New Picasa build - version 2.6 build 36.21

No notification of what may have changed in this build, but I would guess that it may be related to the the Google Photos Screensaver 2.0.

Google Photos Screensaver

The Google Photos Screensaver is part of the Google Pack which also includes Picasa.

As the name suggests, its a screensaver for showing photos - where those photos can come from

• directories on your disk
• images managed in Picasa
• your Picasa Web Albums
• general photo RSS feeds.

To retrieve photos from Picasa Web Albums you have to provide it with your login details, and it can then either get photos from your own albums, or from recent updates to the albums of people you have selected as favorites.  This uses the Picasa Web Albums API, including the currently  undocumented API call that retrieves the recent changes of favorites.

Unfortunately Picasa Web Albums do not offer a way to get to photos from across the community search, so you can't set that as your screensaver source - though you can use specific albums from other people using the standard RSS feed mechanism.

RSS feeds display a caption with the images - unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to disable this - which is a shame since it can detract from the impact of the images.

The screensaver also installs a Firefox extension that allows you to click on feed links and add them to the screensaver.

A few notes of interest from the executable

• The executable name is GPhotos.scr - it does look as if Google may be positioning GPhotos as a replacement or at least an addition to the Picasa branding
• There's a reference in the file to C:\dimich-picasa-dx\googleclient\picasa3\dazzle\CBurnInUI.cpp - not sure what to deduce from that - I suspect that dazzle is the codename of the picasa3 screensaver - now released on it's own as this Google Photos Screensaver

Picasa Web Albums and the Google Talk gadget

The Picasa Web Albums What's New page has been updated with the information that:

Share photo albums in your instant messages
You can now share photo albums in your chats with the Google Talk Gadget. Paste a URL from Picasa Web Albums into your chat, and you can scroll through a slideshow of the album right in your conversation.

In addition to that, there's mention of the Picasa Web Albums data API on the same page - and indeed this is being pushed quite strongly since on every album page the footer has now been updated to have links to Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Program Policies - Developer - Google Home.  So every user gets to see a link to developer information, even though to the vast majority of the users who are not computer developers, this will be of no use at all.

Picnik goes half way to a secure link to Picasa Web Albums

When the Picasa Web Albums API launched last week, one of the listed example services making use of the API was the photo manipulation site Picnik.

However, it was a poor example of how to do things, in that when you went to the Picnik site, it asked you for your Google account and password so that it could use them to access your account.  I hope that no-one gave them these credentials - there is no excuse for asking for them when Google provide a proper authentication mechanism which means that you only ever authenticate with Google, never entering your details into a third party site.

I'm glad to say that Picnik has now started to use the proper authentication mechanism - passing you off to a secure page at Google when it becomes necessary to log in. 

However, there's still room for improvement - they currently have not bothered to properly register with Google, so that once you have logged in you get a warning

This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:
http://www.picnik.com/callback/picasaweb

So still work to do there, but certainly moving in the right direction.

The Picnik application provides a Flash based UI - so much of it breaks the conventions we have come to expect from the web (such as middle click to open in new window), but it does seem to have done a fair job at integrating with Picasa Web Albums.  As well as showing you the contents of albums from which you can select items to process in Picnik, you can also use the interface to rename (that is update the captions) or delete items from your albums.  Once you have manipulated images in Picnik, you can also save the resulting image back to Picasa Web Albums.

Images saved in this way are tagged with a "picnik" tag - there are currently 177 photos tagged picnik in the Community Search at Picasa Web Albums.

I also found a few bugs apparent in this beta application (for example the "I'm doing something animation" shows some rotating gears and always says "renaming"), and the chunky Flash interface has a habit of truncating text and not giving you any way to see the full text (such as in names of albums).

Tabblo acquired by HP

Via the tabblo blog comes news that they have been acquired by HP.

In Tabblo's words:

"The plan is to take the entire Tabblo experience— the editor, the template engine, and the output formats— and spread it far and wide across the web, and frankly, we could not be more excited."

Tabblo is one of the few firms to have reversed engineered the Picasa desktop protocol, so that they can provide a plugin for Picasa that allows you to upload direct to Tabblo from within Picasa.

Picasa Web Albums gets an API

Finally, Picasa Web Albums is maturing into a fully featured web application.

Recently it filled the inexplicable hole (for Google, a search company) by adding the "Search Community photos" feature, and now it's added another vital ingredient for a modern web based application by introducing an API.

As might have been guessed, the API is GData based.

The API documentation was announced via a post on the Google Code Blog.  There's a Google Group to support it, but there still the rather inexplicable fact that Picasa (on the Desktop), and Picasa Web Albums are still without their own official blog.

