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.

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.

JotSpot Photo Gallery

And today's acquisition by Google, is JotSpot, following their recent purchases of YouTube and Neven Vision.

JotSpot is a hosting platform for providing wikis, but it goes beyond the normal range of (mostly) text wikis, by offering a rich application platform, including a number of preprogrammed web applications that can be included within your JotSpot wiki.

One of these is the JotSpot photo gallery.

This offers the ability to

• Create albums and upload photos
• Thumbnail and slideshow views of your photo albums
• Comment on photos when they are uploaded
• View photo info (EXIF) for uploaded photos
• View a photo stream of recently added photos across all albums
• Read a comment stream of recently added comments across all albums

Hardly earth shattering I know, but the very fact that that list is so familiar is indicative of the fact that photo galleries are an intrinsic part of the wide collaborative platform that the web is becoming.  The ability to comment on photos in a gallery, and to get streams of information when more comments or photos are added is a very useful feature.

Picasa Web Albums offers these features of course, and I don't see that the JotSpot Photo Gallery will replace the Picasa Web, but the obvious "fit" for JotSpot's collaborative approach is within the "Documents and Spreadsheets" package that Google already offer.  Picasa Web has a foothold there already, appearing as a "photos" link within the spreadsheets and other documents, and I think that this move is likely to help make this a closer integration.  At the moment you can add just a short caption to the photos appearing in a Picasa Web Album, but close integration could see photos appearing as part of much richer collaborative documents - as cells in spreadsheet for example, or embedded within paragraphs of text in a word processor document.

Even just the ability to add more to the photo album pages themselves within Picasa Web would be immensely useful - I've seen a good number of requests by users to add counters or analytics code to the pages, and JotSpot is all about the ability to easily change page content, so would provide a useful model to follow.

Google makes acquisitions for a number or reasons - including to acquire technology, and to acquire people.  JotSpot certainly has some bright people, and although the wiki technology may be far from unique, it was packaged well.  I look forward to seeing the wiki ideals of easy collaboration making their presence more widespread in other Google properties, and Picasa Web looks a prime candidate for many of these ideas to show up first.

There's a number of posts from Google about this - the main Google Blog carries the announcement of the deal and a follow up that notes how Google have been pushing the collaborative angle for a while already, moving  "calendars, photos and documents onto the web".  Of course the JotSpot blog now also becomes another Google blog as well, and Ken Norton's personal blog also relates the news.

Some graphic skills that could do wonders to Picasa

Via an entry on the Google Code blog, Announcing OpenVis3d, which pointed out that Google is "very interested in computer vision and graphics", I was led on to this Google job opening for a Software Engineer, Computer Vision and Graphics.

There's an impressive list of technologies listed there, and although I rather think this is position is about Google Earth (the clue is perhaps in the question "would you like to build the largest image ever, a petapixel multi-resolution 3D mosaic of the earth using a few thousand computers and millions of source images?"), more than a few of them could be applied to Picasa with good effect.

The list includes

• image stitching - [yes please, it would be great if Picasa could help form panoramics and other stiched images easily]

and a whole load of techniques to help understanding what the picture might contain, to make searching images more precise

• structure from motion or shading
• object detection
• document image understanding
• pattern recognition

Picasa has a couple of "experimental" menu options that allow for searching based somewhat on the content of the images - the search by colour, and the "find duplicates" options, but these are fairly easly attributes of an image to work out.  Deeper understanding of what an image contains, such as objects or text, will add considerably to the search abilities of the program, and indeed at the time of the Neven Vision acquisition, the stated aim was that this facial and object recognition technology would find a place within Picasa.

Even more cool (Mac) applications are underway

Greg Robbins, a well known Mac developer in Google's Kirkland office writes a fair sized post on the Google Mac Blog, in which he notes the Mac applications he's been working on at Google:

Though I had worked in large and small companies prior to joining Google, the rapid pace of development here still amazed me. Within weeks, I was helping the Mac developers working on Google Earth get it talking with Sketchup, making Google Video player keep itself up to date, and turning a photo uploader that had been an impressive, experimental 20% project into a polished, easy way for Mac users to take advantage of Picasa Web Albums.

So, a reminder there that the Picasa Web photo uploader started out as a 20% project, but was embraced and turned into a full product.  He then goes on to note that:

Of course, even more cool applications are underway.

I'm sure Mac users are anxiously waiting to see what those could be! 

Using Picasa for student creativity

techLearning has a article entitled "How To Use Picasa for Student Creativity" which is a useful reminder of some fun things even junior school students can do using Picasa.

It suggests:

• create a slideshow
• create a timeline
• create a picture collage
• editing and adding effects to photos
• cropping photos
• making a webpage

The article is accompanied with well done screenshots, with a torn paper edge effect (those weren't done in Picasa!), though unfortunately despite being written just recently, these all show the old version of Picasa, rather than Picasa 2.5.  Some details have changed in the current version, in particular "Make a webpage" is now called "Export as HTML page...", but the activities all still apply.

Just a few days earlier, another article "Going Ga-Ga for Google" on the same site had briefly touched on a number of Google products and sites of great use to educators, mentioning Picasa, video, scholar, calendar, and spreadsheets.  I think they rather missed out an obvious other one there - Google Earth, which has immense educational opportunities. 

Geotag with Google Earth

Picasa 2.5 offers the ability to geotag images using Google Earth.

