so may still show as a big blank area until you scroll right away from the current folder and then return to it.
5. When editing the name of the folder, Picasa tries to keep the folder name on disk in step with the name it is using within Picasa, but this fails far more often than it should with a popup.  For example, you can get this if you simply try to change the first letter of the folder name to a capital letter, which should be perfectly easy to accomplish.  At other times, this changing the case of the letter succeeds, but the folder name (both within Picasa and on disk) gains an ugly and unwanted "_1" addition at the end of the folder name.
6. When editing the folder description in place, with certain multiline descriptions, as the cursor flashes, the thumbnails continually scroll up and down by a small amount.

Where is the video demo for Picasa?

Robert Scoble notes that Google is missing an important marketing angle: video demos.  In the original post he lists many of the Google services, and finds no video demos for those services.  Later on in the comments, he specifically highlights Picasa as eminently suitable for showcasing via a video demo:

something like Picasa would be a better example. That requires downloading and installing before you can get a good idea of what it does.

Robert makes the offer to take his video recording equipment to Google, and to record a podcast interview and video demo.  Whilst this certainly provides an easy set of program ideas for Robert's podcast show, the point he makes is still very valid - videos on the web have taken off in a big way, and providing a demo video of Picasa would be a useful introduction for those unwilling to download and install the program before they try it out.

Roberts search strategy for videos was rather limited - he searched for videos that matched the query Google <service> demo video, so if the video did not describe itself as a "demo video" then it would not have been found.

In the case of Picasa, there do exist videos that demo the program's features - but they are not official video's produced by the team at Google.  I've noted a few such videos in previous posts:

• Picasa tutorials from screen captures
• Picasa 2.5 video introduction
• Short instructional videos about Picasa

Geotag with Google Earth

Picasa 2.5 offers the ability to geotag images using Google Earth.

The way it works is very simple:

• select your images in Picasa
• choose Tools > Geotag > Geotag with Google Earth
• this starts Google Earth, and displays a crosshair and a Geotagging dialog box within Google Earth
• to tag each photo you move the map under the crosshair to the appropriate place, then press the "Geotag" button which tags the highlighted image from the filmstrip of images, and automatically moves you to the next image.

It's a very straightforward workflow, and one that is surprisingly quick.

One problem that I do however have with it is that the filmstrip images are very small - which can make it hard to identify exactly what is pictured.

RoboGeo

An alternative way to do geotagging is to use RoboGeo, which has just come out with version 5.0.  They offer a number of different ways to geotag photos (including matching timestamps with a GPS captured trace).  However, they have obviously also used the Picasa and Google Earth method, and offer it as an almost identical feature.

RoboGeo puts up a very similar dialog within Google Earth, but with one very important difference - a number of features of the dialog can be configured including the size of the thumbnails.  I think this is a feature Picasa would be very wise to adopt.  Perhaps it's unnecessarily complex to ask for the size to be configured in number of pixels, but adding a small slider to the dialog which allows the thumbnail size to be increased would make this much more usable.  I would suggest that the current size is the minimum size offered, but that the upper range should be about 2.5 times the current size.

Update: I should have included a link to Digital Geography's Using Picasa to geotag photographs which provides a nice illustrated step by step guide to the process I ran through above.

All about saving... from Tara

Tara is a member of the Picasa team at Google, who regularly posts to the Picasa Google Groups.  She has just put together what she describes as an info sheet on the new "Save Changes" feature of Picasa 2.5.  The post has been pinned in the group, so that it is easy to find, but unfortunately the Google Groups post only allows for rather limited formatting.  I have taken the liberty of reposting the information here, with rather better formatting (and a couple of spelling corrections!):

Hi all,
I've put together a little info sheet about the new "Save Changes" feature in Picasa 2.5, hopefully this helps clarify how it works :)