The API docs list 3 web applications that are already making use of the API:

• Picnik
• Booksmart
• ShoZu

I'm sure I'll be writing more on this as get time to explore it more.

Update: As well as the sample web applications, there are also a couple of Google Homepage Gadgets using the API.

• Slideshow gadget
• Public Albums gadget

There are also some other resources from Google:

• Developer Knowledge Base

Advanced search options at Picasa Web Albums

The help page for searching at Picasa Web Albums is pretty sparse - merely telling you that you can search "My Photos", "My Favorites", or "Community photos", and adding that electing to include your images in Picasa Web Albums search will not include them in Google Image Search results.

That page does not tell you what syntax you can use in the search box itself, though you do get a little guidance showing up if your search does not give any results:

In order to find more items, consider the following tips:

• Choosing the right search terms is the key to finding the information you need. Start with the obvious - if you're looking for items related to Hawaii try typing "Hawaii".
• It's often advisable to use multiple search terms. For example, if you're looking for items of a Hawaiian vacation, type "vacation Hawaii".
• Don't worry about capitalization. Google searches are not case sensitive.
• Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search terms. For example, you could type "the long winding road".

However some of the operators specified on the Advanced Search page for the normal Google search also apply to searching in Picasa Web Albums.

Specifically the following all work:

• specifying multiple words means the results must include all the given words
• specifying a phrase in quotation marks searches for that exact phrase
• separating words with OR (in capitals) or the vertical bar | finds results with either of the separated values
• using a minus sign before a word excludes results that match that word

Searching looks for what you type in the image tags, descriptions, album titles and other data, but there does not appear to be a way to limit searches so that they only check specific types of this data.

Picasa Web Albums learns to count

Picasa Web Albums has finally learnt to count.  When it was first released, the community search feature of Picasa Web Albums was unable to count accurately - any search you did on a popular term returned a number of matches that was way up in the many millions.

These figures were frankly unbelievable, and the fact that the number varied wildly from search to search indicated that these figures were not to be trusted. 

However, Google seems to have fixed this problem, searches now return reasonable numbers for most queries, of the order of thousands of results rather than many millions.

For the first time, this allows us to do an estimate of the size of Picasa web albums by seeing how many results it has for a number of popular terms.

My searches showed the following numbers:

the 1128279
and 1075975
in 823335
of 782688
a 600900
trip 550325
my 427027
at 391763
photos 340944
on 317398
new 307207
wedding 288286
for 281272
2 268007
1 238600
de 217689
3 203786
party 195887
by 172345
march 157793
family 157555
album 156220
birthday 153792
10 147692
park 143186
me 140743
house 133573
san 133416
city 125609
christmas 125569
la 125095
home 115748
4 108715
london 104605
st 103432
friends 99035
ca 94977
beach 91139
summer 78804
york 78482

I've included the top 40 words that I found, from a selection of around 120 likely high scoring words.

So, the top two result give a just over a million photos each.  We can double check those numbers by using the - (subtraction) operator to check on how many of the pairs of words are disjoint.  This gives the results

the -and 679780 + 1075975 = 1755755
and -the 616847 + 1128279 = 1745126

the -in 740250 + 823335 = 1563585
in -the 416885 + 1128279 = 1545164

the -of 686066 + 782688 = 1468754
of -the 333947 + 1128279 = 1462226

the -a 860211 + 600900 = 1461111
a -the 309792 + 1128279 = 1438071

trip -wedding 552249 + 288286 = 840535
wedding -trip 287401 + 550325 = 837726

In all cases I've taken the result of subtracting a word, then adding the count of that word to the resultant count.  The fact that pairs of totals here are approximately equal gives me greater confidence in the individual numbers themselves.

Note that the top value here gives us a minimum estimate of the total size of Picasa Web Albums - there are something over 1.7 million searchable photos that include "and" or "the" in their descriptions or album names.  Of course that vastly under counts the number of searchable photos, since I'd suppose that the vast majority of photos in Picasa Web Albums are actually unlabelled, or placed in fairly generic named albums which don't involve either of these words.  I'd guess that this makes our figure an order of magnitude out - so lets guess that there are 17 million public photos.  I also suspect that there are as many unsearchable photos as there are searchable ones - many users are making use of non-public albums, and even when they do have public albums they have not elected to add them to the community photos search.  So from these I'm guessing that Picasa Web Albums is hosting around 34 million photos.

For comparison, something over 425 million photos have been uploaded to Flickr - making it currently over 12 times the size of Picasa Web Albums.

Problem posting from Picasa to Blogger

The recent change so that images posted to Blogger appear in Picasa Web Albums is not without problems at the moment.

