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Things that go bump in the night
October 5, 2010
On the
Picnik
team, Halloween is one of our favorite times of year. We get a bit giddy anticipating our braaaaainstorm session for this holiday. We love dreaming up ghouls and ghosts that bring spooky effects to your photos.
This October, we brought back mob favorites, like Vampire and Zombie, Lightning and Ghostify. And we’ve introduced new effects like eeriness with one click, unearthly textures and heaps of new stickers.
Halloween Effects
: Feeling beastly? Our mad scientists created tools to turn you into a zombie, vampire or other creature of the night, and many other effects to give your photo a mysterious cast.
Halloween Stickers
: We went up to the attic and dusted off trunks full of stickers, so you can add everything from witch hats, ghosts and jack-o-lanterns to fangs, lesions and tombstones.
Halloween Fonts
:
We unearthed some of the spookiest fonts around so you can add text to your photo written in skeletons, ghosts or other treacherous text.
To find these fiendish delights, go to
picnik.com/halloween
. This Halloween, you can dress up your photos without even putting on a costume.
Posted by Lisa Conquergood, Picnik team
Google welcomes Picnik
March 1, 2010
(Cross-posted from the
Google Photos Blog
)
More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until recently, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Today, we're excited to announce that
Google has acquired Picnik
, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. Using
Picnik
, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your web browser.
We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.
We're very impressed with the Picnik team and the product they've created, and we're excited to welcome them to Google. We're looking forward to collaborating closely with them to improve the online photo editing experience on the web. In the meantime, we encourage you to head to Picnik, import some of your photos from Picasa Web Albums, Flickr or Facebook and try your hand at photo editing in the cloud!
Posted by Brian Axe, Product Management Director
Happy holidays from Picasa Web Albums and Eye-Fi
December 7, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
Google Photos Blog
)
I used to take a lot of photos with the best intentions of sharing them with friends and family. But most of the time they just sat on my camera's memory card, never quite making it to my computer, let alone to my friends and family.
Three weeks ago we made
extra storage more affordable
for Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, and now we're making it easier to get your photos in the cloud and share them, right in time for holiday picture snapping. We've partnered with
Eye-Fi
, makers of WiFi-enabled memory cards that make it easy to upload photos directly from your camera to Picasa Web Albums — no cables required. For a limited time, when you buy 200 GB of Google paid storage for $50 you'll get a free 4GB SDHC Eye-Fi card (a $95 value). The Eye-Fi card lets you wirelessly upload photos and videos directly to Picasa Web Albums or to your computer. It even includes automatic geotagging, so you'll know exactly where your pictures were taken. And you won't need to worry about running out of space — 200 GB is enough storage for a hundred thousand original resolution photos. Visit
picasa.google.com/eyefi.html
to get yours today.
By using Eye-Fi and Picasa Web Albums together, you can automate your photo sharing: photos are wirelessly uploaded and shared with the people that matter. Based on my experience as an avid Eye-Fi user, here's some tips on setting it up:
Configure
the Eye-Fi card to send photos to an active album (in my case, "Axe Family 2009 Lifestream")
After the first photo posts to the album,
share this album
with individuals or a group (I created a "Family" group)
Whenever the Eye-Fi card uploads photos to Picasa Web Albums, the people on the album's shared list are
automatically notified
via a daily digest email.
Advanced tip: If you add yourself to the group, you'll get the digest email as well to remind yourself to curate your photos (delete bad pics, add captions, etc).
Eye-Fi can even make the holidays more fun: With nearly instant access to photos of her grandkids, my mother-in-law felt like she was with us this Thanksgiving, even though she was two thousand miles away!
Posted by Brian Axe, Product Manager
Show me the pictures: better format for image results
December 1, 2009
I love when I get images back in my Google search results. There's no better way to quickly understand the difference between an
ocelot
and a
clouded leopard
. But sometimes I want to see more images to really make sure I've identified the right jungle cat.
Over the next twenty-four hours we're rolling out a new format for image universal results. When we're confident that we have great image results, we'll now show a larger image and additional smaller images alongside. With this new layout we're able to show you more pictures than before, so you have more to choose from. As always, you can click on an image to see it full size in the original webpage.
We hope this new layout makes finding the images that you're searching for even easier.
