New Picasa 2.5 build 32.97

Downloads of Picasa are being served up a new build now, 32.97, though there are no notes on the regular readmes etc to say what may have changed.

Flickr Uploadr loses some metadata

Richard Akerman noticed that when he uploaded his photos, prepared using Picasa, into Flickr using the Flickr Uploadr, some of his metadata was going missing.

Specifically he noticed that if the Uploadr was used to resize his images, uploading from Windows (Uploader 2.3) caused the keywords to go missing, whereas uploading from a Mac (Uploadr 2.2) caused the EXIF data to go missing.

His article is a good introduction to using Picasa to add metadata to photos

• caption
• keywords
• geolocation via Google Earth

He also has an earlier article specifically about geocoding with Picasa and Google Earth.

Picasa awards

I wrote yesterday about the Picasa Testimonials page, which carries an old copyright, links to a download for an out of date version of the software, and carries testimonials that relate to the software produced before Google bought the company.

Reached in a similar way from the features section of the Picasa website, the Awards page is similarly very out of date.

It's got a similar 2005 copyright message, but we can be more exact than that - the awards mentioned were last updated with an entry from March 2005.

The full list of awards given (and it's not a long list!) are:

• 5-Stars-Award. CHIP Online - March 2005
• Editor's Choice Award 2005. PC Magazine – January 2005
• DIMA 2005 Innovative Product Award. - February 2005

The above all relate to Picasa 2.  In addition there is a list of awards for the earlier Picasa 1 software:

• Editor’s Choice: Australian Personal Computer – October 2004
• Best of the Year 2003, Digital Imaging. PC Magazine – December 2003
• 2003 Editor's Choice Award. American Photo - 2003
• DEMOgod Award: DEMO 2003 – February 2003

I can't think what good Picasa thinks keeping such an out of date list does - I rather suspect that, like much of the Picasa support documentation, this page has simply been abandoned.

Picasa testimonials

Picasa has page of customer testimonials accessed via their features section of their website.

However, I think it's fair to say that the page is woefully out of date - the copyright reads 2005, and the "Download Picasa now" link gets you a version of Picasa 2 from March 2006, rather than the current Picasa 2.5 with Picasa Web Albums.

Even more telling are the testimonials themselves, which include

"...My husband suggested that I purchase Picasa..."

"...It's the only one I've actually liked enough to spend money to purchase..."

"...I downloaded your trial copy..."

Notice the emphasis on having to pay for Picasa - that means that all these testimonials relate to the old Picasa 1 software - from before Google bought the company!

It's not as if Google don't solicit testimonials - the Picasa support page has an explicit button to "Share my testimonial or personal story with the Picasa Team" which takes you through to the How do you use Picasa? page.  This page asks:

How do you use Picasa?

Has Picasa changed the way you edit and share photos? Do you have a special or fun story about Picasa you'd like to share with us? We'd love to hear from you!
Type your story in the box below and hit the "Submit Story" button. Feel free to include additional information, such as a Picasa feature you've discovered that may be helpful for others. It's up to you if you'd like to include information about yourself.
We love hearing from our users and we share your stories with members of our team. Some of these stories will also appear on our Picasa website, so look for yours in the near future.

By submitting your story, you grant Google Inc. permission to use your name and testimonial for marketing purposes. Google will not sell your name or email address.

Like I care about shoes...

Picasa enables me to find my photos on my own PC, but a lot of the power in that search comes about because of the good metadata associated with the images - I carefully file them in directories where the name means something, and by virtue of the date being stored with images I can often narrow the search down by knowing around when I took a photo (or more likely, whether it was before or after another photo).

On the web however, image searching is a different matter.  Metadata is much harder to find - images prepared for the web often have dates and EXIF metadata stripped off or altered, and images are not filed in neatly named categories.  Most search engines therefore rely on just approximate clues about the image - the filename, link text, other on page clues.  The result is that image search is a very poor relation to text search in many respects.

