Picasa Web's New Homepage

Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to emphasize the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most recent 8 albums.

"This new design centers around photos that are interesting to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the talented Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been shared with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.


While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has recently switched to a feed view, a stream of activities popularized by Facebook.

If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.

Store More Photos and Videos in Picasa Web Albums

You've probably noticed that Picasa Web's storage counter shows that you have more free space than a couple of days ago. It turns out that this is not a bug.

"We recently made a change whereby any pictures 800 pixels and under don't count towards used PWA storage. The new GB numbers you're seeing are the result of quota recalculations that were made," informs a Google employee.

The new feature encourages users to upload smaller images. If you use Picasa to upload your photos, there's a setting that lets you pick the dimensions of the photos that are uploaded. The "small" option is recommended "for publishing images on blogs and webpages". Blogger users who resize their photos before uploading them will no longer have to buy extra storage if they're prolific.

Another important change is that "all videos under 15 minutes also don't count towards used PWA storage". That means you can now upload short videos to Picasa Web Albums without worrying about the file size.

Update: "Photos less than 800 pixels x 800 pixels and video less than 15 minutes long that are uploaded to Picasa Web Album, Blogger, or Buzz don't count towards your storage quota." (Picasa Web's help center)

Picasa Web's Multiple File Uploader

Picasa Web Albums has finally improved the uploading feature. You can now select multiple images from a folder and upload all of them. After uploading images, you can add captions and delete the images you don't like. It's a long overdue improvement that's especially important if you don't use Picasa.

Another change is that you can now upload videos without installing Picasa.


Picasa Web's new uploader uses HTML5 APIs, so it's not available in Internet Explorer, where you still have to install an ActiveX control.

{ Thanks, Přemysl Brýl. }

Default HTTPS Access for Picasa Web Albums

Last month, Picasa Web Albums started to support HTTPS and now it's enabled by default. It's probably the only popular photo sharing site that uses an encrypted connection by default and that's really impressive.


Picasa Web Albums is not the only Google service that has recently switched to HTTPS. Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites are three other services that only use encrypted connections. You no longer have worry about editing the URL and replacing "http" with "https" because Google automatically redirects URLs to HTTPS.

Picasa Web Adds HTTPS Support

Picasa Web Albums was one of the few Google apps that didn't support encrypted connections. Now you can go to the secure version at https://picasaweb.google.com to make sure that no one can intercept your requests. This is especially helpful if you use an unsecured WiFi connection.

Google Chrome says that Picasa Web Albums includes some resources that are sent via HTTP, but these aren't the usual suspects: images, CSS and JavaScript files. The culprit is an iframe used for loading ads. Internet Explorer shows a mixed content warning every time you visit a Picasa Web Albums page, which is really annoying. (Update: this was a quickly fixed.)


Many Google services support HTTPS connections: Gmail (enabled by default), Google Reader, Google Groups, Picasa Web Albums, Google Search, Google Finance, YouTube (partially encrypted). Other services only support encrypted connections: Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Health, Google Analytics, Google AdSense and AdWords, Google Web History, Google Bookmarks, Google Voice, Google Latitude, Google Checkout. It's probably easier to list the services that don't support HTTPS.

{ via Brian Rose }

Picasa Web Albums Wish List

Picasa Web Albums is one of the Google services that has been unfairly neglected by Google, even if it has a lot of flaws and many missing features. Probably the biggest flaw was the goal of the service: to be an online extension of Picasa, a popular photo management software. Picasa Web Albums inherited Picasa's limitations and didn't add many useful features because they were available in Picasa. Instead of focusing on improving the web app, Google developed Picasa for Mac, added new features to Picasa and acquired Picnik, an online image editor.

Picasa Web Albums is somewhat similar to Microsoft's Office Live, an online extension of a popular software, which is surprising, considering that Google is a big proponent of cloud computing.

If you try to upload photos to Picasa Web Albums, you'll notice that Google recommends to install Picasa. That's because you can only upload up to 5 photos at a time using the web app (unless you're using Internet Explorer: Google developed an ActiveX control for uploading photos).


Try to download an album and you won't be able to do that without installing Picasa or using some workarounds.

To edit a photo, you need to use Picasa or Picnik, a slow Flash image editor. It would be much more useful to have some basic editing options inside Picasa Web Albums, so you can quickly retouch your photos.

Andrew Maxwell and François Beaufort created a long wish list for Picasa Web Albums (sorting albums by name, sub-albums, upload by drag and drop, multiple sign-in, offline mode) and many of their issues can be easily addressed by storing photos in Google Docs and transforming Picasa Web Albums into a Google Docs app. This way, you'll use a single file storage service, uploading and downloading multiple photos will be much easier, photos could be shared privately without revealing all the photos from an album, you could add photos to multiple folders and even create subfolders. Another benefit is that you'll be able to use a syncing software for all your files if Google decides to release a software like Dropbox or Windows Live Mesh.

