PicasaWeb GData feature submitted to IETF as internet draft

Google's GData APIs are based on the AtomPub protocol, but in places Google has found it has has to add extensions to this protocol.

One such extension was introduced in the Picasa Web Albums Data API to allow both a picture and its title (and other metadata) to be uploaded at the same time (rather than in separate requests that the base protocol requires).

Google have now submitted this extension to the IETF as an internet-draft.

The basis of the extension is that rather than requiring a POST of the photo, a GET of the id, and a PUT of the additional metadata, these can be accomplished by a single POST of the photo and related metadata in a multipart/related representation.

The draft also specifies the required Service Document Extension, so that clients can determine that the service can accept multipart Media Resource creation requests.

Via AtomPub Multipart Media Creation Internet-Draft.

Picasa 2.7 for Linux

After about 4 months as a beta, the Google Photo blog carries the news that Picasa 2.7 for Linux is now out of beta and fully released.

The Linux download page carries the details of what is new in this release - with Picasa Web Albums integration being one prominent addition.  It also carries a list of known problems - where I notice one particularly worrying one which says that albums are uploaded to Picasa Web Albums as public, even if you don't select them to be so.

iTag - specialist photo tagging software

There are 3 main standards for including metadata within jpg photo files

• EXIF - used for image capture information (including geolocation), and normally added automatically by the camera (though camera phones and web cams often omit including it)
• IPTC - a standard for adding more textual metadata, describing what the photo actually illustrates, licensing information etc
• XMP - a more recent standard for similar metadata to IPTC

Picasa allows you to give a description to a photo, and to add what it calls keywords (but nearly everyone else calls tags), which are stored in the photo as IPTC.Caption and IPTC.Keywords data.

However there is also a specialist tagging program available in the form of iTag which makes this tagging even easier, and also writes the data as XMP data (in addition to IPTC) for use by other programs that prefer that standard.  This Windows freeware program was written because in the words of it author "I found quite a few IPTC tools but none worked the way I wanted them to. So I decided to write my own."  It is actively maintained and enhanced.

The program's website has a great table which shows the use of IPTC and XMP metadata by a wide range of desktop programs and web applications.

Photoshop for Linux

Picasa is a photo organizer, with a few photo adjustment tools.  However for real photo manipulation the program that defines the category is Photoshop.

To get Picasa working on Linux, Google use Wine - a layer that allows Windows applications to work on Linux.  Google have also extended their work (via hiring of CodeWeavers, Googlers working their normal jobs and in their 20% time, interns, and Summer Of Code students) so that Photoshop also works pretty well on Linux.

More details at the Google Open Source Blog and the Wine-Devel list.

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.

Python library for PicasaWeb GData API

Google's official Python library for accessing its GData API has been updated to add support for Picasa Web Albums, as well as code search.  The announcement blog post also lists a number of other notable features that are new in this 1.0.10 release.

The Picasa Web Albums support was actually written outside Google, by Håvard Gulldahl as a part of his picasapush project.  That project now focuses on PicasaFS (which serves up Picasa Albums as a local file system), and PicasaPush itself (a general Picasa Web Albums client).

Picasa 2.7 Beta for Linux

The current version of Picasa for Linux (version 2.2) has fallen behind the features offered on Windows, so a new beta has been provided that brings the Picasa for Linux version up to 2.7.

The step from 2.2 to 2.7 provides the following new features:

• Upload to Picasa Web Albums
• Saving edits back to disk if desired
• Folder hierarchy view
• Better RAW support

and of course plenty of other improvements to existing features.

iPhone version of Picasa Web Albums

Karen Groenink, User Experience Designer at Picasa, announced on the Google Photos blog that there is now an iPhone optimized version of Picasa Web Albums.

There is an iPhone only slideshow feature, but also the whole Picasa Web Albums mobile experience has been optimized for the iPhone - "Pictures are proportioned to fit the iPhone's screen dimensions, and we've tweaked the key buttons so they're easier to navigate with your fingertips".

Picasa team finally have a blog

It's been a rather low key launch (I track Picasa news closely, and I missed it for 2 months!), but the Picasa team finally have an official Picasa blog.

Actually it carries the tagline "The Official Google Photos Blog: News, tips and tricks from the Picasa team at Google", and as the first post "Ready for our close-up" explained, the Picasa team

"works on more than just Picasa and Picasa Web Albums -- we're responsible for a variety of photo-related technology here at Google, such as hosting Blogger's image-uploading infrastructure, developing Orkut's photo picker, and creating Mapplets for browsing geotagged photos inside Google Maps."

So far there been a low number of posts, in order

• Ready for our close-up - the introductory post, by Jason Cook
• Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features - a useful run down by Mike Herf on some special syntax you can use when searching within Picasa
• Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features, cont'd - the continuation of Mike Herf's article, where he talks about backup being a way to transfer Picasa setup between machines, and also mentions the otherwise undocumented Radial Tint filter.
• New Mac Uploaders released - as the title says
• New languages & new features for international users - Pam Benjatanaporn mentions the new languages that Picasa supports, and also that various Picasa Web Albums features gained
• Better connections with Picasa Web Albums - Mark Geller talks about 5 companies who use the Picasa Web Albums API
• Tune into Picasa Web Albums on Tivo® - Derek Collison announces the tie up with Tivo to show off Picasa Web Albums on your living room TV
• Fixing common photography problems - a reminder by Chris Mysen about how to use the "I'm feeling lucky" and other Picasa tuning controls to improve photo appearances.

Upload from Picasa to Facebook

The Facebook PicasaUploader gives the ability to upload images to Facebook directly from the Picasa desktop application.

The application is a plugin for Picasa, which adds a new button to Picasa's button tray.  It's apparently written by a third party developer, neither affiliated with Google nor Facebook, but appears well executed.

Version 1 was released in June 2007, with a number of bug fix releases appearing since.

Additional 11 languages for Picasa

The latest version of Picasa, Version 2.7, Build 37.36 - October 30, 2007 has added support for an additional 11 languages

• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Filipino
• Indonesian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Serbian
• Slovakian
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Vietnamese.

Slideshow element for Layouts based Blogger blogs

For Blogger based blogs that use the Layouts feature to define their appearance, there is now a convenient Slideshow page element that can showcase pictures from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, or any other site using MediaRSS.

The announcement on Blogger Buzz about this is illustrated with a couple of photos, but the blog itself does not use the feature - in fact it can't since it looks as if it is a Template based blog, rather than a Layouts based blog.

Template based blogs of course can still include slideshows via other mechanisms, such as Google gadgets which currently offers 102 results matching "slideshow".