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 the video effectively full screen, the share button sends out an email (with fortunately just a thumbnail and a link back to the Album, not the whole video!), and the download button starts Picasa on the desktop, which gives a popup "This album only contains videos. Videos cannot be downloaded at the present time."

Showing Powerpoint presentations via Picasa slideshow

Google have brought together spreadsheets and word processor documents into a combined online service at Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  When compared with a full office suite (ok, or maybe this one), the obvious omission is a presentation module.

However, Google already have a service that partly provides for this - in the slideshow built into Picasa Web Albums.

To illustrate this in use, I took a very well known Powerpoint presentation, and processed it as follows:

• Load the Powerpoint file in Powerpoint
• Select "save as", and select Jpeg as the format, electing to convert the whole presentation when asked
• Upload the individual files to a new album in Picasa Web Albums (either via the Picasa desktop program, one of the Mac uploaders, or simply via the website)
• I then chose to add some "speaker notes" as captions to the individual pictures - unfortunately Picasa Web Albums limits the length of captions to 1024 characters, so you do need to be quite concise.

The result is:

Update - I've removed the direct embed of the slideshow here, since this seems to have stopped working unless you are already logged in to Picasa Web Albums - which is not a very good user experience for many readers of this blog

With many thanks to Peter Norvig, who grants permission to use his presentation in an educational presentation.

 

Yes, the result does lose the slide transitions where they have been used, but in general it seems pretty usable to me.  The speaker notes (captions) can be turned off if desired by the viewer.

Picasa Web Albums exits test phase

Picasa Web Albums have dropped the "Test" designation from the logo, and added a few more features.

The new features include:

• A single page to edit the individual captions of all images in an album (a feature that Picasa calls Bulk Caption Support - which is rather misleading since that suggests updating the captions of many images to all be the same)
• The embed in Blog or Myspace link now has a twistie, which can open or collapse the HTML fragment

The caption editing page is accessed via the new "edit captions" button in the album view when you are logged in.

As well as its intended use for editing captions, it provides a convenient layout for printing, since you get a full set of images, with their captions alongside.

Amusingly not all pages are in sync yet - the What's New page gets to mention these new features, yet still has the "test" rider in the logo.  It also links to a FAQ - which is actually the Picasa Mac Tools FAQ, rather than the general FAQ you might expect from its position in the footer of this page.

Picasa 2.5 build 32.95

There is no indication as to what may have changed (the readme and release notes have not been updated), but current downloads of Picasa are being served the 32.95 build, dated 3rd October 2006.

The previous build was the 32.94 build, from the 15th September.

Update: Presumably the new version was needed to add support for uploading videos.

What does unlisted mean to Google

Google have 2 major products which offer "unlisted" options - Picasa Web Albums, and now Google Video.

Unlisted on Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums are created as either of

• Public (default) – This album will be listed in my public gallery
• Unlisted – Not listed in my public gallery (but may still be viewable if someone knows the album’s name)

At the moment there is no way to search within Public albums, though their URLs may show up in a search engine if a page links to them.

Unlisted albums started out needing just the album name to access them, which was guessable, but have now been changed so that you need the album's full URL - which incorporates an authkey parameter.  This has improved security considerably, since the URL is not guessable, but URLs can be forwarded to people they were not intended for, or indeed leak into search engines - Google is currently listing around 270 such URLs.

If you view unlisted albums from someone who you have added as a favorite within Picasa Web Albums, then your favorite screen in fact lists the "unlisted albums you have seen" from that user.

Unlisted albums are not private - to do that they would only be accessible to authorized viewers - requiring viewers to sign in before they can see the album.  A half-way house would be to password protect albums - this still suffers from the fact that passwords can be forwarded to other than the intended recipient, but at least passwords are not part of the URL, so don't appear in bookmarks and search engine discovered URLs, and if a viewing password gets into the wrong hands, you can change it, and just tell the rightful recipients the new password.