• After you upgrade to 2.5, you will notice the new "Save Changes" button on some of your folders. This means the folder contains edited pictures. Rotates are considered edits, and this includes automatic EXIF rotates. Whenever a file in Picasa does not look the same on disk, the "Save Changes" button will be available.
• Saving is not something you need to do. You can use Picasa as you always have, and never save a thing. Picasa will still remember your unsaved edits and allow you to undo/redo them. When you email/blog/etc. from Picasa, your edits will be used. The 'Export' button is also still there.
• Picasa has always kept your original files safe. When you save a file in Picasa, we create an edited copy, and move the original to a subfolder called "originals". The "originals" subfolder is hidden, and will not be visible in Picasa. This automatic backup also allows saves to be undo-able, and revert-able :)
• "Undo Save" brings your picture back to the state is was in before the save - with edits in Picasa, but not on disk. You can undo a save the same way you undo any other edit, by going into the Edit view and using the Undo button. "Revert" will revert your file back to its original state on disk. "Revert" is on the File menu.
• Other tidbits: Save matches the jpeg quality level of the original but, if we can't match it, we use 85%. Non-jpegs are saved as jpegs. If you move an edited file on disk while Picasa is running, the original will move with it. Backup will include saves and originals. Right-click on saved pictures to locate the file or the original on disk. Under the File menu, "Save As..." and "Save a copy" are also available.

In a subsequent post to a followup thread, she also adds

• you can either use [the "Save Changes"] button to save everything in a folder at once OR you can select one picture at a time and go to File > Save.

PicasaWeb builtin module for Google Personalized Homepage

If you use the Google personalized homepage then you can add new modules to it.

There is a builtin module offered for displaying Picasa Web Albums content, which is has the description "View the activity for your Picasa Web Albums account!". In effect this means that it shows the "recent activity" within your favorites.

The actual display output seems to have changed since the screenshot on the directory page was taken, since the displayed items are now more compact than shown there. The number of items shown is configurable between 1 and 10 items.

The module has a feedback address of seanm.feedback.picasaweb@gmail.com, who is described as "Google Engineering". Some personalized homepage modules can also be used within Google Desktop Search - this unfortunately is not one of them.

Picasa 2.5 officially acknowledged

About a week after Picasa 2.5 started to roll out, Google finally got around to announcing it via a post to the Official Google blog titled Picasa goes online, gets new features too.

The post, by Michael Herf, this time simply described as a Picasa Engineer, talks about the 80,000 photos he has in Picasa, and how the new online albums feature now allows him to share these with the world - or just with friends and family. It also mentions the new folder layout view, the ability to save changes to photos (in an undoable manner), links with Google Earth, movies, screensaver, and button customization.

The main Picasa download page is indeed serving up the latest version now (build 32.94), but unfortunately many of the other download routes are still serving up back level versions (such as via the link on Picasa Web Albums, the link on Joga.com, and the version that is packaged for Linux).

Picasa tutorials from screen captures

I've noted before a number [1, 2] of Picasa tutorials available via Google Video.  Unfortunately uploading a video to Google Video causes the data to be re-encoded as a Flash movie, which generally leads to loss of quality in the pictures.

I've just come across a series of Picasa tutorials, which were generated originally as screen captures which despite also being encoded as Flash movies are of much higher image quality.

The tutorials were created by Jim and Chris Guld who do computer training professionally, so they are reasonably polished - I get the feeling that they have actually shown people the things they are talking about and so have planned the best way to make their points, rather than just making up the tutorials on the fly. Currently there is a series of 6 numbered tutorials, designed as an ordered introduction to Picasa, and 5 further lessons designed to be dipped in in any order.  The titles are:

• 1. Installing Picasa
• 2. Opening Picasa for the first time
• 3. Basic Searching to find your photos
• 4. Importing photos from your camera
• 5. Viewing your photos in different ways
• 6. Rename, Move, Delete photos
• Importing Photos from CD
• Removing images from Picasa's view
• Delete and/or Rename photos
• Exporting/Copying/Resizing photos to another folder
• Examples of Editing Photos, Basic Fixes, Tuning and Effects

These all seem to use Picasa 2 rather than 2.5.  A note on the site says that the collection is currently (August 2006) being developed, and is free - but will move to a paid model in future.