Picasa Web's New Zoom Viewer

Picasa Web Albums has a new zoom viewer that uses Flash. If you click on the magnifying glass icon next to a photo, you can select a rectangular region from the image and zoom in or zoom out. The feature is called "microscope zoom" and it doesn't fall back to the old version for users who haven't installed Adobe's Flash plugin.


Another new feature lets you view all the EXIF tags that are available by clicking on "full details page". You'll find a lot of tags that offer more information about white balance, orientation, exposure, color space, brightness, light source and more.



{ Thanks, Bogdan. }

Picasa Web Users, Forced to Link Their Google Profiles

Google tries to make Picasa Web Albums a little more social, but it's not easy to convince users that this is a good idea. I posted in August that Google will link Picasa Web Albums with Google Profiles. On the surface, this is a minor feature, but Google didn't manage to explain users why it's important.

If you visit Picasa Web Albums, you'll see a huge modal dialog:

"Together at last! Picasa Web Albums now uses your public Google Profile to display your name and profile photo on your albums and next to your comments. This will help improve your experience in two ways. First, the quality of interactions across Picasa Web Albums will improve as friends can see and recognize whom they are interacting with. Second, using multiple Google products will be easier because you can now update your profile in one place."


It makes sense for Google to have unified public profiles that integrate will all services, but users may find this disconcerting. Why take away my hard-earned alternate username and change it with a number? Why not use a different number in the URL than the Google Profiles ID, like Google Reader does? Why associate my photos with a public profile that includes my name and my Google Buzz messages?

Custom usernames were useful and I don't see why Google isn't more flexible. You should be able to keep the existing username or at least pick an URL that can't be guessed from your profile address.

Instead of trying to make profiles more flexible, Google decided to disable most of the features until you link your Google Profile. You can no longer share a photo, favorite a user, add a comment. If you still don't like the new feature, you have the one-time opportunity to transfer your photos to a new account.



You can't force users to use a new feature by crippling the other features and then expect them to like the new feature.

Here's how a Google employee tries to address this issue:

the chief reason for this profiles change is because we want the vast majority of pwa users to have a quality experience with other pwa users. right now, its common for a pwa user to get a comment on a photo from another user, and have the comment be effectively meaningless because it was posted by 'DJJazzyJeff01234'. we've heard from many users how this freaks them out, and makes pwa a scarier place. we think this makes for a low quality social interaction between users and does not cause further engagement.

the other main reason we're doing this is to simply help users manage their google profiles better across multiple google products. the reality is that many of our users use several google products, not just picasa. the new model lets you manage your profile ONCE, and you're done.

in the end, you still will have total control over what others see. you can set your profile to show your full name publicly OR simply opt-out of your name being found in search. also your profile won't display any private information unless you've explicitly added it.

Upload HD Videos to Picasa Web Albums

One of the benefits of switching to YouTube's player in Picasa Web Albums was the support for higher quality videos. Now you can even upload HD videos to Picasa Web Albums.

"We're happy to now support uploading high-definition (HD) videos, up to 720p, from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums. Whereas before you could upload, store, and share videos shot in 240 or 360p, now you can do the same for your 480p and 720p (HD) videos too."

Here's an example of HD video uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. It's less than 3 minutes long and it uses almost half of the free storage quota.


Unfortunately, Picasa Web's new feature would be much more useful if you could upload videos from your browser. Right now, you can only upload videos from Picasa.


While YouTube lets you upload videos up to 2 GB, Picasa Web's free storage quota for all your photos and videos is 1 GB. Of course, YouTube lets you upload videos without installing an additional software.

Another issue is that Picasa Web Albums doesn't offer per-file permissions, so you can't share a video without sharing the entire album.

These are just some of the reasons why YouTube is a much better service for sharing videos than Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa Web Groups Google Buzz Albums

Picasa Web Albums is the central repository for all the photos uploaded to Google's services. If you upload photos to Blogger, Google Buzz, Orkut or upload a background image for Google's homepage, your photos are stored in Picasa Web Albums.

Unfortunately, Google creates many albums that clutter the interface. For example, Google Buzz creates a new album every time you upload one or more photos. Picasa Web addressed this issue by grouping all the Buzz albums in a special gallery called "Photos from posts".


Google Buzz is not the only service that adds unnecessary albums: Blogger creates albums to store the photos uploaded to your blogs. Picasa's albums aren't a good way to organize photos because they have limitations (the maximum number of albums has been recently increased to 10,000), you can't store the same photo in multiple albums and individual photos don't have privacy controls. Until Picasa Web Albums drops "Picasa" and "albums" from its name and becomes Google Photos, the service will be an online extension of a desktop software and will inherit Picasa's flaws and limitations.

{ via Adewale }

Google Buzz Is Here to Stay

Many tech blogs say that Google Buzz is an unsuccessful project and Google will have to abandon it. Google Buzz is not an experimental service like Google Wave, it's an extremely important project for Google's future and it's a key component of Google's social strategy.