Picasa gives more explanation in their Picasa Web Albums FAQ. They suggest thinking of unlisted albums like unlisted phone numbers - anyone can see them, as long as they know the URL, but they are not listed in the directory.

Unlisted on Google Video

Google Video allows you to specify options for videos you upload:

• Public - your video will be included in search results
• Unlisted - your video will not be included in search results

Note that this is slightly different from the Picasa Web Albums case, since videos do have a way of searching them, and so this is explicitly about whether they are indexed by that search or not.

Video URLs, even the Public ones, include a long numeric docid, which effectively makes them unguessable.

The Google Help center has more to say on What are "unlisted" videos?

(More discussion on the Unlisted Videos at Google Video Adds "Unlisted" Option and Unlist Your Video.)

F-Spot adds export to Picasa Web Albums

F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop.  It's written in C# on the Mono platform and released under the GNU GPL.

In essence its very similar to Picasa, as indeed they acknowledge on their Similar Projects page.

The latest version, f-spot 0.2.1, adds the ability to export to Picasa Web Albums (joining the existing ability to export to flickr).  As a first iteration of the function it works, but not without a few problems - it happily tries to upload say .png files to Picasa Web Albums, even though this only accepts jpeg images.

There's a bug open to cover this, where the suggested fix is to auto convert to jpeg on export.  That is what Picasa itself does, showing this dialog:

Viewing Picasa Web Albums via Google Gadgets everywhere

Google Gadgets, which provided customized display panels for the Google customized homepage, are now able to be placed on any page.

With this announcement, Google have also come up with some new gadgets, including one for displaying Picasa Web Albums content that displays either someone's gallery, or the pictures in an individual album.

The gadget, by Sophia B. (who has produced a number of Google Gadgets) is configured by giving it a Picasa Web Albums RSS feed - which are available for galleries or albums.  It then shows just one album or image, with click arrows to scroll to the previous or next album or image.  A check box allows for showing the image description - which uses the caption if present, or gives the image filename if there is no caption.

The earlier inbuilt gadget for Picasa Web Albums is not suitable for embedding in pages other than the personalized home page.

Wordpress plugin for Picasa Web Albums: mPicasaIntegration

mPicasaIntegration is a plugin for Wordpress that allows images from Picasa Web Albums to be included in Wordpress blogs, either inline within the blog posts, or as a gallery.

The author markezz explains:

This plugin requires the feed for each album, that should be integrated. It fetches the feed and saves everything into its own mysql-tables. (They are auto-generated - so no need to install.) When there’s a ‘request’ for an image the plugin grabs it (thumbnail 160×160 fullsize or scaled 640x?) and saves a copy in a cache folder. So we don’t touch the ‘terms of use’ of the picasaweb service since we don’t do hotlinking. Once it has the feed URL, there's an autoupdate function that checks for changes on the picasaweb album and synchronizes this with the locally saved data. Your image titles and descriptions given in picasaweb are used, too. Optionally you can activate ajax-rating (with IP check against double voting) and comments. The comments are spam-protected by a simple email validation (not really applicable) and a captcha (non-image) code.

For Wordpress users it's a familiar download and copy to the plugins folders, after which the plugin can be activated from the Admin Panel.  You also need to ensure that the cache folder is writable.

Albums and individual images are added to pages by a particular tag syntax.  The plugin reads the RSS feed from Picasa Web Albums in order to find the photos available.

The plugin was launched on 11 Sept 2006, and has been regularly updated over the past three weeks to reach a fairly stable 1.0 release.

Shutterfly goes public

Shutterfly, a photo sharing and printing website, has had a long association with Picasa - they were one of the original 4 partner sites (along with Ofoto, Snapfish, and Walmart) when Picasa 2 launched in January 2005.  It just held an IPO, raising about $87 million, and giving the company a market capitalization of about $354 million.

To reach the service from within Picasa, users in the USA who use the Create > Order prints and products... menu option can choose Shutterfly from the list of offered photo processors.  After logging in, Picasa then uploads your selected photos onto the service.