There is a similar professionalism to a illustrated step by step explanation of achieving certain effects with Picasa contained in the recent Fun with Picasa post on their blog.

Picasa integration with websites - where is the API?

Joe Duck points out that Yahoo is doing a LOT of great stuff. 2.0 Stuff. which is especially relevant to him as he tries to put together some travel related mashups.  In addition, he goes on to note that

Flickr makes it a snap to add pictures to blogs or websites as well as manipulate your own photos. I pointed out how great the Flickr features were to some Picasa developers at Google last month and asked about Picasa integration with websites. They sheepishly replied they were working on it...

I certainly hope they are - there is enormous scope for integrating Picasa Web Albums with other data. Google started an explosion of interest when they documented the API to Google Maps, and although Picasa Web Albums are not the same breakthrough technology that Google Maps were, I'd venture that more people regularly look at photos than consult maps, so the opportunities are huge if that data can be accessed via an API.

Just to recount, Picasa Web Albums do already have some integration points, where things can be linked with other websites, but this is far from a full API.  The integration points include:

• code snippets to embed an album in a blog or MySpace
• code snippets to embed a photo in a blog or MySpace
• RSS feeds for a single web album
• RSS feeds for a user's public gallery

Where they fall very short is the discoverability and searchability of albums and photos.  To be honest, that's not just a missing API - it's a whole missing feature, since you can't even search interactively on the Picasa Web site itself.

Another area where there is need for a (documented) API is for the uploading of photos. At the moment you can upload from the Picasa desktop application, or if you are on a Mac via the Mac uploading tools (which include a plug-in for uploading from iPhoto). There are plenty of other photo sources that could be "PicasaWeb enabled" if the upload API was opened up - such as uploading from mobile phones, or from other photo organizers.

A home for your photos

Google doesn't do tag lines - even the famous "Don't be evil" is described as an informal company motto, and is hidden away in the code of conduct on subsidiary sites such as the investor website, not on the regular search site.

Picasa is slightly different from the Google norm - after all it was a brand that Google acquired fully formed, and have retained since.

The name Picasa is rationalized as being form from Pic (=picture/photo) and Casa (=home), hence "a home for your photos".  This has been explained this way for many years, but the only direct quote I can find for now is from this year, by Adrian Graham, product manager for Picasa.  (Via the Internet Archive, a view of the Picasa home page from Nov 2002 is rather sparse, since the images were not archived, but the page title is "Picasa: The best home for your pictures").

The current Picasa home page now uses the tagline "Picture Simplicity".

Along the way, Picasa has also used the following taglines:

• Picasa -- The software that should have come with your digital camera
• Hello -- Share pictures like you're sitting side-by-side

The first of these is echoed by the text of buttons to be found in Google's referrals program, which uses the text:

• Get photo software from Google
• Organise your pictures. Get Google's photo software.
• Google's photo software. It's what should've come with your camera.

Different countries have different buttons, and the US seems to have been updated with some changed text, which emphasises the sharing aspects of Picasa - presumably to accompany the roll out of Picasa 2.5 with many more options for sharing in it:

• Organize and share photos with friends. Google' photo organizer.
• Organize your digital pics with Google's photo software.

Note that none of these referral links actually make any mention of Picasa - they all talk about "Google's photo software".  Referral buttons are also available in languages other than English, and as far as I can tell, these are fairly literal translations of the same phrases used on the English versions.

The Picasa Review Guide sums up the program with the phrase "Find and enjoy all the photos on your computer in seconds".

Update 30/9/06: John Battelle's article Thoughts on Picasa and Google's Marketing Strategy carries a image with another Picasa advertising phrase: You can find any image you want on the web. How about on your own computer?

Picasa 2.5 build 32.94

Google have slipped out another quick update to Picasa 2.5, taking it to build 32.94.

The public release notes just show a new date and build number, without any details of the change, but the PicasaWeb readme carries brief information:

September 15, 2006
Picasa 2.5, Build 32.94

This update fixes bugs with saving to disk, uploading to Picasa Web Albums, and with CD burning.