Posted by Alex Petcherski, Software Engineer
Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more
September 22, 2009
Today, I'm happy to announce that
we're releasing
Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. This version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers
name tags on Picasa Web Albums
. Name tags are designed to help you organize your photos by what matters most: the people in them. Picasa identifies similar faces and puts these into an "Unnamed People" album. From there, you can easily add a name tag by clicking "Add a name" and typing the person's name. After you've added name tags to some photos, you can use your tags to do creative things, like quickly find all the photos with the same two people in them, make a face collage with just one click or upload and share people albums with friends.
In addition to name tags, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps, so you can easily geotag your photos or view the locations of already-tagged photos on a map. And using our totally redesigned import process, you can now import photos from your camera and upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.
Picasa 3.5 is available for both PC and Mac, in English for now. You can download and try it today at
picasa.google.com
.
Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer
We have a winner for the Google Photography Prize
June 26, 2009
Huge congratulations to
Daniel Halasz
from Hungary, who was awarded the
Google Photography Prize
this week. This was a global student competition to create themes for
iGoogle
. More than 3,600 students from across the world entered, and a couple of weeks ago we asked you to
vote on the shortlist
. The six finalists who got the most public votes were
Amelia Ortúzar
(Chile),
Fahad AlDaajani
(Saudi Arabia),
Matjaz Tancic
(U.K.),
Mikhail Simin
(U.S.) and
Vesna Stojakovic
(Serbia) — congratulations to all of them! From that group, a jury of respected art critics and artists chose Daniel as the winner. They also gave a special commendation prize to
Aliyah Hussain
from the U.K.
You can see the work Daniel and the other finalists submitted at the Saatchi Gallery in London until Sunday, June 28th. Come by if you're in town, or have a look at their photographs on
google.com/photographyprize
, where you can also add them to your
iGoogle homepage
.
Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team
Voting for iGoogle photo themes now open
June 12, 2009
A few weeks ago we launched the
Google Photography Prize
, a global student competition for students to create themes for iGoogle. Our goal was to find talented student photographers and give them unprecedented online and offline exposure. It may seem a little brave to unleash student art on our homepage, but we've been hugely impressed the number and quality of entries we received.
From among the thousands of entries from around the world, we've just announced the shortlist of 36 finalists. Now they're up for your vote - the most popular six you choose will make it to the finals. The 6 finalists will be exhibited at the
Saatchi Gallery
in London and have the chance to win the first prize of £5,000 ($7,500), plus an invitation to spend the day with the internationally renowned photographer
Martin Parr
.
On the voting page you can also add your favourite as a theme to your iGoogle homepage. Millions of people have already chosen to adorn their iGoogle page with images, with everything from seascapes to original art. Now you can have some fantastic photography from some of the best up-and-coming photographic talent out there right on your homepage.
So take a look, enjoy the photographs, and
please vote
— the deadline is June 17th. And if you are in London this month, come see the exhibit of the winners at the Saatchi Gallery, starting the 24th and running for a week.
Posted by Posted by Louise Rigby, Consumer Marketing Team
Picasa Web Albums stays big, gets faster
June 4, 2009
I use
Picasa
to manage the photos on my computer in part because it's the fastest way to manage all of the pictures I take. When I started working on
Picasa Web Albums
, the speed and responsiveness of the desktop program were a tough act to follow. Typically, when you move your photos from the desktop to the web, you have to choose between viewing high resolution photos that take forever to download, and tiny photos that lack any detail. For Picasa Web Albums, we thought we could do better.
We chose to show large images, the very biggest we can fit into your browser window. If you open up a slideshow or full-screen view, we can fill your entire monitor. But it wasn't snappy enough for us, so we had a choice to make: either use smaller images, make the Internet faster, or make our code smarter. We think large images are important, because seeing a photo's little details can make a big difference, and as much as we wanted to, making the whole Internet faster was a little impractical in the short term. So we went deep into the code and gave it a thorough tune-up.
The results, I hope, speak for themselves. Take a look at any album or slideshow on Picasa Web (
here's one of mine
) and you should notice that browsing photos is significantly faster. Give
full-screen
mode a try to see even bigger photos. If you've got a reasonable connection to the Internet, you should be able to hold down one of the arrow keys and zip through the entire album at a pretty good clip, flip-book style. Of course, while you
could
zoom past entire albums at ludicrous speed, we hope you'll enjoying spending your time looking at the photos themselves, rather than navigating between them.
Posted by Shawn Brenneman, Software Engineer
Introducing Picasa for Mac (at Macworld!)
January 5, 2009
Sometimes I find it hard to describe Picasa without sounding like a late-night infomercial for a multi-bladed thingamabob: "It's a photo organizer! A photo editor! A web-savvy photo sharing and management system in just one tiny package!"