The way it works is very simple:

• select your images in Picasa
• choose Tools > Geotag > Geotag with Google Earth
• this starts Google Earth, and displays a crosshair and a Geotagging dialog box within Google Earth
• to tag each photo you move the map under the crosshair to the appropriate place, then press the "Geotag" button which tags the highlighted image from the filmstrip of images, and automatically moves you to the next image.

It's a very straightforward workflow, and one that is surprisingly quick.

One problem that I do however have with it is that the filmstrip images are very small - which can make it hard to identify exactly what is pictured.

RoboGeo

An alternative way to do geotagging is to use RoboGeo, which has just come out with version 5.0.  They offer a number of different ways to geotag photos (including matching timestamps with a GPS captured trace).  However, they have obviously also used the Picasa and Google Earth method, and offer it as an almost identical feature.

RoboGeo puts up a very similar dialog within Google Earth, but with one very important difference - a number of features of the dialog can be configured including the size of the thumbnails.  I think this is a feature Picasa would be very wise to adopt.  Perhaps it's unnecessarily complex to ask for the size to be configured in number of pixels, but adding a small slider to the dialog which allows the thumbnail size to be increased would make this much more usable.  I would suggest that the current size is the minimum size offered, but that the upper range should be about 2.5 times the current size.

Update: I should have included a link to Digital Geography's Using Picasa to geotag photographs which provides a nice illustrated step by step guide to the process I ran through above.

Picasa 2.5 officially acknowledged

About a week after Picasa 2.5 started to roll out, Google finally got around to announcing it via a post to the Official Google blog titled Picasa goes online, gets new features too.

The post, by Michael Herf, this time simply described as a Picasa Engineer, talks about the 80,000 photos he has in Picasa, and how the new online albums feature now allows him to share these with the world - or just with friends and family. It also mentions the new folder layout view, the ability to save changes to photos (in an undoable manner), links with Google Earth, movies, screensaver, and button customization.

The main Picasa download page is indeed serving up the latest version now (build 32.94), but unfortunately many of the other download routes are still serving up back level versions (such as via the link on Picasa Web Albums, the link on Joga.com, and the version that is packaged for Linux).

Picasa 2.5 new features

Although it's still not rolling out automatically, the golden version of Picasa 2.5 is available for direct download.

This version of Picasa offers an extensive range of new features, compared to the previous 2.2 version. These include:

• Picasa Web Albums for easy sharing on the web.
• Nested Folder View - a much requested alternative way to look at the photos on your disk
• Save Changes to Disk - for the times when you do want to overwrite original images with edited versions
• Improved import - both faster, and into existing folders
• Updated screensaver with more presentation options
• Geotagging using Google Earth to indicate where each photo relates to, and the ability to export as KML for display in Google Earth and Google Maps
• Larger thumbnails
• More RAW support, including newer cameras, DNG, more accurate color, and faster
• Improved caption editing
• Starred photos organize automatically into a special album
• "Just raw frames" option lets you export time-lapse sequences in the movie maker
• The bottom row of buttons can now be configured to suit your needs

and

• an Experimental menu for some other things they're trying out.

 

There's more detail on many of these via the release notes.

 

For Picasa Web Albums, there's a new tutorial online.  Within Picasa itself, the Web Albums button pulses to draw attention to itself, and on pressing it you are presented with a "New Feature!" dialog, that leads through to the online tutorial, as well as giving you options to sign up for the albums.

The online support pages do mention the Web Albums, but it looks as if there is still work to do here to fully document all the other new features.

Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge

The Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge is in Los Angeles, not all that far from the Picasa offices.  It's a place that is a favourite haunt of a number of the Picasa team, including Lorna, and Michael Herf.

Lorna has written "An open letter to Los Angeles: Don’t destroy Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Refuge!", objecting to the potential plans of Caltrans to build a freeway onramp through the refuge, and the article links through to a number of resources on the refuge put together by Michael Herf.

These resources include

• An album of photos hosted on Picasa Web
  
  Sepulveda Basin
  Jun 21, 2006 - 19 photos
• A similar set of photos, geotagged via Picasa, and exported as a Google Earth file.

The Google Earth file can also be viewed via Google Maps (though this currently has problems with landscape orientation photos).

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.

How often do people use Picasa

Google Blogoscoped ran a survey of how often people use various Google services.

The results are currently showing, that of the 863 people who have so far taken the survey (which given the subject matter of the blog, is highly biased in favour of advanced Google users)

• Picasa comes 22nd out of 55 in the list of the most used services
• Picasa Web Albums are 28th

• 1% of respondents use Picasa hourly
• 13% use it daily
• 13% use it weekly
• 20% use it monthly
• 39% do not use it at all
• 5% have not heard of this service

Most of the other services in the survey are web based - though Google Earth does appear 4 places ahead of Picasa at number 18. It's not entirely clear how the overall ranking is given - more people use Picasa daily than Google Earth for example, but on a weekly basis, Google Earth is ahead. Personally, I use both of these almost daily, and with the latest betas of each working closely together, I would expect a lot more people to be doing the same in the future.

Colors, duplicates, and geotagging

The Google Operating System blog has a quick run down of 3 features of Picasa 2.5 in Picasa 2.5 Has Interesting Features.

The features which get a quick mention are

• searching by color
• detecting duplicate files
  
• geotagging images via Google Earth