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.

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".

Flickr passes one billion images

Flickr has hit that very significant milestone of having a billion images uploaded.  Sometime yesterday the id assigned to uploaded images crossed that boundary, though I can't seem to find an image with exactly id 1000000000 - this could just be a problem with the API that it does not cope with the ten digit id's yet - or it could be that Flickr decided not to allocate this id for whatever reason.

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.

How many photos does Flickr host?

Thomas Hawk noted in a post about the growth of Flickr that for Flickr "one metric (number of photos online ... can be publicly obtained)".

He didn't note where such info was available, but a little digging shows that uploaded photos get a unique number assigned to them, that equates to the number of images previously uploaded.  Note that Thomas has it wrong - it's not easy to get the number of photos online, but it is easy to get the number uploaded.  Some number of images get deleted - presumably a very small percentage, but the number currently online will be smaller than those which have ever been uploaded.

Ignoring this difference between the numbers, a good source of historical trends of photos uploaded can thus be found by checking the numbers assigned to images uploaded over the period of time that flickr has been available.  A suitable account to check is that of Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, and thus a regular poster from the beginning to the present time.

Her account shows the following dates and numbers: (I've just picked sufficient datapoints to show a trend)

• 15-Dec-03 88
• 31-Dec-03 276
• 26-Feb-04 7445
• 31-May-04 39772
• 29-Sep-04 631538
• 31-Dec-04 2751945
• 31-Mar-05 7964208
• 29-Jun-05 22524347
• 30-Sep-05 48112787
• 30-Dec-05 79628416
• 31-Mar-06 120824395
• 28-Jun-06 177531266
• 29-Sep-06 256102864
• 29-Dec-06 338061633

 

Quickly turning that into a graph shows the following:

The growth was exponential, but there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing down - the last 3 points on the total uploads are very close to a straight line, and the growth values that I've plotted as a derived line confirm this with the last 2 data points here almost horizontal.

However, it should be noted that the 100 million, 200 million, and 300 million uploaded files all happened in 2006, and that at a rate of almost 1 million uploads per day that's a huge amount of data by anyone's standards.  Remember also that much of this is tagged with metadata that makes finding and using the images so much easier - there are tens of millions of images that have been geotagged with latitude and longitude for example.

Picasaweb popularity revisited

I recently compared a couple of measures of the popularity of Picasaweb compared to Flickr by looking at the number of links to the sites, and showing the Google Trends graphs which shows search queries for the two sites.

The results showed that Flickr beats Picasaweb by a couple of orders of magnitude on the link measure, though as the trends graph has no units, we can't read much into that, beyond the "Picasaweb is massively less popular" conclusion.

A number of other blogs picked up on the post, and made valuable points either within the post, or in the comments thereto:

• Googlified did a similar trends graph, extended in a couple of ways
  • showing picasaweb and "picasa web" as a single entity, to account for whether people search for this as one or two words (which made almost no difference to the shape of the graph at all)
  • adding in other photosharing sites webshots and imageshack (both less popular than Flickr) and photobucket (more popular than Flickr) for further comparisons

The comments to that post suggest that people also search for "picasa" when looking for "picasa web albums" which may be true in a proportion of cases, but I suspect that the vast majority of such searches are for the desktop application called Picasa, not the web service.  Google Trends shows that picasa and flickr are on a par in popularity as search terms.

A second comment also points out the obvious, that picasaweb is much newer than flickr, and that we should check back in a couple of years time to see how it is doing then!

• Mike DelGaudio wonders whether I asked the right question! He points out that although both sites share photos, the feature sets are not equivalent - Picasaweb is so far missing the huge social aspect that makes Flickr so valuable.

There is another trend tool available via IceRocket.  The graph it presents for picasaweb, picasa, and flickr tells a similar story - over the past 3 months picasaweb was mentioned on average on 6 blog posts per day, compared to 1900 for flickr.

A further set of hard numbers relating to popularity would be to compare numbers of photos hosted by each service, and numbers of (registered) users.  However, it's not easy to come up with accurate numbers for these.

Update: I've found how to get upload number for Flickr.

Too late for Voting for Your Favorite Photo-Sharing Site

Mashable ran a vote to find the favourite photo sharing site.  In an ironic twist, Mashable, which profiles slick Web 2.0 social networking sites elected to hold the vote by having votes cast by entering comments on the blog entry - hardly a slick way to conduct such matters.

The choice of sites you could vote for was:

• Flickr
• Pickle
• Zooomr
• ImageShack
• BubbleShare
• Webshots
• Photo.net
• Tabblo
• Parazz
• Shutterfly
• Kodak Gallery
• Photoblog.com
• Twango

PhotoBucket was explicitly excluded, because they sponsored the poll.  Picasa Web Albums were not even listed.

Voting seemed to go in bunches, perhaps as news of the vote appeared on various blogs, some of them with a vested interest!  In fact voting continued after the winner was declared (and the post is still open for new comments even now).  The post appeared on the 22nd December, and the winners were declared on the 24th December.

The winner was Flickr, with Twango as the people's choice, and Zooomr getting a special mention.

How popular is Picasaweb?

