Farewell Bloggerbot

Christina, the official Picasa spokeswoman on the Picasa Google Groups has formally noted the passing of the Bloggerbot for posting pictures from Picasa's Hello instant messaging program.

The Farewell Bloggerbot post states:

Dear users,

We'd like to thank those of you who have been devoted fans of Bloggerbot -- the photo uploading feature in Picasa's Hello instant messaging program. Unfortunately, Bloggerbot is not compatible with the newest version of Blogger and will no longer upload photos to your blog.

For those of you still using the older version of Blogger, Bloggerbot will continue to work for a short while before being discontinued. At that time, you'll no longer be able to use Bloggerbot to send pictures to your old Blogger account. (And no, if you have already started using the new version of Blogger, you can't revert to the old version just to keep using Bloggerbot. Sorry.)

As an alternative for posting multiple photos at once to your blog, you may want to try Picasa's "BlogThis!" button.  It uploads four photos at a time to your blog. Or, you can directly upload your photos through the Blogger dashboard.

To upload photos through "BlogThis!":
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=31292

To upload photos through the Blogger Dashboard:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41641&query=upload%20pho...

We're investigating some issues that people have reported when using Picasa's "BlogThis!" button with the new version of Blogger. The known issues are listed here:
http://knownissues.blogspot.com/search/label/blogthis

Please let us know if you see any other problems. As Picasa and Blogger look forward to the New Year, our resolution is to find newer, better ways for you to share photos and videos with your family and friends.

Rest in peace, Bloggerbot. We'll miss you.

Those that used the BloggerBot will notice that the suggested alternatives are not nearly as powerful - in particular the BloggerBot did not have the "4 photos only" restriction.  The passing of Bloggerbot was announced last November.

Ideas for Improving Picasa Web Albums

Google have been doing some promotion of Picasa Web Albums via a "tip" that appears at the top of search queries containing certain trigger words.  Specifically a search that contains the words "photo" and "sharing" together in that order gives a tip of

Tip: Want to share pictures? Try Google's Picasa Web Albums

Searches that just contain "photo" or similar words give a tip of

Tip: Looking for pictures? Try Google Images

Similarly searches related to blogs and blogging have a tip directing users to Blogger.

 

This behaviour has been criticised by a number of bloggers, who view it as human tampering with Google's search results.  In the middle of such a discussion on the Google Blogoscoped forum, there was an interesting exchange between Philipp (the site owner), and Ionut, a regular contributor:

Ionut asked:

Philipp, let's say you are Larry Page, you have a product called Picasa Web Albums, with a market share of 0.04%, and you want more users. What would you do?

Philipp replied:

I'm billionaire then, right? So I'd probably take a loong vacation first. :)
Seriously, I would:
- rename Picasa Web Albums to Google Pictures (or Google Photos)
- move it to pics.google.com
- make it possible to upload PNGs, BMP, TIFF, PCX, etc., which will all convert to JPG, PNG or GIF for display (but the original version will keep intact)
- put some unobtrusive AdSense in the application
- offer the option to have real password-protection/ invitation system for private pictures
- easily allow people to add a Creative Commons license to their pictures
- advertise on Flickr by buying Flickr ads (if Flickr allows this)
- advertise on blogs using the various ad networks/ AdWords-AdSense
- put a link to Google Pictures onto the Google homepage for a couple of days, to see how people react (the spot below the search box)
- potentially, put Google Pictures in the homepage's "more box"
- create a clearer navigation for Google Pics because the current one is partly confusing
- make it easier to understand what others visiting your URL will see; this is completely confusing right now
- add some killer features to Google Pics, like pattern matching search algos, that will draw many people to the site and increase word-of-mouth propaganda among tech-savvy people (who will then evangelize the not-so-savvy crowd)
- create a Google Pics-wide search engine for all photos, not just favorited albums
- allow much more storage; beat competition like Gmail storage beat competition when it was released
- create an online photo retouching tool using the latest technologies; integrate this with Google Pics
- additionally, buy Corel PhotoPaint, fix the bugs, and release it for free – and add an upload functionality to Google Pics
- integrate Hello functionality, kill Hello (but announce this in a blog post first giving transparent reasons)

In other words, I'd do what every other competitor with an image app will have to do to gain market share: improve the product. Only monopolies stop improving the product, which in the end, is bad for the user.

