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.

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.

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).

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.

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".

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.

New PicasaWeb uploaders v1.1 for the Mac

Google have announced updated Mac file uploaders, for uploading to Picasa Web Albums, specifically adding supporting for iPhoto '08.

They also note that they have redesigned the internals of the uploaders - they now use the public Google Data API interfaces and the Objective-C GData Library.  Additionally they install using Google Updater.

Browsing through the geotagged photos in Picasa Web Albums

Google have released a mapplet, that you can incorporate into the "My Maps" tab of Google Maps, that allows you to browse the geotagged photos in Picasa Web Albums.

There are few hard numbers available for how popular Picasa Web Albums are, but Google claim that "Already, the Picasa Web Albums community has added map information to millions of photos from all over the world".

Since the Mapplet appears as one of the "featured content" links on the "My Maps" tab, you don't have to specifically add it - and thus you can get to see this info without being logged in.

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).

Mobile Picasa Web Albums

In the same blog post that announced mapping integration for Picasa Web Albums, Google also announced Picasa Web Albums for Mobile Devices.

Unfortunately, as I write this, the link they give does not work, so the only info I have to go on is the blog post itself.  The meat of this states:

The mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan

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.

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.

Objective-C Library for Picasa Web Albums

Greg Robbins, a member of the Mac team at Google, has updated the open-source Objective-C Client Library to add support for the Picasa Web Albums GData based API.

His suggestions for how you might want to use the ability to upload images from any application to your web albums include:

• sharing images of your avatar from an online world
• uploading images from a security camera, so they can be monitored like any other RSS feed

Picasaweb storage upgrade allows more photos per album

Picasa Web Albums have been offering paid storage upgrades for a while now.  As well as the simple increase in storage space, a paid upgrade also increases the number of photos permitted within each album.

Free Picasa Web Album accounts are allowed up to 500 photos per album.

Paid accounts are allowed double that, at 1000 photos per album.

One such gallery that is taking advantage of this is LaurasCoop which has a number of albums containing 900+ photos each.

More Tips from Mike DelGaudio

Mike continues to provide useful and informative tips and techniques on Picasa on his blog.

Amongst the latest post of note are:

• Adding captions to picture pile collages
• Picasa can zoom with a gesture
• Create your own Warhol

Although I noted this blog as being a new blog in December, I've since found out that it's a continuation of his earlier blog Photo Editing with Picasa. Although that is no longer being updated, its back catalogue of posts contains a wealth of useful information. My pick includes:

• Adding Keywords to Photos in Bulk using Picasa
• Create a Multi-Exposure effect with Picasa
• Picasa Thumbnail Icons Explained
• 5 ways to create black and white images in Picasa

I've already noted Mike has a Picasa Web Album, but he also uses other photo sharing services, with collections of images on both flickr and zooomr.

A major Picasaweb user - with 70,000 photos

The Boardy Barn is a serious party venue in Hampton Bays, Long Island, New York.  If you visit their home page, you will also see they are a major user of Picasa Web Albums.

They link through to two galleries on Picasa Web Albums

• boardybarnpixs - with over 50,000 photos in 183 albums
• boardybarnpics - currently with over 22,000 photos in 102 albums

That's certainly a lot of photos - though it has to be said they are not fine art, consisting as they do mostly of snapshots of party goers.

I guess that they did the maths, and determined that paying for Picasa Web Albums was a cheap way to host this number of photos.  (It looks as if previously they were using Webshots for hosting).

If you've got that volume of photos to upload, the convenience of the Picasa desktop applications for uploading must be hard to beat.

Picasaweb popularity by country

Still investigating the popularity of Picasaweb, I thought about looking into which countries (or strictly which TLD's) are responsible for the most links to Picasaweb.  My findings were initially surprising to say the least.

All numbers were obtained by doing a search for "picasaweb.google.com" together with "site:tld" - all done at the main google.com site.

For reference, without specifying a TLD gives 412000 results.  (Remember, these numbers are always an estimate - but [probably] - see the conclusion, good enough for our purposes).