The Shutterfly service offers a fairly similar shared albums experience to Picasa Web Albums, with the added ability to order physical prints of the images.  Albums are nominally unlisted (there is no search facility within the service), and are viewable only by those who can get hold of the album URL - which would normally be by you sending out the URL of your albums via email.  However, like Picasa Web Albums, the URLs are general, and do not require logging in or validation to view, and many have made their way into the Google search index:

• Shutterfly albums via Google search - "about 8,950"
• Picasa Web Albums via Google search - "about 6,760"

However, Shutterfly goes one better, allowing collections to also be password protected if required, so just having the URL is not always sufficient.

Images from Shutterfly albums may not be hotlinked from other web pages - (PicasaWeb allows for limited hot linking).  Space for online storage is free and unlimited, though Pro Galleries are charged for, but give the opportunity to earn money when people order your prints.

You can also download the Shutterfly Studio, a Windows desktop application with similar functionality to Picasa, which allows for managing images, editing them, and uploading, sharing and printing them.  One feature it offers that Picasa is sorely lacking is the ability to view more than one image at once - for a side by side comparison.

PicasaWeb builtin module for Google Personalized Homepage

If you use the Google personalized homepage then you can add new modules to it.

There is a builtin module offered for displaying Picasa Web Albums content, which is has the description "View the activity for your Picasa Web Albums account!". In effect this means that it shows the "recent activity" within your favorites.

The actual display output seems to have changed since the screenshot on the directory page was taken, since the displayed items are now more compact than shown there. The number of items shown is configurable between 1 and 10 items.

The module has a feedback address of seanm.feedback.picasaweb@gmail.com, who is described as "Google Engineering". Some personalized homepage modules can also be used within Google Desktop Search - this unfortunately is not one of them.

Picasa integration with websites - where is the API?

Joe Duck points out that Yahoo is doing a LOT of great stuff. 2.0 Stuff. which is especially relevant to him as he tries to put together some travel related mashups.  In addition, he goes on to note that

Flickr makes it a snap to add pictures to blogs or websites as well as manipulate your own photos. I pointed out how great the Flickr features were to some Picasa developers at Google last month and asked about Picasa integration with websites. They sheepishly replied they were working on it...

I certainly hope they are - there is enormous scope for integrating Picasa Web Albums with other data. Google started an explosion of interest when they documented the API to Google Maps, and although Picasa Web Albums are not the same breakthrough technology that Google Maps were, I'd venture that more people regularly look at photos than consult maps, so the opportunities are huge if that data can be accessed via an API.

Just to recount, Picasa Web Albums do already have some integration points, where things can be linked with other websites, but this is far from a full API.  The integration points include:

• code snippets to embed an album in a blog or MySpace
• code snippets to embed a photo in a blog or MySpace
• RSS feeds for a single web album
• RSS feeds for a user's public gallery

Where they fall very short is the discoverability and searchability of albums and photos.  To be honest, that's not just a missing API - it's a whole missing feature, since you can't even search interactively on the Picasa Web site itself.

Another area where there is need for a (documented) API is for the uploading of photos. At the moment you can upload from the Picasa desktop application, or if you are on a Mac via the Mac uploading tools (which include a plug-in for uploading from iPhoto). There are plenty of other photo sources that could be "PicasaWeb enabled" if the upload API was opened up - such as uploading from mobile phones, or from other photo organizers.

Picasa 2.5 build 32.94

Google have slipped out another quick update to Picasa 2.5, taking it to build 32.94.

The public release notes just show a new date and build number, without any details of the change, but the PicasaWeb readme carries brief information:

September 15, 2006
Picasa 2.5, Build 32.94

This update fixes bugs with saving to disk, uploading to Picasa Web Albums, and with CD burning.

Thanks for all of your great feedback and bug reports! Let us know if you run into any problems with this update.

(via the Blogoscoped forum thread).

New users downloading Picasa are still being directed to an old 2.1 version, but the 2.5 version is gradually rolling out via automatic update.  (The automatic update, and indeed the manual update via the menu option "check for updates online", deliberately does not offer upgrades to everyone at once, to avoid stressing the download servers).