Would I advertise the product as a "tip" in search results? Only if that wouldn't go against what I previously told people. Only if that wouldn't go against core beliefs previously stated. Whether or not the current tip does that, again, everyone can make up their mind about. I consider it a tipvertisement, so it's neither a clear advertisement nor a clear tip.

Ionut provided his own suggestions:

Here's what I'd do.
- Integration with Gmail. You can save photo attachments to Picasa Web and send photos from Picasa Web.
- Integration with Image Search. Everytime you perform a search, you can see search results from your photos / your contacts' photos.
- Move Picasa online. Photo editing, effects, collages.
- Create an extension for Firefox to upload photos faster.
- Upload / view photos on mobile phones.
- 5 GB space storage for free.
- Add NevenVision technology for object recognition, face recognition.
- Every photo you upload to Google in each and every service (Blogger,Docs) should also be saved in Picasa Web.
- Easy geo-tagging, integration with Google Maps.
- How to make money:
* backup CDs
* high-quality prints
* find people from your photos in other public photos

These suggestions are not particularly new, just it's useful to see them all together.  The need for a full search feature in particular is one I've highlighted a number of times before.

One item that's not on these lists is to start official blogs for Picasa and Picasa Web Albums - there's plenty to talk about for these two Google services, and it's silly not to have an official outlet for them.

I think a lot of the under promotion of Picasa and Picasa Web Albums is due to the small, still largely independant team that work on these.  Perhaps Google should look to increase the size of the team significantly - it's unclear yet whether the Neven Vision staff have been added to the Picasa team, or have ended up elsewhere within Google.

Bloggerbot to be turned off soon

Michael Lowry reports that he received a message whilst posting to his blog using Hello that Bloggerbot is going away soon.  The full text of the message is

Bloggerbot is going away soon.

Bloggerbot will be turned off by the end of 2006.

Instead try Picasa's "BlogThis!" feature.

(We're working to make it even better.)

As Michael notes, although superficially BlogThis! and the Bloggerbot both do the same thing in allowing you to post pictures to your blog (from Picasa or the companion Hello), the differences at the detail level are such that Bloggerbot users don't want to move to the more limited BlogThis! system.

 The differences include

• The "BlogThis!" window takes up the whole screen, which make it difficult to produce the blog post, which often requires you to consult other windows to collect or check on information as you write.
• Bloggerbot does not limit the number of photos in a blog post, whereas BlogThis! can only cope with 4
• The BlogThis! window is very slow to appear, so you have to sit around and wait for many seconds before you can start your blog post.

Michael also relates in an earlier post how he recently started to get truncated images with Bloggerbot, but Google eventually identified and fixed that problem.

For examples of blog posts that use the ability of Bloggerbot to post an unlimited number of photos at once, check out his "eat, drink and be merry" blog.

More Picasa tutorial videos

Atomic Learning made available at techLearning a number of parallel videos showing how to do the same operation to photos using either Picasa on Windows, or iPhoto on the Mac.

The videos are all in the QuickTime format, which requires installing a player to watch them on Windows, though I guess that most Macs should cope with the format already.

The operations covered are:

• Importing Pictures from a Digital Camera (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Reducing Red Eye (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)
• Straighten a Crooked Photo (Picasa 2 / iPhoto 5)

These were published in January 2006, so relate to the older version of Picasa, rather than to Picasa 2.5.

These videos are part of a wider set of short videos about Picasa available direct from the Atomic Learning site.  There are two additional free videos there