• com 278000
• org 32400
• net 18800
• nl 15700
• tw 11000
• pl 593
• cn 433
• ru 386
• de 322
• fr 305
• jp 239
• uk 208
• ca 202
• info 182
• us 76
• edu 154
• dk 133
• it 130
• no 115
• il 104
• be 104
• se 99
• br 99
• au 87
• cc 72
• at 65
• es 54
• ch 42
• biz 42
• ie 25

So, links from .com domains dominate as expected, with healthy showing from .org and .net domains.

The first countries to show up are a real surprise - the Netherlands and Taiwan, and in fact they are the only ones with a significant presence that I found.  (Normally you would expect the UK, Japan and Germany to top the country rankings here).

Next in fact, but massively behind the two top countries are Poland, China and Russia, and it is only after those that you get back to something closer to expectations, with Germany, France, Japan, UK and Canada occupying the next few spots.

What can explain this strange set of results?  Perhaps the Dutch have taken to Picasaweb in a big way, much as Brazil has made Orkut its own.  I' dont know - I'll certainly be trying to delve more into these figures - and to see if I can back them up with further results.

Some comparative figures searching at Yahoo are:

• [all] 31941 (yes, that's less than other figures!)
• com 88000
• net 11200
• org 10800
• tw 2890
• pl 1050
• nl 994
• cn 933
• ca 597
• de 515
• uk 452
• ru 367
• fr 290
• jp 196

The disparity here is not as pronounced, but it still shows Taiwan, Poland, Netherlands and China ahead of the more usual high rankers of Canada, Germany, UK and Japan.

Live.com has the following:

• (all) 14635 (yes, again less than later figures!)
• com 29605
• org 1587
• net 1381
• ru 460
• uk 367
• cn 318
• nl 308
• de 267
• jp 195
• ca 174
• pl 166
• tw 138
• fr 97

These figures are much closer to the expected ranking - its beginning to look as if Google has been misled.

Returning to the Google results for nl, paging through the results shows that after just 128 entries, Google gives up and says that the rest of the results have been omitted.  Choosing to display those explains a lot - it looks as if the nl result numbers have been inflated by forum spam - there are lots of results from various threads all at the same forum site.  In general Google is better than the other search engines in indexing dynamic pages (such as forums often produce), and that seems to have affected the numbers in the initial estimates.  Taiwan also gives up after displaying just 140 results. Oh well, maybe the Google numbers are not "good enough for our purposes" after all.

So the general conclusion to be taken from this is that the majority of (link) support for Picasaweb actually comes from the regular .com, .org, and .net domains - corresponding to a lot of American users, and widespread support from early adopters around the world who use the .com domain as its worldwide meaning.

[A useful paper on estimating size of search engine indexes, and explaining some of their biases is Random Sampling from a Search Engine’s Corpus].

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.

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.

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.

New blog by Mike DelGaudio

Mike DelGaudio has just started a blog with the tag line "Learning everything I can, with an emphasis on photo editing, photo sharing and Picasa".

In just a week of posts he's covered a lot of ground, with a number of useful tips about getting the best from Picasa.

As you might expect, he's also making use of Picasa Web Albums to illustrate his techniques.

Picasa upgrades to version 2.6

As well as upgrading Picasa Web Albums, Google have rolled out a new version 2.6 of Picasa on the desktop.

The Picasa readme page notes the major changes as being:

• Added Vista / Internet Explorer 7 support
• Changed update behavior so that it now automatically downloads updates in the background
• Picasa Web Albums is now available in 18 languages

In addition, the release notes page has been updated with news of both this release (build 35.94), and also the previous builds of 32.97 and 32.95 which had not previously been documented.  This adds more details to recent changes, which notably include:

• New autoupdate behavior for Windows Vista support
• New CD/DVD-burning engine (supports more devices)
• Improved upload reliability to Picasaweb
• Added support for 18 new languages
• Added XMP metadata parsing
• Fixed a problem where incorrect GPS values were being saved under certain conditions.

Removed functions

What the readme and release notes do not list is that some functionality appears to have been removed with this "upgrade".  Specifically there are now just 2 items on the Experimental menu under Tools.  This menu also used to have "Publish via FTP..." and "Upload to Google Video..." on it.  It's the nature of experimental things that they may not work out in the future, but I think it's worth a comment on both of these lost items.