Update: Michael Herf, Picasa engineering manager, adds some more detail:

32.94 is rolling out to picasaweb users starting tonight, and it has fixes to this issue. We've fixed a connection issue due to Google Web Accelerator, added more reliable connection detection, and figured out some proxy bugs.

If Internet Explorer can see picasaweb, we're really hoping Picasa will be able to upload to it in this new build.

Embedding images from Picasa Web Albums

From Documenting P...

I've already written that Picasa allows the embedding of Albums in Blog posts or MySpace, (and noted a problem associated with that due to the poor design of the embedded code).

Picasa Web Albums now also offer the ability to embed single images in blogs, as illustrated by the image appearing above.  Unlike the case with the embedded album, the URL used for the image is simple (without the problematic ampersand character that is present in the album embed code), so there should be far fewer broken images.  The image is of a very restricted size (288 pixels wide), but clicking it links through to the full size image in the album.  Notice also that there is a short title of the album where the image comes from - but this is truncated to be just 16 characters long - which seems unnecessarily short.  Of course, you can always change the HTML code manually, but many people will not bother to do so.

When producing the embedding code, there is the option to not include the Album link at all, but no other options, for example there is no attempt to surround the picture with any form of border.

Picasa 2.5 (build 32.91) looks ready for widespread release

The public release notes for Picasa now reference build 32.91 (dated 12th September), yet the build downloadable from the Picasa Web download link still shows build 32.71 on its about screen, and directs you to an older set of release notes.

The existence of these two parallel release notes suggests that Picasa 2.5 is about to be released from limited tests, and made available to  the public at large.

The public release note page at http://readme.picasa.com/public/ is titled "Auto Update" which further suggests that this new release may be rolling out automatically to people with earlier versions of Picasa2, though Picasa 2.5 beta users do not seem to be being automatically upgraded.

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).

Picasa Web Albums - Linked Galleries

Picasa Web Albums have added a new feature - that of linked galleries.  These show up as a list on the right hand side of your public gallery page, and are simply links to other peoples public galleries.  You can see an example of this at the Documenting Picasa albums.

When you add a new user to your favorites then you are offered the choice of also displaying this in your Linked Galleries list, though as the dialog notes, you can always add it later.  You do this by going to your favorites list, which has has a new column added offering "show link on my gallery" for each entry.

Updated Picasa - Beta 3, Build 32.71

As reported in the Picasa online Readme

August 25, 2006
Beta 3, Build 32.71

• We fixed a couple of bugs with uploading to Picasa Web Albums- Picasa was crashing in some cases, and there was also a problem with detecting if a user was online.
• Problems importing into an existing folder, and an import crash bug have been fixed.
• We also fixed some problems with the Picasa Screensaver, incorrectly rotated thumbnails, and sorting files/folders by name.
• We really appreciate all of your feedback and bug reports! If something hasn't been working well for you, we would like to hear about it. Please visit the Picasa Web Albums Help Center to report bugs, or just tell us what you think of the new 2.5 features.

Picasa Web Albums being hidden in Google search results

I was doing some searches in the main Google search when I noticed that it's now apparently got much harder to find Picasa Web Albums in the search results.

I wrote quite extensively about searching Picasa Web Albums on Google before and at the time the search results were reporting around 30,000 results (and I saw higher figures after that). However, today the same search I did then, site:picasaweb.google.com, claims just 3340 results, and shows just 1 (the main Picasaweb page), together with the message

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

If I search for the same "popular" words that I looked at before (photo, picasa, here...) then the reported number of each of those seems to have mostly stayed the same or maybe increased slightly.  Thus these results are compatible with a fairly straightforward algorithm change - one that spots that Picasa Web URLs are pretty similar to each other, so collapses them all as "omitted results".  The change in numbers would seem to indicate a more accurate number is being reported - though an order of magnitude change brings new extremes to the definition of the word "about" that always precedes the counts on Google's result pages.