• Understanding the Library View
• Working with Folders on Disk collection

and the full set of tutorials available to subscribers includes

• Adding pictures to Picasa
• Importing pictures from digital camera
• Managing how Picasa finds pictures
• Moving and renaming pictures
• Adding a star rating to a picture
• Adding keywords to your pictures
• Adding a new collection
• Labeling a picture
• Adding an existing label to a picture
• Adding a picture to multiple label collections
• Deleting from a label collection
• Rearranging in label collections
• Saving changes (exporting pictures)
• Zooming and panning in the editor
• Cropping a picture
• Straightening a picture
• Removing red eyes
• Producing an ideal image
• Using Auto Contrast
• Manually adjusting the picture lighting
• Fixing the lighting in one click
• Making your picture warmer or cooler
• Applying amazing effects
• Writing captions for pictures
• Viewing advanced picture information
• Sending photos via email
• Adding your pictures to Blogger
• Sharing your picture via Hello
• Exporting pictures as a web page
• Viewing a slideshow of your pictures
• Using Timeline view
• Searching for your pictures
• Printing your pictures at home
• Exporting pictures to a photo processing website
• Burning your pictures to CD or DVD
• Creating a gift CD with slide shows
• Hiding and unhiding pictures
• Password protecting a collection
• Hiding and unhiding a folder
• Creating a movie from your pictures
• Making a screensaver
• Setting a picture as the desktop background
• Creating a poster
• Making a picture collage

A home for your photos

Google doesn't do tag lines - even the famous "Don't be evil" is described as an informal company motto, and is hidden away in the code of conduct on subsidiary sites such as the investor website, not on the regular search site.

Picasa is slightly different from the Google norm - after all it was a brand that Google acquired fully formed, and have retained since.

The name Picasa is rationalized as being form from Pic (=picture/photo) and Casa (=home), hence "a home for your photos".  This has been explained this way for many years, but the only direct quote I can find for now is from this year, by Adrian Graham, product manager for Picasa.  (Via the Internet Archive, a view of the Picasa home page from Nov 2002 is rather sparse, since the images were not archived, but the page title is "Picasa: The best home for your pictures").

The current Picasa home page now uses the tagline "Picture Simplicity".

Along the way, Picasa has also used the following taglines:

• Picasa -- The software that should have come with your digital camera
• Hello -- Share pictures like you're sitting side-by-side

The first of these is echoed by the text of buttons to be found in Google's referrals program, which uses the text:

• Get photo software from Google
• Organise your pictures. Get Google's photo software.
• Google's photo software. It's what should've come with your camera.

Different countries have different buttons, and the US seems to have been updated with some changed text, which emphasises the sharing aspects of Picasa - presumably to accompany the roll out of Picasa 2.5 with many more options for sharing in it:

• Organize and share photos with friends. Google' photo organizer.
• Organize your digital pics with Google's photo software.

Note that none of these referral links actually make any mention of Picasa - they all talk about "Google's photo software".  Referral buttons are also available in languages other than English, and as far as I can tell, these are fairly literal translations of the same phrases used on the English versions.

The Picasa Review Guide sums up the program with the phrase "Find and enjoy all the photos on your computer in seconds".

Update 30/9/06: John Battelle's article Thoughts on Picasa and Google's Marketing Strategy carries a image with another Picasa advertising phrase: You can find any image you want on the web. How about on your own computer?

Historical list of Picasa updates

As Picasa rolls out its version 2.5 upgrade, its worth documenting, before the information slips from sight, what features the previous releases of Picasa introduced.

Picasa 2.0 was originally launched in January 2005.

Picasa 2.1 was released September 19, 2005, and added:

• Multiple interface languages – Picasa is now available in Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, English (U.S. and UK) , French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. When you start Picasa, the software will automatically match your system's native language. To change the language in Picasa, go to Tools > Options. Change the language using the pulldown menu on the "General" tab. You will need to close and re-open Picasa to see your changes take effect.
• BlogThis! - Post a photo to your blog in one click. Picasa's new "BlogThis!" button replaces the "Blogger" button and allows you to upload your photos directly to the Blogger web editor, without the need for a Hello account. To use, select a photo in Picasa and click the "BlogThis!" button. (If you do not have a Blogger.com account, follow the steps on-screen to create one.) When you are signed in to Blogger, the web editor will open. Click "Publish" to post your photo to your blog.
• Print CD covers – Turn any photo into cover art. Click the "Print" button. Go to Tools > Options > Printing. Select "CD Cover Size" and apply. "CD Cover Size" is now one of the print layout choices.
• Improved RAW handling – Picasa supports more RAW formats and cameras in this release, with improved color-balance support and faster speed. Work with your highest quality files from these camera manufacturers: Canon (.CRW, .CR2), Nikon (.NEF), Olympus (.ORF), Pentax (.PEF), Kodak (.DCR), Sony (.SRF), Minolta (.MRW), and Fuji(.RAF). New models supported include the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (aka the 350D), Pentax *istDS, Konica/Minolta Maxxum7D (aka the Dynax 7D).
• External drives - Find photos on external drives using Picasa. Simply go Tools > Folder Manager to choose whether Picasa should scan a connected external drive to find pictures. When you unplug and reconnect, Picasa will find your pictures instantly (with no scanning), and will also preserve your labels