We try hard to avoid hyperbole around here, but it's true that
Picasa software
, working together with
Picasa Web Albums
, can help with
nearly every aspect
of owning and operating a digital camera. And because many of us take pictures in order to share them, we try to make sure Picasa does a great job of getting your favorite photos online, where friends and family can enjoy them too. In Picasa 3, that means
powerful new features
like automatically syncing changes between the photos on your computer and what you're sharing online, useful privacy controls integrated into the software on your PC, easier notifications, and more.
And today, we're releasing
Picasa for Mac
. While we've previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums
uploader
and an
iPhoto plugin
for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the "it-slices-and-dices" feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.
Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.
Right now, Picasa for Mac is still in Google Labs, but we very much wanted to get an early version out to folks attending Macworld (you can learn more about this beta release at the
Google Photos blog
). To run Picasa, you'll need an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 and above. We hope you'll give it a spin, and give us your feedback in person — members of the Picasa engineering team will be conducting demos at
Google's Macworld booth
all week (you can also check out the video tour below).
Posted by Susanna Leng, Software Engineer
Picasa 3 (and name tags) go global
December 16, 2008
A few months back, we announced
some pretty big upgrades
to Picasa and Picasa Web Albums for English-speaking users in the U.S. On the PC side, we rolled out a
brand-new version of Picasa
, with a
slew of new tools
like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, we launched "
name tags
," a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who's in each of your pictures.
Today, just in time for your holiday snapshots, these changes (and more!) are available in all of the 38 languages we currently support. If you've been waiting to try the new photo-collage feature in Picasa, or been curious to see how clustering technology can automatically find similar faces across your photo collection, now's the time to
download Picasa 3.1
or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.
Of course, having a truly global audience sharing and commenting on photos is one of the things that makes Picasa special. The people and places you'll spot on our
Explore page
attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. That's why we just launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that "美麗的落日" means "
Beautiful sunset
!"
In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that we've recently rolled out a number of other small but meaningful changes across Picasa Web Albums, in all 38 languages -- ranging from
improved sharing to better video playback
. Swing by the
Google Photos blog
to learn more about what's new.
(Or, if you speak British or American English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian or European Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Danish , Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Tagolog, Thai, Vietnamese, or Ukrainian, just visit
Picasa Web Albums
and see for yourself!)
Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager
LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search
November 18, 2008
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.
We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
This collection
of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.
Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.
It has been a thrill for us to explore this archive, filled with images captured by LIFE's famous photographers. See masters like
Alfred Eisenstaedt
and
Margaret Bourke-White
documenting pivotal world events, capturing the evolution of lifestyles and fashions, and opening windows into the lives of celebrities and everyday people.
One of our favorites is this classic Eisenstaedt image of children watching a puppet show.
Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.
Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn't get much easier than that.
So please take a look for yourself and experience these great photos. Your exploration will be limited only by your imagination and your desire to keep on clicking. Be sure to check back often as more photos from the LIFE archive will be added regularly to Google Image Search. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we do!
Posted by Paco Galanes, Software Engineer
Introducing Picasa 3.0 (and big changes for Picasa Web Albums)
September 2, 2008
A little over two years ago, we launched
Picasa Web Albums
to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted
to share their experience with a friend, their extended family, or maybe the world.
Today, we're rolling out major technology upgrades to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, these are largely focused on how we share and enjoy our photos with others.
For starters, there's a brand-new feature called "
name tags
" in Picasa Web Albums that helps you quickly label all the people in your photos, so you can organize and share your photos based on who's in the picture. Name tags uses advanced technology to automatically group similar faces together. That way, you can quickly label all the people you care about in your photo collection. Once you've labeled your photos, it's then a snap to do things like create a slideshow with every picture of you and your best friend, or easily share party photos with everybody who appears in that photo album. This demo video shows you what you can do with name tags:
There's more to Picasa Web Albums. The site now has a fresh, clean look that makes photos look great, and a new "
Explore
" page that allows you to browse some of the most interesting public content on our site, including "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums.
Of course, Picasa Web Albums is only half the story. The great advantage of Picasa Web Albums has always been its integration with Picasa, Google's free photo management software for your PC. And today we're making public the
beta version of Picasa 3
at
picasa.google.com
.
