Documenting Picasa

PicasaWeb GData feature submitted to IETF as internet draft

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:03:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:32:00 +0000

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.

iTag - specialist photo tagging software

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:12:00 +0000

There are 3 main standards for including metadata within jpg photo files

EXIF - used for image capture information (including geolocation), and normally added automatically by the camera (though camera phones and web cams often omit including it)
IPTC - a standard for adding more textual metadata, describing what the photo actually illustrates, licensing information etc
XMP - a more recent standard for similar metadata to IPTC

Picasa allows you to give a description to a photo, and to add what it calls keywords (but nearly everyone else calls tags), which are stored in the photo as IPTC.Caption and IPTC.Keywords data.

However there is also a specialist tagging program available in the form of iTag which makes this tagging even easier, and also writes the data as XMP data (in addition to IPTC) for use by other programs that prefer that standard. This Windows freeware program was written because in the words of it author "I found quite a few IPTC tools but none worked the way I wanted them to. So I decided to write my own." It is actively maintained and enhanced.

The program's website has a great table which shows the use of IPTC and XMP metadata by a wide range of desktop programs and web applications.

Photoshop for Linux

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:03:00 +0000

Picasa is a photo organizer, with a few photo adjustment tools. However for real photo manipulation the program that defines the category is Photoshop.

To get Picasa working on Linux, Google use Wine - a layer that allows Windows applications to work on Linux. Google have also extended their work (via hiring of CodeWeavers, Googlers working their normal jobs and in their 20% time, interns, and Summer Of Code students) so that Photoshop also works pretty well on Linux.

More details at the Google Open Source Blog and the Wine-Devel list.

Linking Google News with Picasa Web Albums

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:49:00 +0000

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.

Maybe Picasa for the Mac

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:37:00 +0000

Whilst visiting MacWorld, Duncan Riley of TechCruch noticed that the staffers on Google's stand were wearing t-shirts with the logos of Gmail, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa...

Just a moment he thought, and asked outright about whether Picasa was coming for the Mac, to which he got one one inexperienced employee's response of "Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year." He tried probing other staffers for more details, such as the release date, but was met with a collection of silence - and "smiles like Cheshire cats". Read what you will in to that!

Update: Google Operating System picked up on the same blog post, and augments it with a useful table showing the various Google installed applications (Toolbar, Desktop, Earth, Sketchup, Picasa, and Talk) and when they became available on Windows (where all are available), on Mac (yet to get Picasa or Talk), and Linux (already has Picasa, but no Sketchup or Talk either).

CES roundup a week late

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 07:41:00 +0000

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).

Picasa 2.7 Beta for Linux

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:13:00 +0000

The current version of Picasa for Linux (version 2.2) has fallen behind the features offered on Windows, so a new beta has been provided that brings the Picasa for Linux version up to 2.7.

The step from 2.2 to 2.7 provides the following new features:

Upload to Picasa Web Albums
Saving edits back to disk if desired
Folder hierarchy view
Better RAW support

and of course plenty of other improvements to existing features.

iPhone version of Picasa Web Albums

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:41:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:57:00 +0000

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.

Upload from Picasa to Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:08:00 +0000

The Facebook PicasaUploader gives the ability to upload images to Facebook directly from the Picasa desktop application.

The application is a plugin for Picasa, which adds a new button to Picasa's button tray. It's apparently written by a third party developer, neither affiliated with Google nor Facebook, but appears well executed.

Version 1 was released in June 2007, with a number of bug fix releases appearing since.

Additional 11 languages for Picasa

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:07:00 +0000

The latest version of Picasa, Version 2.7, Build 37.36 - October 30, 2007 has added support for an additional 11 languages

Bulgarian
Catalan
Filipino
Indonesian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Serbian
Slovakian
Slovenian
Thai
Vietnamese.

Slideshow element for Layouts based Blogger blogs

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:02:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:01:00 +0000

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

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

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

Picasa Version 2.7, Build 37.32 - October 02, 2007

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:45:00 +0000

Fixed a case where corrupted AVI files could cause a crash.

Fixed a case that would result in a "This account is not enabled for Picasa Web Albums" error.

New PicasaWeb uploaders v1.1 for the Mac

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:42:00 +0000

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.

Picasa Version 2.7, Build 37.29 - September 13, 2007

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:05:00 +0000

Added support for RAW pictures from the Canon 40D.

Fixed a case where certain RAW pictures appeared overexposed.

Full-screen preview using Ctrl-Alt now works again.

Fixed a case where uploading to Picasa Web Albums could result in an immediate "failed to connect" error.

Browsing through the geotagged photos in Picasa Web Albums

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 10:58:00 +0000

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.

Flickr passes one billion images

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 21:53:00 +0000

Flickr has hit that very significant milestone of having a billion images uploaded. Sometime yesterday the id assigned to uploaded images crossed that boundary, though I can't seem to find an image with exactly id 1000000000 - this could just be a problem with the API that it does not cope with the ten digit id's yet - or it could be that Flickr decided not to allocate this id for whatever reason.

Picasa Web Albums data API adds more features

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 21:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (zmarties) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 07:48:00 +0000

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.