Googlified is reporting a similar number of results to me, so I don't think this is just a blip in one of the datacentres.

Update: MSN also shows about 3000 URLs pointing at Picasa Web Albums, so this looks to be a fairly accurate figure, and an indication that the previous 30000 was very inaccurate.

Updated Picasa 2.5 build 32.67

As reported in the Picasa online Readme

August 16, 2006
Beta 3, Build 32.67

You will notice that we are doing another update of your Picasa thumbnails, please let us know right away if you encounter any problems with this.

Add your Picasa Web Albums photos to your screensaver! Check it out under Tools> "Configure Screensaver". There's also a new "Pan and Zoom" effect we added to the Visual Presentation options.

We fixed issues with movie file support, finding pictures in your watched folders, and getting stuck on the "Refining" message.

We also made some improvements to the import process, and to the hierarchy view options.

Displaying photos from your Picasa Web Albums in the screensaver is described as an experimental option. The screensaver is a separate program from Picasa, and it currently requires you to enter logon credentials again, even if you are already logged in in the main Picasa program. It offers options of displaying the newest pictures, and of displaying photos from unlisted albums.

Picasa Web Albums adds an activity digest

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

Most wanted Google features survey

Google Blogoscoped is running another survey, this time on Which Google Features Do You Want Most?

All questions ask for a 1 to 5 response as to how much you want a given feature, and the image related questions include

• Higher storage in Picasa Web Albums
• Search for images using image comparisons
• Thumbnails of a page next to the web search result
• A Google API for image search
• Google Sets for images

Currently around 200 people have filled in the survey (again, remember this is a self selected group, of largely expert users) - it would probably get a lot more replies if it was easier to fill in - [Philipp, please use radio buttons not a drop down on future surveys!]

In the results so far, both the more Picasa web storage, and image searching by comparison are in the top 10 of wanted features (out of 53).  The Picasa web storage issue however is fairly polarized - with high numbers of replies for both 5 and 1 on the scale.

The comments on the survey are perhaps more informative than the results themselves.  These include

• a request for more integration, to make it easy to post "picasa [web albums] images + google videos easily on blogger"
• ... and a follow on request to include on the page creation tool
• "Why does picasaweb use a different contact photo than Gmail? Why can't I choose a picasaweb photo as my gmail contact photo?"
• Why dont the services linked to from the corner bookmarks in Gmail (which includes 'photos' which links to Picasweb) also offer corner bookmarks to be consistent

There's also the plea "Google, don't follow this survey, and continue to create services which made us "wowww" !"

Advertising their visual wares

Google have made a number of changes over the past few days in order to publicise some services that may not be as well known as they would like.

On the one hand they have juggled the entries on the search home page, so that Froogle is dropped in favour of Video.  (This has only happened on the google.com domain - other countries still have their own set of entries in place).

They have also added a link labeled "Photos" to the list of services along the top of the Gmail page (referred to as the CornerBookmarks by Google).  This one links through to Picasa Web Albums, opening this in a new page (or tab, dependent on what browser you use).  Like all actions in Gmail, its internally tracked, so Google can see how effective the link is.  Once at Picasa Web Albums, there is currently no link back to Gmail.

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.

Google's Flickr Killer (should that be killr?)

Red66 has made a couple of posts in the past few days about Picasa / Picasa Web Albums, and how they compare to flickr.

Google’s Flickr Killer is about how Picasa's simplicity is key, and the reason why Yahoo (who own Flickr) need to get their hands on a desktop photo application. Whilst Red66 would like to upload from Picasa direct to Flickr, he sees that it's unlikely that Google would provide such a feature, now that they have their own web albums service.

In Google’s Flickr Killer - Part 2 there is more consideration of what Google need to do to Picasa to make it the killer application he believes it can be - merging the convenience of the desktop application, with the best of breed web albums service.