To see how important is Google Buzz for Google, consider that Buzz wasn't launched in Google Labs. It wasn't even launched as a standalone service: Google Buzz was integrated with Gmail, one of the most popular Google products. Google Buzz is also the only Google service that has a special icon and a special search command on Google's mobile site. In less than 7 months since Buzz's launch, the service already has a powerful API, it's integrated with Google Maps, Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums and it's constantly improving.

Google Buzz is actually the service planned in 2007 whose goal was to integrate Google's social applications and become the central place for sharing photos, documents, videos, news with your contacts. Google Buzz already streams some activities from Google Reader, Picasa Web Albums, Blogger, YouTube.

Google Photos blog reports that Google Buzz can now share private Picasa Web Albums:

"It used to be all or nothing when it came to sharing a new Picasa Web Album in Buzz. If you created a public album in Picasa Web Albums, it created a public Google Buzz post. That was great for when you wanted to share your photos broadly. But for those times when you wanted to share with a smaller circle — no Buzz. Now when you create a private album, the select people you choose to share your photo album with will see a notification in Google Buzz as well."


Google Buzz also added two other important features: muting posts by source, so you can hide someone's Twitter posts, Flickr photos or the posts from another source, and editing posts and comments from the mobile interface.

It should be clear that Google Buzz is here to stay, even as a feature of a future service.

Picasa Web Stats in Google Analytics

Picasa Web Albums has an option that lets you see detailed visitor stats for your photos. If you go to the Settings page, you can enable "photo tracking". The only thing you need is a Google analytics tracking code.


Picasa Web's help center explains that you need to create a new Google Analytics account (not a new Google account) to monitor Picasa Web Albums photo traffic. After creating the new account, find the account ID that looks like UA-xxxxxxx-y and enter it in the Google Analytics tracking code box from Picasa Web Albums. "Once the setup is complete, just sign in to Google Analytics and click View reports to see visitor stats for your photos. It can take up to 24 hours for Analytics to detect your tracking code."

A similar option is available for Google Docs, but only for published documents. While this feature is useful, it's not very easy to use and it's not properly integrated with Google Docs and Picasa Web. Showing simple stats, like the number of views, the top search queries and referring websites, in a special section of Google Docs and Picasa Web would be a much better idea.

Link Your Google Profile with Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums added an option to connect the service with Google Profiles. Before Google Profiles was released, each Google service used separate profiles, so you had to enter personal information multiple times.

"Picasa Web Albums are now compatible with your Google Profile! Now when you use Picasa Web Albums, you can use the same profile name and photo that you use on your Google Profile. Your Picasa Web Albums will link to your Google Profile, and your profile will link to your public albums," informs Google's photo service.


After linking your Google Profile with Picasa Web Albums, you can edit the profile and remove the link to your public albums.

If you've previously used an alias to hide your Gmail address from the URL, you can no longer use it after merging the profiles. The only option you have is to use the same ID number from Google Profiles.

It's interesting that Picasa Web's code calls this feature "merged profiles softlaunch", which suggests that users aren't required to merge profiles, but that will change in the future.

Picasa Web's Unlisted Gallery

Picasa Web Albums added a link at the top of the page that lets you share most of your albums: "unlisted gallery". The URL includes an authentication key that can be reset from the settings page.

"Albums set to the most private visibility setting - 'Sign-in required to view' - will not be displayed unless the person viewing is included on an individual album's 'Shared with' list. Your unlisted gallery has an authorization key in the web address; this key is a combination of letters and numbers which makes the web address very difficult to guess," explains Google.


The name of this feature is confusing: while the standard gallery only includes public albums, the unlisted gallery displays both public and unlisted albums. At least you only need a single link to share all your public and unlisted albums.

{ via François. }

Picasa Web Integrates with Picnik

Picasa Web Albums added an option that lets you edit photos in Picnik, the online photo editor acquired by Google in March. After clicking on the "Edit" button, Picasa Web Albums uploads the photo to Picnik and opens Picnik in a pop-up box.

Picnik is still a Flash application and it doesn't load quickly, so you have to wait at least 10 seconds until you can use it. The online photo editor doesn't have all the features that are available in Picasa, but there's an useful "auto-fix" option similar to the "I'm feeling lucky" button from Picasa, you can crop photos, repair red-eye flaws, remove color casts automatically and fix exposure.



The nice thing is that you no longer have to sign in to Picnik and that the changes can be saved to Picasa Web Albums after you click "save to my album", but that's nothing new. Flickr has been offering a similar feature since 2007.

"Picnik's rich editing tools are now integrated into Picasa Web Albums allowing you to experience them without ever having to leave your account. As long as you're using Picasa in one of the Picnik supported languages, just click 'edit' from the edit drop down menu or from the new handy Picnik icon. Then, Picnik away by applying an effect, adding a sticker, or exploring your own creative path with advanced tools. When you are done editing your photo, save back to your album by either replacing the existing image or making a new copy," suggests Google.

I expect that Picnik will be rewritten as an HTML5 application, so that it can have a better performance and properly integrate with Picasa Web Albums. Instead of opening the editor in separate box, Picasa Web Albums should let you edit the photo in place.

{ Thanks, Sterling and Niranjan. }