Maximum Picasaweb image size doubles to 20MB

Picasa Web Albums has increased the permitted size of uploaded images from 10MB to 20MB.

The what's new page notes:

Bigger photo uploads
We've doubled the size of the images you can upload - from 10MB to 20MB per image. As always, you can still use Picasa to reduce the file size of the photos you're uploading to Picasa Web Albums.

This seems to have coincided with a similar increase in the maximum file attachment permitted for Gmail, also increased from 10MB to 20MB.  Perhaps this is indicative of Google having updated their underlying infrastructure to cope with increased file sizes.

Searching Picasa Web Albums community photos via the API

I noticed that searching community photos at Picasa Web Albums now acts rather differently than it used to - your search returns quickly - but there are no photos shown, then later (sometimes several seconds later) the thumbnail results appear.

What this suggested to me was that the search page was returning the HTML framework, but that the actual search results were being obtained by a separate data query.  That is indeed the case - Google have added searching to the Picasa Web Albums GData API, though there is no mention of this fact yet in the Picasa Web Albums Data API Reference.

The URL for a search query is of the form:

http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/search?q=google&start-index=1&max-results=24&psc=G&category=photo&alt=json

So the parameters are

• q : the string to search for
• start-index : where the lowest number used is 1
• max-results : the number of results wanted
• psc=G : this makes it a Global search of all the community photos
• category=photo : not sure what other values can be used here
• alt=json : returns the data as json format

Other formats are possible

• alt=rss : to get the query results as an RSS feed
• alt=json&callback=output : to get JSON wrapped in a callback function

Unfortunately the results are not as controllable as you really need.  There does not appear to be a way to sort the results, so you simply get them sorted presumably by "relevance" - for an RSS feed you probably want to sort by most recent first, and perhaps to restrict the results to certain date ranges.

Warning: This API is not yet documented though is in use by the Picasa Web Albums pages, and is currently very slow (the very slowness of it was the reason that I spotted that Picasa Web Albums pages had changed the way they worked).  It is very likely that Google will be improving this API before they get around to documenting it, so currently use it at your own risk.

500 Millionth photo uploaded to Flickr

This fairly unremarkable photo is the 500 millionth photo to be uploaded to Flickr.  Just part of a set from a party in Vegas, it was uploaded on 15th May.  The 400 millionth photo was uploaded earlier this year on 23rd Feb.

Google's second slideshow of the day for Picasa Web Albums

On the same day that the Picasa Web Albums team launch a Flash based slideshow, the AJAX team at Google also launch a slideshow widget for showing those same Picasa Web Albums photos!

Full programing details for the AJAX slideshow are available.

The AJAX slideshow can show Picasa Web Albums photos, or any other RSS feed that uses Media RSS extensions.  It's a much more powerful system than the Flash mechanism, but does require some simple programming - its not the same cut and paste solution that the Flash method gives.

Picasa Web Albums Flash slideshow

Picasa Web Albums have added an embeddable slideshow to their feature set.  The slideshow uses Flash, and an option to create one shows up when you are logged in and viewing one of your albums - the option to "Embed Slideshow" now appears above the "Link to this Album" entry in the left sidebar.  When you chose the "Embed Slideshow" link it pops up a small wizard that allows you to set the size the photos show at, and also whether captions are shown or not.  The results of this is to give you a scrap of HTML that you can paste into a blog entry or a webpage.

The resultant slideshow shows your images, but does have a permanent Picasa shutter image in the bottom right hand corner obscuring part of your photos.  To make it worse, its not just the shutter image, but also an "arty" turned over corner, that takes up even more of your image area - I'm not inclined to use the feature with that there all the time.  This is obviously aimed fairly squarely at the My Space user - though My Space have taken action before over advertisements appearing in such widgets.

When you mouse over the slideshow, additional controls appear, allowing you to pause, step forward, or step back, and to turn captions on or off.  There is also a link to the photo albums of the user whose images are shown in the slideshow - though in Firefox 2 at least this link is ineffectual since Firefox rightly prevents such popups from occurring (since Flash applications are notorious for causing those horrible advertising popups we have grown to hate).  Clicking on the shutter icon turns the slideshow into a text info page - and this shows a little more info about the person whose photos are being shown - and a manual link to the album itself (this is not blocked by Firefox, since it requires a manual click to happen before the link is followed).  One nice touch of this text view is that (despite being in Flash which normally does away with all the web browser conventions we expect), right clicking on the link does offer an "open in new window" option - of course in Firefox you really want the twin options of open in new window or open in new tab, but its nice that at least some thought has been made about this.

PicasaWeb has a help page about this feature.

Customizing the Slideshow

The popup wizard offers you a choice of sizes for the slideshow, and also whether captions are shown or not.  However by manually editing the HTML fragment it produces, further customization is possible.

The HTML is of the form

<embed
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"
flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&amp;captions=1&amp;RGB=0x000000&amp;feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Ftester%2Falbumid%2F5061951474333359457%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26authkey%3D3V8IljiqEO0"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
height="192"
width="288">

Easy manual customizations are to:

• adjust the height and width parameters (and yes you can use numbers other than those the wizard offers)
• change the background colour - which is specified as black above via the RBG=0x000000 setting

Picasa 2.7, Build 36.40

Picasa continues to roll out regular minor updates, fixing a few bugs along the way.

One very useful thing they have started to do is to place the versioning information directly into the install executable - so for example in Windows Vista you can just mouse over the install executable file and find out which version it will install.

Form the online readme:

Version 2.7, Build 36.40 - May 3, 2007

• Fixed a case where updating thumbnails message would incorrectly appear.
• Updated version number for international installs.
• Support for more cameras.

Yahoo Photos set for closure

TechCrunch are reporting that Yahoo Photos is to be shut down in favour of the Yahoo owned Flickr.

An official announcement is set for today, with the closure happening over the next few months.  Yahoo will make it easy to transition to Flickr, but will not be forcing users to move that way.

Currently Yahoo photos is about 4 times the size of Flickr based on number of photos, but traffic to Flickr has recently approached (or exceeded, dependent on which metric you follow) that of Yahoo Photos.

Picasa GData API wiki pages

In common with a number of other GData based API's, the Google Picasa Data API group has gained a number of wiki pages.  These are currently fairly empty pages, covering the following subjects:

• Tips and Tricks
• Share Your Project
• Links to More Resources
• API Feature Requests