It's worth noting that there are a number of motivations for doing an image search:

• to find an image of a particular item - this may be the obvious one, but its actually not one that drives most of my searches
• to return to a website that I remember was illustrated by a particular image
• as a sort of visual snippet to help decide which sites are worth visiting (on the basis that if a site goes to the trouble of sourcing good images, the rest of its content may be of a similar standard)

Thus around a year ago when Riya launched, I was hoping for a site that would push the boundaries of image search.  Their particular hook was that they did textual and facial recognition.  The facial recognition got the big press, since it was the sexier technology, but was beset with problems - it didn't work well enough to live up to the hype, and had it done so, there are all sorts of privacy concerns, with shades of Big Brother being able to find lots of images of an individual automatically.

I was therefore more interested in the textual recognition that they offered.  However, if possible, this was even worse than the facial recognition.  The recognition rate was quite low - many images showing text had nothing in them recognized, and even when text was recognized, it was normally as single words, rather than as a block of text.  (My understanding from Tara Hunt is that this was not a technical issue, rather that the licence to the technology that Riya obtained to do this would not permit them to do continuous text recognition).  There are a few images that the text recognition has tagged - for example search for "exit", but in general so little text from images was recognized that you probably forget the site ever offered this feature.

Riya realized they had problems, (their CEO writes a very open blog on the matter), and decided to change their emphasis, to become a real visual search engine.  This sounded great, and I eagerly awaited the arrival of Riya 2.0 as they considered it.

And today it arrived - and I don't like it.

Rather than perfecting their technology for a wide ranging search field, they have instead produced a shopping service - you can use it to search for products that look like each other - provided that those products are shoes, watches, handbags or jewelry.  I'm certainly not in their target market - 20 to 30 year old women, so perhaps I'm missing the point, but these seem a strange set of goods to handle.  Shoes are one of the last things I would buy on-line - unlike most clothes they need to fit pretty exactly, so generally need to be tried on in person.  Watches and jewelry are high value items - and not everyday purchases, so not an obvious online purchase either.  And as a man, I'm never likely to understands handbags - so again the exact logic behind offering this product escapes me.  Perhaps the reasons for these choices lies with the celebrity pictures to be found on the site - where the pictures show watches and shoes highlighted, and linked to searches.

All in all, with the widespread coverage of like.com's launch, it does look as if I'm not alone in thinking they could have done more with this technology.  Here's hoping that Picasa is able to do more with the related object recognition technology they recently got via Neven Vision.

Good further coverage of Like is to be found at: Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, ZDNet, TechCrunch, Greg Linden, GigaOM, Don Dodge.

It's worth noting that visual search for shoes is not unique to Like - Chez Imelda also offers this, powered by technology from Pixsta. 

Microsoft Max project winding down

Microsoft Max was never all that clear what it was (except for being a demo of new technologies), though as it offered some photo organizational features it did get briefly compared to Picasa.  Back in September, when a new version came out, I gave it a more thorough workout, and was disappointed - finding it slow and cumbersome.

However, just a couple of months later, Microsoft have announced that the project is over, and that the program will be discontinued.  Downloads are already disabled, and soon the ability to share lists of photos will be switched off.

Bloggerbot to be turned off soon

Michael Lowry reports that he received a message whilst posting to his blog using Hello that Bloggerbot is going away soon.  The full text of the message is

Bloggerbot is going away soon.

Bloggerbot will be turned off by the end of 2006.

Instead try Picasa's "BlogThis!" feature.

(We're working to make it even better.)

As Michael notes, although superficially BlogThis! and the Bloggerbot both do the same thing in allowing you to post pictures to your blog (from Picasa or the companion Hello), the differences at the detail level are such that Bloggerbot users don't want to move to the more limited BlogThis! system.

 The differences include

• The "BlogThis!" window takes up the whole screen, which make it difficult to produce the blog post, which often requires you to consult other windows to collect or check on information as you write.
• Bloggerbot does not limit the number of photos in a blog post, whereas BlogThis! can only cope with 4
• The BlogThis! window is very slow to appear, so you have to sit around and wait for many seconds before you can start your blog post.

Michael also relates in an earlier post how he recently started to get truncated images with Bloggerbot, but Google eventually identified and fixed that problem.

For examples of blog posts that use the ability of Bloggerbot to post an unlimited number of photos at once, check out his "eat, drink and be merry" blog.