Thanks for all of your great feedback and bug reports! Let us know if you run into any problems with this update.

(via the Blogoscoped forum thread).

New users downloading Picasa are still being directed to an old 2.1 version, but the 2.5 version is gradually rolling out via automatic update.  (The automatic update, and indeed the manual update via the menu option "check for updates online", deliberately does not offer upgrades to everyone at once, to avoid stressing the download servers).

Update: Michael Herf, Picasa engineering manager, adds some more detail:

32.94 is rolling out to picasaweb users starting tonight, and it has fixes to this issue. We've fixed a connection issue due to Google Web Accelerator, added more reliable connection detection, and figured out some proxy bugs.

If Internet Explorer can see picasaweb, we're really hoping Picasa will be able to upload to it in this new build.

Embedding images from Picasa Web Albums

From Documenting P...

I've already written that Picasa allows the embedding of Albums in Blog posts or MySpace, (and noted a problem associated with that due to the poor design of the embedded code).

Picasa Web Albums now also offer the ability to embed single images in blogs, as illustrated by the image appearing above.  Unlike the case with the embedded album, the URL used for the image is simple (without the problematic ampersand character that is present in the album embed code), so there should be far fewer broken images.  The image is of a very restricted size (288 pixels wide), but clicking it links through to the full size image in the album.  Notice also that there is a short title of the album where the image comes from - but this is truncated to be just 16 characters long - which seems unnecessarily short.  Of course, you can always change the HTML code manually, but many people will not bother to do so.

When producing the embedding code, there is the option to not include the Album link at all, but no other options, for example there is no attempt to surround the picture with any form of border.

Picasa 2.5 new features

Although it's still not rolling out automatically, the golden version of Picasa 2.5 is available for direct download.

This version of Picasa offers an extensive range of new features, compared to the previous 2.2 version. These include:

• Picasa Web Albums for easy sharing on the web.
• Nested Folder View - a much requested alternative way to look at the photos on your disk
• Save Changes to Disk - for the times when you do want to overwrite original images with edited versions
• Improved import - both faster, and into existing folders
• Updated screensaver with more presentation options
• Geotagging using Google Earth to indicate where each photo relates to, and the ability to export as KML for display in Google Earth and Google Maps
• Larger thumbnails
• More RAW support, including newer cameras, DNG, more accurate color, and faster
• Improved caption editing
• Starred photos organize automatically into a special album
• "Just raw frames" option lets you export time-lapse sequences in the movie maker
• The bottom row of buttons can now be configured to suit your needs

and

• an Experimental menu for some other things they're trying out.

 

There's more detail on many of these via the release notes.

 

For Picasa Web Albums, there's a new tutorial online.  Within Picasa itself, the Web Albums button pulses to draw attention to itself, and on pressing it you are presented with a "New Feature!" dialog, that leads through to the online tutorial, as well as giving you options to sign up for the albums.

The online support pages do mention the Web Albums, but it looks as if there is still work to do here to fully document all the other new features.

Historical list of Picasa updates

As Picasa rolls out its version 2.5 upgrade, its worth documenting, before the information slips from sight, what features the previous releases of Picasa introduced.

Picasa 2.0 was originally launched in January 2005.

Picasa 2.1 was released September 19, 2005, and added:

• Multiple interface languages – Picasa is now available in Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, English (U.S. and UK) , French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. When you start Picasa, the software will automatically match your system's native language. To change the language in Picasa, go to Tools > Options. Change the language using the pulldown menu on the "General" tab. You will need to close and re-open Picasa to see your changes take effect.
• BlogThis! - Post a photo to your blog in one click. Picasa's new "BlogThis!" button replaces the "Blogger" button and allows you to upload your photos directly to the Blogger web editor, without the need for a Hello account. To use, select a photo in Picasa and click the "BlogThis!" button. (If you do not have a Blogger.com account, follow the steps on-screen to create one.) When you are signed in to Blogger, the web editor will open. Click "Publish" to post your photo to your blog.
• Print CD covers – Turn any photo into cover art. Click the "Print" button. Go to Tools > Options > Printing. Select "CD Cover Size" and apply. "CD Cover Size" is now one of the print layout choices.
• Improved RAW handling – Picasa supports more RAW formats and cameras in this release, with improved color-balance support and faster speed. Work with your highest quality files from these camera manufacturers: Canon (.CRW, .CR2), Nikon (.NEF), Olympus (.ORF), Pentax (.PEF), Kodak (.DCR), Sony (.SRF), Minolta (.MRW), and Fuji(.RAF). New models supported include the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (aka the 350D), Pentax *istDS, Konica/Minolta Maxxum7D (aka the Dynax 7D).
• External drives - Find photos on external drives using Picasa. Simply go Tools > Folder Manager to choose whether Picasa should scan a connected external drive to find pictures. When you unplug and reconnect, Picasa will find your pictures instantly (with no scanning), and will also preserve your labels

Picasa 2.2 was released January 30, 2006, and added:

• 25 Additional Languages - Now in Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
  When you start Picasa, the software will automatically match your system’s native language. To change the language in Picasa, go to Tools > Options. Change the language using the pulldown menu on the "General" tab.
• Network Drive Support - Improvements have been made for users who map their My Documents folder to UNC/Network drives.
• IE 7 Support - Fixed errors in Order Prints room with IE 7.
• CD Burning - Better reliability burning folders with long folder names.

Picasa 2.5 was released September 12, 2006, and adds many new features, as listed on the release notes.

Picasa 2.5 (build 32.91) looks ready for widespread release

The public release notes for Picasa now reference build 32.91 (dated 12th September), yet the build downloadable from the Picasa Web download link still shows build 32.71 on its about screen, and directs you to an older set of release notes.

The existence of these two parallel release notes suggests that Picasa 2.5 is about to be released from limited tests, and made available to  the public at large.

The public release note page at http://readme.picasa.com/public/ is titled "Auto Update" which further suggests that this new release may be rolling out automatically to people with earlier versions of Picasa2, though Picasa 2.5 beta users do not seem to be being automatically upgraded.

Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge

The Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge is in Los Angeles, not all that far from the Picasa offices.  It's a place that is a favourite haunt of a number of the Picasa team, including Lorna, and Michael Herf.

Lorna has written "An open letter to Los Angeles: Don’t destroy Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge!", objecting to the potential plans of Caltrans to build a freeway onramp through the refuge, and the article links through to a number of resources on the refuge put together by Michael Herf.

These resources include

• An album of photos hosted on Picasa Web
  
  Sepulveda Basin
  Jun 21, 2006 - 19 photos
• A similar set of photos, geotagged via Picasa, and exported as a Google Earth file.

The Google Earth file can also be viewed via Google Maps (though this currently has problems with landscape orientation photos).

Picasa Web Albums - Linked Galleries

Picasa Web Albums have added a new feature - that of linked galleries.  These show up as a list on the right hand side of your public gallery page, and are simply links to other peoples public galleries.  You can see an example of this at the Documenting Picasa albums.

When you add a new user to your favorites then you are offered the choice of also displaying this in your Linked Galleries list, though as the dialog notes, you can always add it later.  You do this by going to your favorites list, which has has a new column added offering "show link on my gallery" for each entry.

Picasa teddy bear - a hidden Easter Egg

Pressing Ctrl-Shift-Y in Picasa brings up a floating teddy bear, which has no particular use beyond simply being a hidden easter egg.  If you repeat the key press you get another bear, at a random position, and random size.  The bear can be moved around by picking and dragging it, so you can try placing it in appropriate places in your photos. 

The Easter Egg is present in both Picasa 2 and in the 2.5 beta. However, as a non-mainstream feature, in Picasa 2.5 it currently shows a number of bugs:

• when dragging the bear around with the mouse, the bear does not move the same amount as you drag the mouse (try picking him up by the center of his nose - as you drag, the mouse moves off his nose)
• when appearing where the search box is, the bear, which normally floats in front of everything, is obscured by the white rectangle of the inner search box
• when switching between albums in the thumbnail view, the bear can lose his head, or appear in multiple parts - as the albums scroll into view, parts of the bear are scrolled with them, rather than the albums scrolling behind the bear

I don't know of a way to get rid of the bear once you have brought it up - you simply have to exit Picasa.