Upload to Google Video...

I guess that this was seen as unnecessary since anyone can now upload videos to their own Picasa Web Albums, and having two upload destinations for video may have been too confusing.  It must be noted however that uploading videos to Picasa Web Albums is not the same as uploading to Google Video for two very important reasons:

•  videos in Google Video have a search engine available, so that people can find them easily
• videos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums count against your storage space limits, whereas Google Video essentially has unlimited space

Publish via FTP...

Not sure exactly what the use case for this was expected to be.  It's possible that this was also deemed unnecessary now that Blogger Beta has improved integration with Picasa.

Picasaweb gets search

Google have updated Picasaweb with a number of features, key amongst which is the ability to search through Picasaweb photos, together with the ability to order prints from photos, and now anyone not just those with a paid hosting plan can upload videos.  The briefest of details are available on the What's New page.

In Google's own words, the additions are

Anyone can upload videos using Picasa
Finally, a way to share those digital camera movies with friends. Learn more

Search and tag your photos. Search over your friend's public photos
Hey, we're Google. Search across album descriptions, captions, our new tags and more.

Order prints and photo products
If one of our print providers sells it, you can order it.

(I note that despite updating this What's New page, they still haven't corrected the link in the footer, which still links to the Mac Tools Terms of Service  rather than the Picasaweb Terms of Service).

 

The search still does not allow for a full search over all Picasaweb pages - it mostly searches through your own albums, or those that you mark as favorites.  However, it will search through any other single album that you are currently in, even if that is not one of your favorites (indeed you don't even have to be logged in to do such a search).

The ordering of prints currently offers two print providers - Photoworks and Shutterfly (Both US based, even if you are not a US user of Picasaweb), but that thankfully also works without you having to be logged in to Picasaweb.  To avoid favoring one of these providers over the other, they are presented in a random order.

The features are still a little rough around the edges, for example the help message you get when there are no search matches contains two typos that I spotted - Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search teams. For example, you could be type "the long winding road".

However, with these additions, together with the recent ability for non US customers to purchase paid hosting plans, Picasaweb is slowly turning into the killer photo hosting site it should have been from the start.

Update: It looks like Google have discovered some major problem with the search function, and have temporarily withdrawn the feature.  Less than an hour after I posted, the feature is no longer available (though it's still documented on the What's New page).  The Order Prints feature is still available.

Update: A few hours later and the features have returned.  There's also a post about the new features on the main Google blog.

Picasa awards

I wrote yesterday about the Picasa Testimonials page, which carries an old copyright, links to a download for an out of date version of the software, and carries testimonials that relate to the software produced before Google bought the company.

Reached in a similar way from the features section of the Picasa website, the Awards page is similarly very out of date.

It's got a similar 2005 copyright message, but we can be more exact than that - the awards mentioned were last updated with an entry from March 2005.

The full list of awards given (and it's not a long list!) are:

• 5-Stars-Award. CHIP Online - March 2005
• Editor's Choice Award 2005. PC Magazine – January 2005
• DIMA 2005 Innovative Product Award. - February 2005

The above all relate to Picasa 2.  In addition there is a list of awards for the earlier Picasa 1 software:

• Editor’s Choice: Australian Personal Computer – October 2004
• Best of the Year 2003, Digital Imaging. PC Magazine – December 2003
• 2003 Editor's Choice Award. American Photo - 2003
• DEMOgod Award: DEMO 2003 – February 2003

I can't think what good Picasa thinks keeping such an out of date list does - I rather suspect that, like much of the Picasa support documentation, this page has simply been abandoned.

The PicasaWeb ActiveX Uploader control

Picasa Web Albums offer you a number of choices as to how you might upload images to it:

• using Picasa on Windows
• using the iPhoto uploader or the Mac uploader on the Mac
• using a "browse" button to select the file from the Basic Uploader web page
• if you are on IE, using an ActiveX based control

The ActiveX control provides a reasonable upload experience as follows:

• images can be dragged and dropped to it from an Explorer window
• images can be selected via the "Add Photos" button which brings up a file selection dialog.

In both cases, files of type jpg, gif, and png are accepted.  Any other filetypes (including movies files) are simply ignored.

