Linking Google News with Picasa Web Albums

The Google News Blog has announced a feature request form that allows Google News users to vote on possible new features for inclusion in Google News.

Amongst the features listed are:

Integration with other Google Services:

Picasa - view pictures related to a news article

I'm sure they don't mean Picasa, but rather Picasa Web Albums (the first is the desktop program, the second is the Google service).

That's an interesting proposal, though the Picasa Web Albums model of "prepare a set of photos offline, then upload as an album" is less likely to be used for breaking news than the alterative Flickr model of "upload individual photos as a stream of photos".

In addition, to achieve this, Picasa Web Albums needs to support returning searched for items in date order - something that is sorely missing from their current search feature.  At the moment all searches have a fixed search order - presumably Google's determination of relevance.

Maybe Picasa for the Mac

Whilst visiting MacWorld, Duncan Riley of TechCruch noticed that the staffers on Google's stand were wearing t-shirts with the logos of Gmail, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa...

Just a moment he thought, and asked outright about whether Picasa was coming for the Mac, to which he got one one inexperienced employee's response of "Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year."  He tried probing other staffers for more details, such as the release date, but was met with a collection of silence - and "smiles like Cheshire cats".  Read what you will in to that!

Update: Google Operating System picked up on the same blog post, and augments it with a useful table showing the various Google installed applications (Toolbar, Desktop, Earth, Sketchup, Picasa, and Talk) and when they became available on Windows (where all are available), on Mac (yet to get Picasa or Talk), and Linux (already has Picasa, but no Sketchup or Talk either).

CES roundup a week late

The Picasa team are still not using their blog very effectively - it's been over a month since their last post, and they skipped the golden opportunity of the New Year to write a post either reiterating the progress of the past year, or looking forward to advances in the new one.

The latest post to appear on the blog is a report by Mike Horowitz of the announcements from CES that mentioned Picasa Web Albums.  Again, since CES was last week, its not very timely to be reporting this news now (especially since Picasa knew about these announcements in advance).

He covers

• Panasonic offering Picasa Web Albums to view on TV
• Panasonic camera with wireless upload to Picasa Web Albums
• Blackberry's application to upload to Picasa Web Albums

Blackberry to offer Picasa Web Albums upload

Blackberry have put up a page for their forthcoming mobile phone uploader that uploads directly to Picasa Web Albums.

At the moment the page does not offer many details - though there's a big section of legal type small print at the bottom of the page - helpfully hidden away in gray on gray text so as not to distract you!

One detail that is available is the fact that for GPS enabled Backberry devices, the uploader will geotag the photos with the location you uploaded them from.  This seems like a bad idea to me - a recipe for getting loads of photos with bad metadata attached to them.  The correct thing of course is for the camera application to write in the geolocation at the time the picture is taken, not for a separate program to add the location of an action that takes place quite possibly much later and possibly far removed geographically from the original action.  I hope there are controls on this, so that for example you can tell it not to geotag the images if they were taken more than an hour ago.

Wireless camera uploads directly to Picasa Web Albums

Panasonic have used the CES show in Las Vegas to announce a LUMIX digital camera with wireless network connectivity, and the ability to send photos directly to Picasa™ Web Albums.

The camera comes in the States with access to the T-Mobile Hotspot service, to make uploading on the go even easier.

The press release quotes Mike Horowitz, product manager for Picasa Web Albums at Google: “We want our users to be able to access and share their photo collections however and wherever they’d like. We created open APIs to encourage exactly this kind of integration. The new LUMIX camera from Panasonic gives our users a great new way to share photos quickly and easily while they’re taking shots on vacation or at a convention."

via DPReview.