Picasa 2.2 was released January 30, 2006, and added:

• 25 Additional Languages - Now in Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
  When you start Picasa, the software will automatically match your system’s native language. To change the language in Picasa, go to Tools > Options. Change the language using the pulldown menu on the "General" tab.
• Network Drive Support - Improvements have been made for users who map their My Documents folder to UNC/Network drives.
• IE 7 Support - Fixed errors in Order Prints room with IE 7.
• CD Burning - Better reliability burning folders with long folder names.

Picasa 2.5 was released September 12, 2006, and adds many new features, as listed on the release notes.

SpreadHello - another abandonned blog

SpreadHello is a blog and information site about Hello - the instant message client from Picasa.  It seems to have been active between July and November 2005, but not to have been updated since.

However the content is at least still kept available, and may be of passing interest.  There is a FAQ, and a brief Getting Started page, though the support forum which had some useful questions and answers on is gradually becoming overrun with spam posts. 

Kim Photo Software

I'm not sure what the significance of this is, but the URL www.KimPhotoSoftware.com is an alias of www.picasa.com.

The domain was first registered in Jan 2004, and checking with the Internet Archive, which first became aware of it in Sept 2004, first shows it holding data from 2003 about Hello, Picasa's IM photo client.

In fact, there are 14 sites in total that share the www.picasa.com system:

1. dontswitch.com
2. kimphotosoftware.com
3. lifescapeinc.com
4. mypicasa.com
5. picasa.com
6. picasa.net
7. piccasa.net
8. wwwpicasa.com
9. wwwpicassa.com
10. wwwpicassa.net
11. wwwpiccasa.com
12. wwwpiccasa.net
13. wwwpiccassa.com
14. wwwpiccassa.net

Aside from KimPhotoSoftware, the dontswitch.com is also unexpected, and unexplained.  The rest of the sites are entirely understandable - Lifescape Inc was the company that became Picasa Inc (before Google bought it); Picasa in its com/net forms is the main version of the site; various domain typos are supported, and mypicasa.com is a perfectly reasonable variation to have registered.

Picasa uses real filenames when uploading - good for indexing

Robert Scoble (who was hanging out with Thomas Hawk earlier in the week), notes

Here’s one thing I learned from Thomas Hawk, though. He says if you want a lot of traffic from Google Images that you have to upload your images using Google’s Picasa instead of to Yahoo’s service.

Sounds like Google is penalizing Flickr, right? Well, probably not explicitly Thomas told me. Instead Google’s algorithm biases on URL names. So, if you are searching Google Images for “Cool Cars” then Google will bring back images with the name in the URL. Picasa, when it uploads, includes the file names you give your photos in the URL. Flickr changes those to numbers.

Although the point is a good one, Robert's post is slightly unclear, and there is a good clarification by Danny Sullivan in the comments, who notes that the point is to always have good words as the filenames of the images you upload. Picasa preserves the filenames when you upload [though there is no mention of where you might upload to!], whereas all files uploaded to Flickr by whatever means are simply assigned numbers, thus losing some very valuable metadata that indexing currently relies on.  However, you don't need to use Picasa to ensure the names are preserved - other systems, including doing it manually, work just as well.

Thomas was not just talking about Picasa Web Albums (which only half heartedly uses the the filename you gave the photo when producing the URL which displays it on the Web Album), but rather photos uploaded with the desktop version of Picasa, presumably to Blogger.  I note from his blog posts that Thomas is actually a great fan of that lesser known Picasa program, Hello, which offered image uploads to Blogger even before Picasa itself did.

