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.

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).

Using GData API's from the command line

In a post entitled "cURLing - Not just for Canadians anymore!", Ryan Boyd of the Gogole Data APIs Team (I take it that should be "Google", but typos are so easily made), points to his recent tutorial as to how to use GData APIs using command line tools.

The major tool covered is cURL, and the chosen API used for the examples is the Picasa Web Albums data API.

The article also mentions other tools such as telnet, openssl, wget, and xsltproc. Using command line tools in this way is unlikely to have mainstream appeal - but it's invaluable for testing and developing purposes.

Picasa Web Albums data API adds more features

Picasa have announced a whole lot of new capabilities in the Picasa Web Albums data API:

• Searching community photos
• Retrieving a user's recent uploads
• Retrieving recent comments for a user
• Searching a user's photos
• Filtering a user or album feed by tag
• Uploading non jpg files (expanded to allow bmp, gif and png as well)
• Downloading the full size, non processed file

Whilst the addition of these is very welcome, the API is still rather patchy. Searching all the photos has been available for a while (though in an undocumented form), but now its documented, why doesn't it offer the full range of capabilities:

• You can search community photos, but only by a the query parameter (no searching by tags for example)
• The values returned are in a predetermined order (presumably "relevance"), but you can't change this to get the most recent updates for example.

Since both of these capabilities are available when searching a user's photos, it would seem logical (and to a degree necessary) to offer these when searching all community photos as well. (Yes, the technical challenges may mean that its harder to offer this facility for all photos compared to just a single user's photos, but after all Google is a search company, well used to solving tricky search problems).