Sharing photos with Picasa has always been remarkably simple, but in Picasa 3, we've made sharing so simple you don't even have to lift a finger. A new 'sync to web' button allows you to sync specified albums on your PC to the web. If you edit or add photos to the album on your PC, those changes will be automatically reflected on Picasa Web Albums. You can even specify who you'd like to share your web albums with from the Picasa software itself.
We've
packed many other new features
into Picasa 3. There's a slew of powerful new editing tools to retouch and restore photos, automatically detect and fix red-eye, or attractively add text to your images. Plus, there's plenty of the fun stuff -- we completely overhauled things like photo collages and slideshows, giving you more creative freedom over composition and layout. Not to mention a brand-new movie maker that can blend photos, video, webcam capture, and music to create customized movies that you can easily share on YouTube.
You can learn more about Picasa 3 and the new Picasa Web Albums on the
Google Photos blog
, or by watching the overview video below. Please give both a try -- and give us
feedback
!
Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager
Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone
June 26, 2007
Posted by Ping Chen and Joel Onofrio, Software Engineers
If you've ever seen a great picture and wondered where it was, wished you could visit that exact spot yourself, or found yourself itching to share a great photo with somebody -- but you were away from a computer, we've got two new features on Picasa Web Albums to help you out. First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation.
Here's how to get started: when you create a new album, just fill in the optional 'Place Taken' field. You can even drag and drop individual photos directly onto a map, and use built-in Google Maps technology to pinpoint exactly where each was shot. For a quick peek at what the results look like, check out our
test gallery
.
But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices. You already have a couple of pictures stuffed in your wallet, and maybe even a few wallpapers stored on your phone. But what about all those snapshots you can't carry around? With
Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices
, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup.
Of course, 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;
learn more here
.
As you enjoy your summer travels, remember to take plenty of snaps, and share the most beautiful places in the world (and don't forget to use your phone to show off pics from back home!).
Store and find even more photos on Picasa Web Albums
March 7, 2007
Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager, Picasa
We have a few long-awaited improvements at
Picasa Web Albums
today.
A new Community Photos search feature helps you discover and explore the public web albums of others on the site. Free storage is now 1GB (and counting)—that's room to post and share around 4,000 standard resolution photos. And we've made albums and photos easier to link to from any email, IM or website—simply copy and paste the code we show you.
Share your photos in more languages
December 7, 2006
Posted by Steve McKay, Software Engineer
Have you been waiting to share your photos on
Picasa Web Albums
in a language other than English? We don't want you waiting a minute longer, so today our team in Santa Monica is very happy to give you the ability to create web albums in 18 additional languages: English (UK), English (US), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Taiwanese, and Turkish. If you've already got a Picasa Web Albums account in English, click the "Settings" link to change your language.
For the fastest and easiest uploading to Picasa Web Albums, get
Picasa
. If you don't use Windows or you have another photo management tool, use your browser to upload your pix. Either way, your photos will be easy to arrange in a clean, uncluttered web gallery where you can add captions and share them. Take a look at our
test gallery
to see what it looks like.
Picasa goes online, gets new features too
September 18, 2006
Posted by Michael Herf, Picasa Engineer
I have 80,000 photos in
Picasa
, Google's free photo organizer, but most of my friends haven't had a chance to see them yet. That's why I'm so excited about the new version of Picasa that came out today. It has a feature called
Picasa Web Albums
that lets you post and share your photos online for free with just one click. You can show the world (or just your friends and family) what kinds of pictures you've been taking. And best of all, you can even download your friends' online photos right back to Picasa.
I run around at parties and take photos of people, and now my friends can see the pictures online as soon as I post them. Rather than bugging me all the time to email them around (which I'm too lazy to do), now they're asking to have the bad shots deleted instead. Some of them even add online comments right to the photos themselves.
We've also
fixed a whole bunch of things
in Picasa. Folders finally work as you'd expect, so people who've kept their photos meticulously organized in folders and subfolders can see them displayed the same way in Picasa. And we've added a shiny new feature to photo-editing: Save. Your Picasa edits can now be preserved when using other programs. The save feature is even undoable, so you never lose your original files.
And there's more -- you can import into any folder you like, make time-lapse sequences into movies, search by color, create a screensaver with beautiful visual effects, and even re-arrange Picasa's buttons. Oh, and we also made Picasa work with Google Earth, so you can put information about where you went on vacation into the photos themselves, and then, view your shots on a 3-D globe. Try it all out for yourself at
picasa.google.com
.
A better way to organize photos?