His list of 10 necessary improvements given is below [my comments in square brackets thus]:

1. Provide more storage space
2. Allow direct links to images at multiple sizes, so they can be placed on blogs etc
3. Tags - both making this easy in the desktop app, and making sure those tags get uploaded to the web version
   
4. Geotags [well Picasa has this on the desktop side, so I guess the point here is to do things with them on the web albums]
5. A powerful API [Not sure if this is mean to be an API for the desktop app, or one to the web service - I argue that both are needed]
6. Ad-supported, with revenue share to the photo owners
7. Comments and notes [Comments are allowed now - I think this may be a new feature just added to the web service]
8. RSS Feeds for everything
9. Better GMail and Blogger integration
10. ... and search

Well, I agree with most of this - though as I've already written about earlier, I think that search is the key point that needs addressing above all others. The lack of an API is close behind, and I think this is necessary both on the desktop client side, and on the server side. With these two in place, I don't so much care about most of the other points, since they can then if necessary be addressed by third parties - though the need for more storage space would then perhaps become a limiting factor.

(The current paid upgrade on storage space, is only available in the USA - so at a minimum this needs to roll out worldwide, but an increase in the base allocation would be welcome as well.) I see the "ad supported, revenue sharing" as being the least important of this list.

How did the search get lost?

Google knows a thing or two about search, so you would think that they would provide a search feature in whatever new services they introduce. Why then does Picasa Web Albums not have a search facility? Whilst the roll out of Web Albums is kept to a slow pace by the invitation process, the number of albums is climbing, and if the service is to have a future, people are going to want to find images that other people have placed in their albums.

At the moment the only presence Picasa Web Albums have in Google search results is shown by doing a search for "site:picasaweb.google.com", which shows around 30,000 results. (Such figures are rarely accurate, but I'll ignore that for the moment).

Since Google is not indexing the picasaweb site (its robots.txt file excludes all indexing spiders), what this shows is that there are links from other webpages that point at around 30,000 different galleries or albums hosted at picasaweb. Note that the results do not show any text snippets - which is further indication that Google only includes the items in its index because there are incoming links, and the page itself has not (and will not) be spidered.

If the page contents are not in Google index, then the only information that can be indexed for these pages consists of the page URL, and the text of the link pointing at the page. Thus, the obvious search strategy of using "site:picasaweb.goole.com {queryword}" has very limited success.

In fact, this is so little information that even words which represent hugely popular photographic subjects such as "wedding" or "vacation" provide less than 10 matching results. A little more investigation came up with the following as being the top search words for finding albums:

• photo (391 results)
  
• picasa (316 results)
  
• here (252 results)
• album (233 results)
• photos (179 results)
• my (166 results)
  
• pictures (130 results)
  
• gallery (124 results)
  
• the (93 results)
  
• 2006 (70 results)
• fotos (62 results)
  
• click (58 results)

• wedding (6 results)
  
• vacation (5 results)
• baby (1 result)

So, the general result is that there is no way to reliably search for Picasa Web Albums - all the top results are simply words that are regularly used in link text, but which convey little information about the target contents - including a big contribution from that most useless of links "Click Here".

The other aspect of the information available for searching is the URL, which consists of upto 3 parts:

• the fixed part "picasaweb.google.com"
• the account name
  
• possibly the album name

The account name may be a gmail account name, or may be an alternative name chosen so as not to expose the gmail account name. As such, these names follow the gmail naming conventions - which is that they contain at least 6 characters, and that by-and-large they are not to be found in a dictionary (Google seemed to remove most dictionary words from the gmail namespace, to cut down on email spam via dictionary attacks). This generally means that the account name is little clue to the photos you may find within its albums - beyond the fact that the name (somehow) relates to the photographer, and so may be relevant if you already know of the photographer.

That leaves the final component of the (optional) album name. Many albums have multiple word descriptive titles, which are used to construct the album name part of the URL by removing spaces from the title. This results in a lot of album names being (from an indexing perspective) nonsence names, since the compound text is not being indexed under its component parts.

In conclusion, Google needs to introduce an internal search facility for Picasa Web Albums as soon as possible - external search systems cannot substitute, since they cannot get at the data necessary to build an index.