A rather ungrammatical post on the Known Issues for the New Blogger blog notes that if you only ever post by using the Blog This button in the Picasa desktop application, each post will end up in a different album.  The intention is that you have one album per blog - a behaviour that is achieved if you produce a post direct from the blogging interface at Blogger itself, at which time all subsequent posts should appear in the same album as intended.

Alt-Gr key for instant full screen image in Picasa

I've long used the very useful shortcut of pressing the Ctrl and Alt keys together when hovering the mouse over an image thumbnail in Picasa as a way of zooming that thumbnail out to full screen size.  (Actually you need to press the keys so that you press Ctrl first, then keep that held down whilst you also press Alt)

However, I've just found out that there is an even simpler way to do the same - the right Alt key (normally marked Alt-Gr) will also zoom the image, without needing anyout key to be pressed with it.

Picasa Web Albums and Google Desktop

One of the features of Google Desktop search is to allow you to search through web pages that you have previously visited.

Unfortunately with pages from Picasa Web Albums, the snippet that shows up in the Google Desktop search results is often far from useful, stating:

Picasa Web Albums
Picasa Web Albums You are using a browser that is not fully supported. Some features may not work too well, but you are welcome to have a look ..

The contents of the snippet depends on the search string - in this case I was searching for the word "picasa" (so as to fetch all the pages I had viewed at Picasa Web Albums recently) which does appear in the snippet, but then it is followed by text that does not show on the page.

Picasa Web Albums are AJAX type pages, and this text does appear in the HTML of the page, but is normally hidden from view unless you are using an unsupported browser.  It's a difficult fix for Desktop Search to apply, but they should really make the snippet reflect what was visible to the user, not what the internal HTML of the page contains.

Picasa Web Albums and Blogger

There is now a post on Blogger Buzz that explains more about how Blogger and Picasa Web Albums work together.

All photos uploaded since December 2006 should now appear within a Picasa Web Album (one album per blog), and gradually older photos will also be moved over as well.

There are of course some downsides to this integration:

• If you delete the photo in Picasa Web Albums, then your blogger blog is also affected since the photo is not available any more
• The photos count towards your Picasa Web Albums limit, although the increase to 1000MB limit will help here

For the moment the Picasa Web Albums What's New page has reverted back to an old version, and carries no mention of any of the new features.

The first PicasaWeb search bug?

Yes, finally (some) public photos across Picasa Web Albums are now searchable.  For a photo to be searchable, the owner of the photo must elect to have their public albums searchable, which is not the default.

It's been interesting to note how throughout today the number of photos returned by a search has rapidly increased - as more and more people elect to have their photos searchable in this way.

However, it's also become apparent that Google have not tested this feature all that well - there is a rather glaring bug that may not have shown up in a small scale test - but is showing up more and more now - PicasaWeb cannot count!  If a search returns a few results, then the results page typically says something like "1 - 24 of 59".  This number is typically an estimation, but PicasaWeb is taking estimation to a new extreme - if there are more than about 20000 results, then PicasaWeb returns a nine digit number.  I really don't believe that this number has any significance - and in fact it seems to vary quite wildly.

As an example, one of the most popular words in most photo sharing sites in "wedding".  As I type this, entering that in to PicasaWeb returns "1 - 24 of 506589391" for me (YMMV).

That claimed number of photos is much greater than the total number of photos on the currently much more popular Flickr service.  Another popular word is beach, which also currently gives a 9 digit count on PicasaWeb - but if you combine the two words, a search for  - wedding beach - returns a believable (and verifiable) 377 count - which is not far off the true figure.  (The best way to find the true figure is to page through to the last page of the results - which forces the search engine to get true numbers - which in this case shows to be 366 as against the 377 estimate).

PicasaWeb adding real search function

According to the Google Blog, Picasa Web Albums are finally gaining the ability to search across all public photos.

The post by Mike Horowitz, Picasa Product Manager, is frank in admitting that this is a long awaited feature, that goes under the name of "Community Photos search". 

The same post also mentions other new features, such as

• "Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)" suggesting they are moving to the same model as Gmail which automatically increases the storage size as time goes by
• Linking to photos and albums is now easier - the link code provided now offers a choice of photo sizes, and the URL scheme has been improved so that the photo size is part of the URL path, and not tacked on the end as a parameter which tended to confuse many tools

There is some more information on the What's New page, which also lists

• View Blogger photos
  All photos uploaded through Blogger now appear in My Photos. The titles of these Blogger web albums match the titles of their respective blog posts. Now the photos you use in both services can be managed from one place. Learn more.

 

I really want to try out the photo search, but I can't seem to find it - I guess that the feature may only be enabled in certain accounts for the moment.  The improved photo linking is certainly in place, and space is reported as 1GB, though I can't see evidence yet that the storage space is indeed "counting".