August 15, 2006
Posted by Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager
It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer.
We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.
Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.
It's all about the photos...on a Mac
August 2, 2006
Posted by Ted Bonkenburg, Software Engineer, Infrastructure
I'm happy to tell you about the release of
Picasa Web Albums Uploaders
(beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we've made it even easier on the Mac. This new download comes with two handy tools for uploading photos: There's a plug-in for uploading your pics within iPhoto. If you don't use iPhoto, or just want to upload the occasional picture, just drag your photos into the provided standalone app and click Upload. Either way, I can't wait for my fellow Mac users to showcase their talents.
Normally I work on search engine infrastructure. I love my work on web search, but as a change of pace I decided to use my
20 percent time
to make Picasa Web Albums better for Mac users. Fortunately, I was not alone. The Picasa and Mac development teams embraced the project and provided great assistance. Greg Robbins, a co-conspirator in the famous
graphing calculator
story, worked to refine the user interface. Later, another one of our Mac engineers, Mike Morton (
I’m OK, mentor
), took over as project lead, made quick work of creating the iPhoto export plug-in, and became the one responsible for incorporating feedback and finishing up the application and plug-in.
For me this has been a great opportunity to meet and work with new people, explore new technologies, and help create something that I hope the Mac community will find useful. So, please sign up for
Picasa Web Albums
, download the uploaders, and show the world some beautiful photos.
It’s all about the photos
June 13, 2006
Posted by Adrian Graham, Product Manager
Reading feedback from Picasa users is one of the best parts of my job. And lately the feedback has been especially clear and direct: please offer an easy way to share photos online. Today, we’re delighted to begin testing a new Picasa feature that does just that. It’s called
Picasa Web Albums
.
In case you’re not familiar with Picasa, it’s Google’s free desktop photo management software. Picasa is a quick download that makes it easy for people to organize and edit their pictures using something that’s simple and clutter-free. It’s all about the photos. And now we’ve tried to bring that same experience to online photo sharing with Picasa Web Albums. Just pick a bunch of your photos from Picasa and upload them into a web album in a couple of clicks. Once they’re online, it’s super-easy to share them – click the “Share” button from anywhere on the site or, just email friends the URL for your public gallery.
Take a look at the photos that our tester
wants to share
: Try flipping through photos using the arrow keys (we pre-fetch photos so they load quickly). Zoom in and out to check out details or see the whole photo. Or maximize them on a large monitor. We focused on the photos, not ads or archiving, because we know how important your photos are to you especially when you want to share them. Of course, there's a lot we want to add and improve — which is why for the moment, we're only testing this feature by invitation. If you’re interested in making your own Picasa Web Albums (and helping us make it better), give us your Gmail address
here
. We’ll be sending out invitations first come, first served.
Once you have an invitation, you’ll be able to download the latest version of Picasa with the web uploading feature. And actually, it’s not just about web uploading -- there’s also
downloading
. We wanted to make sure you can keep enjoying the photos your friends have shared with you. With this in mind, when viewing others’ galleries, you can download an entire album of photos directly into Picasa with just a couple of clicks. For uploading and downloading to and from Picasa Web Albums, you’ll need the new version of Picasa – again, it’s only available to invited users for the time being.
Finally, you may be wondering if this costs anything. No, and no hidden fees either. Picasa is free as always, and Picasa Web Albums comes with 250MB of free storage space. That’s enough for approximately 1,000 wallpaper-sized photos at 1600 pixels each. We also offer an easy-to-understand
storage upgrade option
if you have a whole lot more pictures to share.
We’re working hard to make both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums better. And we’re excited to start making our most commonly-requested feature available to more people. Try it out and
tell us what you think
. We’d love to hear from you.
Picture this: Picasa for Linux
May 24, 2006
Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager
Let's say you happily use Linux, but you sometimes find yourself wishing you had access to interesting new apps that launch for Windows but not Linux. And maybe, like a lot of us, you have a lot of photos stored on your personal machine, and you've read about or even tried Google's photo organizer,
Picasa
. But using it means switching to Windows, even temporarily. (We know--thanks but no thanks.)
Well, we've got you covered, because today we're launching Picasa for Linux on Google Labs. It incorporates nearly all the features of the current Windows version of Picasa, providing you with the tools you need to easily find, edit, and share the photos on your computer. And because it runs on a carefully tested version of
Wine
, Picasa avoids the slowing effects of an OS emulation or a virtual machine.
Have fun with it--and
tell us what you think
.
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