Mobile Picasa Web Albums

In the same blog post that announced mapping integration for Picasa Web Albums, Google also announced Picasa Web Albums for Mobile Devices.

Unfortunately, as I write this, the link they give does not work, so the only info I have to go on is the blog post itself.  The meat of this states:

The mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan

Mapping added to Picasa Web Albums

The Google Blog carries the announcement that you can now show your Picasa Web Album photos on a map.

The new example gallery from a trip to Las Vegas shows the effect of the new feature.  You can view a map showing all the photos in an album (where the individual photos show up as tiny thumbnails), and a small map also appears alongside the photo in the photo view. 

Unfortunately in photo view the screen space is not used very effectively, and the map is often displayed off the bottom of the screen, coming as it does at the bottom of the column of information that includes

• (*) An often meaningless icon representing the photo owner
• Details of the photo (from EXIF and now locational data)
• (*) A few command links (download, slideshow, order prints), each on separate lines
• (*) A link to report inappropriate content
• (*) The latest comment
• (*) Instructions to add a comment or to sign in
• A list of tags, again each on separate lines
• Finally the photo location map

I've placed a (*) in front of the items of data that I think should be moved out of this column.  In addition, the tags list should be redesigned so that it is not just one tag per line.  These changes would allow the map to be seen in many more case than now.  Actually, since the map is fixed size, but the details and tags sections vary in length, it would make much more sense to put the fixed size map at the top of the column.

As well as viewing the data within Picasa Web Albums, there is also a link on the albums page to view the data in Google Earth - this produces a KML file of the album feed.  There are currently some problems with the KML output - the images are marked with the date of upload, rather than the date the photo was taken.

A map appears for an album if a location has been specified for that album, but this is just a rough approximation.  It's also possible to specify individual locations for images, using a drag and drop placement technique.  I've not yet had time to explore whether Picasa Web Albums is able to extract location information that may already be associated with photos when they are uploaded, such as from Picasa itself.

Sample chapter from Picasa book

One of the few books on Picasa is the now rather venerable "Organizing and Editing Your Photos with Picasa", published as it was two years ago.  It's very much a book for beginners, not advanced users.

A lot has happened to Picasa since then, but the book has not been updated, though the author's site does include a very short errata (all just incredibly minor typos).

Also on the author's site are a couple of PDF's - giving the table of contents, and a sample chapter on printing and emailing.

Scoble and Butterfield views about Zooomr

Robert Scoble is good friends with Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate, so he's been close to the action as Zooomr has launched their Mark III version  over the past few weeks.

To say it went badly is an understatement - the website was down for close to two weeks.  Robert's recent post is a considered summary of what happens now.

• Zooomr is the underdog (basically just a single developer), but it has put together some good features
• These good features may pull in more users - it's currently getting good reviews from bloggers
• The infrastructure they have now cant cope
• The community has rallied round to give them some breathing space (Zoho has put them up in its datacenter, Sun has loaned them a hefty server)
• It's time to end the experiment - by the time the loaner Sun system goes back (56 days), Robert thinks they should make sure they have VC funding in place, and turn this into a real business

For another good take on Zooomr, see this forum post by Stewart Butterfield (one of Flickr's founders), which appears in along thread which offers proof that Zooomr includes copied source code from flickr.  Stewart states:

• I'd be astonished if Zooomr (without a radical change) is even around in two years.
• I've never had a moment of doubt in thinking that Zooomr poses zero competitive threat to Flickr.

FireUploader extension for Firefox

FireUploader is the latest in a series of Firefox extensions by the programmer Rahul Jonna, and allows you to upload/download files from a number of websites using the same interface. Currently there is support for Box.net (1GB of free space), Flickr (photo viewing/sharing), Picasa Web Albums  (photo viewing/sharing), YouTube (Videos).

The example screenshots use Picasa Web Albums as the service.

The interface is directory listing based, which can be a quick way of working when you know the names of the files you want to upload, which places this upload method somewhere between the limited built in uploading support from the Picasa Web Albums website, and the extremely convenient (graphical selection) uploading offered by the Picasa desktop application.  The advantages of this extension are its availability across all Firefox platforms, and of offering the same interface to a number of services.

Objective-C Library for Picasa Web Albums

Greg Robbins, a member of the Mac team at Google, has updated the open-source Objective-C Client Library to add support for the Picasa Web Albums GData based API.

His suggestions for how you might want to use the ability to upload images from any application to your web albums include:

• sharing images of your avatar from an online world
• uploading images from a security camera, so they can be monitored like any other RSS feed