Microsoft Max - of minimal use

Microsoft have released a new version of Microsoft Max, a photo organizer of sorts, so it's getting a fair amount of blog coverage.

Max gives you the ability to produce lists of your photos, which it also calls albums, and then to share these with your friends.  In theory a limited, but usable, set of features.  However, that's not the real purpose of Max - its mostly just a way to showcase some new graphical features that Microsoft are producing, and which will be included in Windows Vista.  To use Max on Windows XP is a huge download (the recommended requirements include "Beverage and snack. The installation may take a while."), and the result is a huge disappointment.

The graphics are superficially slick, but are very slow - presumably that's a reflection of the fact that they make huge demands on the graphics card, and that my card is not state of the art.  However, since displaying photos is a very simple operation, there should be no need for this to be a slow operation on any graphics card.

Working with photos almost universally uses a thumbnail concept.  Max however seems to have failed to grasp one of the most trivial properties of thumbnails - that equal sized photos give equal sized thumbnails.  Max is happy with landscape orientation images - the thumbnails of these are fine, but if an image is portrait orientation, the thumbnail is simply made to be the same height as the landscape thumbnail - which means its area is much smaller than it should be.

The photo sharing concept is also severely limited - instead of sharing in any standard format or via a server based mechanism, sharing simply means that you make the photos available for (secure) peer to peer download by other Max users.

Oh, and the reason why a new version has been released was to add RSS feed reading to the package.  I have no idea who thought that this was an appropriate addition to a photo program, but it currently seems very out of place.  (You could perhaps justify it if it was specialized for the photo RSS feeds produced by Picasa Web Albums or Flickr, and if its own sharing ability was based on such photo feeds, but that does not seem to be the case).

See also: Max disappoints (whose conclusion "Max is not even worth downloading and trying it out." I have to agree with), TechCrunch, David Brunell.

SpreadHello - another abandonned blog

SpreadHello is a blog and information site about Hello - the instant message client from Picasa.  It seems to have been active between July and November 2005, but not to have been updated since.

However the content is at least still kept available, and may be of passing interest.  There is a FAQ, and a brief Getting Started page, though the support forum which had some useful questions and answers on is gradually becoming overrun with spam posts. 

"Posted by Picasa" image searches on blogs

One way to find some interesting photo blogs is to search for the phrase "posted by Picasa".

You can do this on a general search engine, such as Google (reporting about 1.7 million matches), or also on a specific blog search engine such as Technorati (reporting a surprising similar 1.6 million matches).

Technorati allows you to see the rate at which these post are being made - ranging up to 6000 posts a day for the period I checked.

You can of course include other words with the phrase, so as to bias the results to particular photo subjects.

Via this mecanism, I came across Signs of the Times which shows amusing photos.  See what you can find.

Corel Snapfire photo software

Corel have launched a new photo organizing and editing package called Snapfire. Available in two versions, a free one, and Snapfire Plus with additional features, it appears to share many of the features of Picasa, namely importing photos direct from your camera, offering simple editing, sharing by email and slide show, and backing up to CD or DVD.

The About Box credits around 75 people, so this seems to have been a sizable development effort -though it may be that many of those just worked on bits that have been bolted into the program.  Having a look at the files on disk shows a good number of bits that may have come from other Corel packages - after all Corel are the current home for Paint Shop Pro, and they already have a photo organizer called Corel Photo Album.

The file formats supported look to be jpeg, gif, tiff, png, bmp, plus avi, mov, and mpeg for videos.  No sign of RAW file support, which suggest this is aimed at the casual user (the "snapper"), not the enthusiastic photographer.

First impressions show it to be inferior to Picasa in every aspect I cared about, so for me at least, it was quickly uninstalled. It's unclear how Corel is going to find space in the market for this - especially since to come close to match Picasa's features you really need the paid for version.