The advantage of the good names for photos is when various image search engines index the photos.  Currently there are no search engines that index the photos in Picasa Web Albums, and the best way to find flickr images is still through the flickr provided search, rather than an external search engine, though the availability of a good API for flickr does mean that external engines have a good chance of accessing the flickr data. 

Thomas Hawk - evangelist at Zooomr

Robert Scoble writes of a evening photo walking with Thomas Hawk.  In it he describes Thomas Hawk as

... one of the most talented photographers I’ve seen ... an authority on everything photo. Including all of his competitors like Flickr, Picasa, Smug Mug, Riya, Tabblo, Vizrea, Web Shots, Photo Bucket, FotoLog, and others.

Thomas Hawk is the Chief Evangelist for the Photo Sharing Site Zooomr, and writes about the same evening in Had a Great Night Hanging out With Scoble.  Robert was filming the evening for his new job At PodTech, and we should be able to see the results some time in September.

I had a look through Thomas' blog, to see what he's shared with his readers about Picasa:

• Better Than Flickr, Better Than Picasa... it Just Doesn't Exist Yet, Photohawk is a insightful look at what various photo programs and sites offer, and how a fictional Photohawk site would take image search to the next level. [January 2005].
• Google Acquires Picasa noting it was a good move, and hoping that they made it possible to upload from Picasa to Blogger (which is indeed now possible) [July 2004]
• Does Hello Picasa Effect Google Image Search Placement wondering whether uploading images via Hello provides a boost to ranking in Google image search. [September 2005], a theme also mentioned in Stockpipeline Wants to be the eBay of the Stock Photography Business [September 2005],  Is Something Up with Google Image Search? [January 2005], I Think Google is Reindexing Their Image Search Again [October 2005]
• BusinessWeek Online Pans Google's Picasa consisting merely of a link to a review of Picasa by BusinessWeek. [November 2005]
• Why an Open API is Important to the Web 2.0 Social Contract covering the need for user data to be portable amongst photo programs and sites (and by implication, criticising Picasa which does not make an API available). [June 2006]
• My Dinner With Microsoft Exec Jim Allchin in which he reveals that Windows Vista will have photo editing and tagging similar to many of Picasa's features built in [January 2006], which is also mentioned in CES Day One [January 2006] and dealt with in much more detail in Photo Tags in Vista Media Center [July 2006]
• 10 Tips for the New Digital SLR Photographer in which after urging the photographer to get hold of Photoshop, notes that "If you really, really can't afford Photoshop or want something else for a laptop on the go or something, also take a look at Google's Picasa. It's pretty good for free software. Not as good as Photoshop, but you can't argue with the price and it does do a lot of the basics nicely." [April 2006]
• Pixoh: Edit Pictures Online commenting on the prograssion from Photoshop (expensive and complex), to Picasa (free and easier to use), to Pixoh (online, and very easy to use). [March 2006]

Certainly plenty of insightful comment there, backed by plenty of real experience.

Hello, or Hullo

When Google bought Picasa, as well as the photo organizer, there was a second program that the company also produced - an instant messaging client (with photo sharing) called Hello.  That program is still available for download, at Hello.com, though it's not been updated for a long time.  (The current version is 1.0, build 651, and this dates from before the Google purchase - it has not even been updated with any mention of Google - all the email and web addresses it refers to are of the form picasa.net).

Google has gone on to produce its own instant messaging client in the form of Google Talk, which offers so much more - including voice calls, voicemail, file transfer, music trends, and integration with email.  The one Hello feature it is missing is integration with Picasa.

Interestingly, though somewhat inappropriately, the Ask blog search lists googlehello.com as a Top Feed when searching for "picasa".  Googlehello.com looks like a blog about the Hello program, but this was last updated in November 2004 (in fact all content seems to date from the same day!)  I can't see what definition of "top feeds" that would fall into.

It's clear that Google still dont really know what to do with Hello - but they are at least continuing to allow it to be used.

(... and as a postscript, an unrelated service called Hullo has just launched, which indicates that the real value in Hello may be its domain name.  Hullo is a VOIP service, providing free phone calls - there's more comment to be found at TechCrunch and an informative despite itself piece I rather like at Dead2.0.  I think it likely that due to the confusion in names, Hello may get a bit more publicity and interest out of this).