I was trying to place some numbers on how popular Picasaweb was in comparison to flickr, and turned up the following numbers via various means:

via Technorati (where 2 numbers are given, the smaller is the links from the past 180 days)

• picasaweb.google.com 112,475 links
• flickr.com 8,148,696 links (3,644,097 links from 204,288 blogs)

via ://URLFAN

• picasaweb.google.com: Ranks 710 out of 1,844,043 sites. Mentioned in 247 unique feeds. Mentioned in 440 posts.
• flickr.com: Ranks 1 out of 1,844,043 sites. Mentioned in 29778 unique feeds. Mentioned in 95950 posts.

via Google

• picasaweb.google.com: 402,000
• flickr.com: 24,700,000

 

A general picture emerges of interest in Picasaweb being at most a few percent of that in flickr.  Google Trends does not give hard numbers, but its graph is still telling - picasaweb (in red) barely shows up, whereas flickr (in blue) continues a long upward trend in popularity.

 

Note that these numbers are all tracking interest in the two sites - I'm still looking at how I can come up with numbers to indicate the numbers of photos hosted by each of the sites.

Flickr Uploadr loses some metadata

Richard Akerman noticed that when he uploaded his photos, prepared using Picasa, into Flickr using the Flickr Uploadr, some of his metadata was going missing.

Specifically he noticed that if the Uploadr was used to resize his images, uploading from Windows (Uploader 2.3) caused the keywords to go missing, whereas uploading from a Mac (Uploadr 2.2) caused the EXIF data to go missing.

His article is a good introduction to using Picasa to add metadata to photos

• caption
• keywords
• geolocation via Google Earth

He also has an earlier article specifically about geocoding with Picasa and Google Earth.

Geotagging photos - first Picasa/Google Earth, now flickr

Picasa 2.5 works closely with Google Earth to make it easy to geotag photos - that is to mark them with the latitude and longitude of where they were taken. That information gets stored in the EXIF data of the photos.

Now a similar feature has been introduced by flickr. This uses mapping from Yahoo Maps (so its worldwide coverage lags behind its USA and Canadian coverage), but the drag and drop interface is quite easy to use.

Lacking an official solution, many existing flickr image had been geotagged by a combination of "geotagged/geo:lat/geo:long" tags - which worked, but was a bit clumsy.  Flickr plan to offer an automated way to remove these old tags, once the development community has had a chance to move to the new model.

Now users has a choice of how to geotag their images - either upload them to flickr, and use the online method there, or perhaps a better solution is to use Picasa / Google Earth to geotag the images before they are uploaded.

Lots of writeups of the feature, including TechCrunch, TechCrunchUK, Yahoo search blog, Thomas Hawk.

Flickr has around 220 million photos (growing at the rate of 1 million per day) - of these, in the first 24 hours the feature was available, geotags were added to 1,234,384 - and by 9 hours later over 1.6 million had been geotagged.

Update: Some interesting comments by the flickr developer Rev Dan Catt at the Ogle Earth report on this, though interestingly nothing yet on Rev Dan Catt's own site GeoBloggers.

flickr images appearing in Yahoo search results

Whilst Google continues to keep Picasa Web Album images out of its search results, Yahoo who own flickr have just announced that they have begun to integrate selected flickr results into their search results.  Initially there are just 5 phrases that bring up the results:

• funny photos
• interesting photos
• travel photography
• nature photography
• black and white photography

(I'm not sure why the words are not a bit more interchangable - funny photography might not be all that common a search, but I would have thought that "black and white photos" was just as good a search to illustrate as "black and white photography").

Each of the 5 triggers ends up showing 4 flickr photos, with a link that takes you to an "appropriate" place on flickr.  This place differs for the different triggers, and includes both taking you to a particular pool (for Travel Photography), and simply doing a search (for "Funny").  The images themseleves are shown as a small square thumbnal, that shows the image title when you mouse over it.  The thumbnail links through to the flickr page for that photo, and the photographer is credited below, with their name linking through to their flickr profile.

Flickr say they have been holding back from doing this integration until they had an opt-out in place for those who do not want their images to appear in the search results.

Thomas Hawk has comments on the matter and there's a write up from TechCrunch.

Picasa, flickr, and Google Image Search

Thomas Hawk, whose comments on images uploaded via Picasa ranking higher than images uploaded to flickr were reported by Robert Scoble, has stepped up to provide a much deeper set of observations - Why Picasa Images Are Indexed Higher in Google Image Search Than Flickr.

He quickly dismisses the conspiracy theory, and elaborates on the fact that providing a good filename is key, which uploads to blogs made by Picasa do, but which files uploaded into flickr do not.

flickr users are discussing this in Google is Penalizing Flickr, Right?, where Thomas has made some more insightful comments - including that it is a problem that his own employer, Zooomr (which also replaces upload filenames with a number) may have to address in the future.

Personal or group photo experience

Another author has come up with their review of the differences between Picasaweb and Flickr. This is quite a deep review, by someone who is an experienced user of such services (and who has paid for the advanced versions of both).

The conclusion is that "Picasaweb is a personal experience and flickr is a group one". In looking for a way to share photos with their family, the author has decided to use Picasaweb, though notes that they still use flickr for other purposes.

The comments on this article are quite informative, and one summarises the difference as Picasweb is a "me" tool (where I share my personal photos for others to look at), whereas flickr is a "we" tool, (where groups of people can contribute photos and comments to family or other group albums). This author notes that they consider the paid for iPhoto flickr plugin that allows uploading to flickr to be a good investment.