ABC News has a review, where they are slightly more positive in that the reviewer mostly found it enjoyable to use - but they also conclude that Picasa beats it in all respects at the moment.

Update: In the brief period that Snapfire was installed on my machine, I find that it did something very stupid - it ran through the whole of my Outlook emails, extracting every image it could find into a directory hierarchy within the My Pictures folder on my disk.  Why is this stupid, well many reasons:

• it extracted every image, including the thousands of ones from junk emails that are currently in my junk emails or my deleted folders
• I don't want yet another copy of all the images in my good emails either - any that I want to refer to have already been extracted to disk, so this is simply polluting my disk with lots of duplicates
• I certainly don't want things added in the My Pictures folder - which I never use since its on a disk drive where space is at a premium

You may ask how did I spot this - simple, after uninstalling Snapfire, I started up Picasa again, and it suddenly found thousands of images that had not been present on my machine beforehand.

Posting from Picasa to Blogger Beta to be "launched soon"

Google have created a blog to keep track of known problems with the Blogger Beta.

One of the problems listed is the inability to use Picasa to post to a Blogger Beta blog. The posting notes that Google is "working on this feature and it will be launched soon."

The blog listing the problems is itself a Blogger Beta blog (as one might expect), so takes advantage of new features introduced with the beta, including the ability to label posts.  There is a label for Picasa, which currently has just this one problem listed.

Update: The post has been updated with

Update (9/12): We have it working and will need a little more time for all the testing. We know a lot of you are waiting for this!

Picasa on Mac via Crossover Office

Codeweavers, who provided the expertise to get Picasa working on Linux, have released a (time limited) beta of Crossover Office for Mac. This is their commercial version of the same Wine technology that Picasa on Linux uses, so it is not at all surprising that using it allows Picasa to also run on the (Intel based models of the) Mac.

Such a development of course raises the question as to whether Google will make the same arrangements on the Mac as they did on Linux, so that Picasa becomes a fully supported (and zero-cost) application on that platform.  (Whilst the beta version of Crossover Office is free, once the beta expires the full version will cost $60 - which is lot just to run a free photo organizer!) 

Google Image Labeler game

Google have licensed the ESP game, and made a version of it available as the Google Image Labeler.

The idea here is to label random images, at the same time as someone else, and when you both use the same label, you progress to the next image.

Its not just fun - the concept is that getting human descriptions of images like this can give improvements in image search, with an example search engine using this data at ESP Image Search.

Google's implementation of the game differs from the original in a number of ways, and frankly seems quite buggy:

• it avoids the need for Java
• the images are far too small - it uses the standard thumbnails from Google Image Search
• the layout of the screen is poor - the offlimits words are easily overlooked since they are too far away from the image
• the screen flickers horribly to update the time and the score - there is absolutely no need to redraw the unchanged score every second
• Once you have finished the game, most of the images used are shown for review, and a tool tip shows the guesses entered by your competitor. (You are not shown the last image, that you were working on at the time the game ends - which is a real shame when you had put a lot of effort in to describing it, and still not hit any matches).

The implementation has been done using the Google Web Toolkit.

Unfortunately, especially by using too small images where no detail can be made out, the best strategy for the game is to guess using lowest common denominator words - general terms such as man, woman, red, green etc. This is hardly adding any valuable data to the image above what the computer can determine automatically (colours are easily found, and face recognition is quite good at determining gender). The "offlimits" column can be used to correct for this a bit, but to do so is frustrating for the players - a far better idea would to simply use bigger images, so that there is more detail that can be described.

Lots of comments from Blogoscoped, TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch, Slashdot, Geeking with Greg.

(It looks likely that the domain names "Google Image Tagger" which were registered recently are associated with this game, but once again, Google has steered clear of the word "tag", instead finally deciding on using the word "label" instead).

Update:Looking at the HTML file, the internal name of this is com.google.image.tagger.ImageTagger, so the change from Tagger to Labeler looks to be a fairly last minute decision.