Once selected, the files show as thumbnails within the uploader control - though many png files display simply as a red square, rather than their true contents.

To the right of the drop area, a drop down allows the selection of the uploading quality, choosing between largest size (original image size), large size (limiting the largest dimension to 1600), or medium size (limiting the largest dimension to 1024).

Below the thumbnail is a remove link, that removes the file from this upload.  Uploads are begun by pressing the upload button.  Once an image has been uploaded, the "remove" link changes to the word "completed".

jpg images are uploaded unchanged (subject to being reduced in size if the quality setting dictates), but gif and png files become jpg files after uploading - though retaining the .gif or .png part of their filename, but also gaining an additional .jpg part - thus example.png.jpg.

The ActiveX control shows up in the Downloader Program Files directory as the rather undescriptive UploadListView class, though if you then check out its properties, it does offer the further description of "PicasaWeb ActiveX Uploader".  As of the time of writing this article, it is at version 1,0,0,22, which dates from June 2006, when PicasaWeb was first made generally available.

Checking the web page source code suggest that the ability to pause and resume the upload may be planned for the the next version of the control:

• "When we get the pause upload in place we'll need to switch..."
• <!-- the following two buttons require changes to the ActiveX component -->
  <!-- STATE: Uploading
  <input type="button" value="Pause Upload" onclick=""/>-->
  <!-- STATE: Upload Paused
  <input type="button" value="Resume Upload" onclick=""/>-->

Picasa Web reviewed as a serious Flickr contender

Robert Nyman has reviewed Picasa Web Albums, and considers it to be a serious Flickr contender.

He gives a reasoned runthrough of what's good about the service, and in particular, for him, one of the best bits is the ability to view albums in thumbnail view at one of three sizes - small to get a good overview, medium for more detail, or large which for him means he sees all he wants without having to view the detailed views of individual pictures.

Perhaps what's more interesting is what he considers bad points of the service.  These are:

• No way to have (totally) private photos.
• No way to share specific albums/photos with certain other users.
• No groups.
• A fixed 6 GB storage; it’s actually not that much. For the Flickr Pro account, one has a 2 GB monthly upload limit, but no storage limit whatsoever.

Furthermore, he's worried about what happens when he stops paying for additional space - contrasting statements from Picasa Web which says that when you stop paying, your additional photos beyond the free limit may (my emphasis) be deleted, with the statement from Flickr that says that if your paid subscription expires, you simply drop back to a free account, but that your photos are safe, and can be accessed again by restarting your paid subscription.

In all, he considers that there is room for improvement in both services.

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! 

URLs in captions and comments at Picasa Web Albums

Google are now turning URLs that appear in captions and comments at Picasa Web Albums into clickable hyperlinks.  Unfortunately URLs in album descriptions don't get the same treatment.

The matching picks up the following examples of text and turns them into clickable links

• full URL - http://www.picasa.com
• URL without the http - www.picasa.com
• secure URL - https://www.picasa.com
• email address - support@picasa.com
• URL with parameters - http://picasaweb.google.com/documentingpicasa/DocumentingPicasa/photo#4973650529123762194

Certainly doing this for captions is a very good idea (and I don't see why they don't do it for album descriptions as well in the same way).  However doing it for comments is a double edged sword - it can lead to more spammy comments being left.

Picasa Web Albums adds videos

As if there hadn't been enough news this week concerning Google and videos, I noticed that the Picasa Web Albums' new features page notes:

Upload videos (only for those who've upgraded to 6GB of storage)

Do any American readers who have upgraded have an example of this they can share? The second class citizens in the rest of the world are stuck with just 250MB, and now they lose out on a video feature as well :-(

I've had a quick look through a number of Picasa team members albums, wondering if any of them had been testing out the feature with their own account, but not spotted anything yet.

Update: Many thanks to haochi in the comments who has provided an example uploaded video. Not surprisingly, the appearance within Picasa Web Albums is of an embedded Google Video player.  The album view shows the thumbnail with a video still, incorporating the same marker icon as Picasa on the desktop uses to mark videos.

The pages still have the same options as for photos: Share video, slideshow, and download. The slideshow plays t