Jun14

Picasaweb Review

05:08 pm on Jun 14th 2006 Josh Kenzer

I am now online with picasaweb.google.com. You can see my first online photo album here. So here is a run down of the process and new features.

At about 6:00 AM PST this morning I signed up for the beta of picasaweb at picasaweb.google.com. At 4:21 PM I received my invite from google and by 4:40 PM I had my first album online. The link in the invite email took me to a picasa web page that asked me to download a new version of Picasa. I downloaded the EXE and installed it without issue. One new feature of Picasa is a new collection that contains all my starred photos. This appears to be a smart album - anytime I star a photo it is automatically added. You can also see it has a different icon and is a different font color.

Screenshot of starred album

I selected all pictures in this album and clicked on the Web Album icon in the bottom tray (see below).

Web Album Upload

Then I am presented with this screen:

Picasaweb Upload Screen

After I clicked OK, this is the screen:

Uploading Screen

Thats it. You can see the results. I was hoping to also find a slew of new features added to Picasa with this upgrade. Here is what I found:

  • You can turn on and off the button that display in the bottom tray (The Hello button in now gone too)
  • Obviously you can upload web albums
  • There is a new toolbar above your albums display on the left. In includes a drop down to filter and sort the albums, a left and right button to navigate forward and backwards among albums and a create new album button.
  • In the upper right, my Gmail email is now display next to a web link for “Web Albums” and “Sign Out.”
  • They changed the term keyword to the term tag.
  • Where there use to be an option to add a label in the bottom tray, there is now an option to add to an album.
  • Under Tools they now have an option for Upload Manager. This is the popup shown in the above screenshot.
  • Under Tools they have added two new options. 1) Geotag and 2)Experimental
    • Geotag allows you to 1) Geotag with Google Earth, 2)View in Google Earth, 3) Clear Geotag and 4) Export to Google Earth File
    • Experimental has the following options:
      • Publish via FTP
      • Show Duplicate Files
      • Search for -> a fly out menu of various colors
      • Upload to Google Video

That’s it for now. I will post more screenshots and descriptions in a bit.

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5 Responses to “Picasaweb Review”

  1. Dorion's Jun 14th 2006 at 06:07 pm 1

    Do you have a spare invite?

    Thanks,

    Jeremy

  2. Josh Kenzer Jun 14th 2006 at 08:21 pm 2

    Unlike Gmail, they don’t give out invites to their users. Instead you have to sign up for an invite and I assume you go into a queue.

  3. Joe Jun 15th 2006 at 10:22 am 3

    Hey Josh — thanks for pointing this way from the Picasa (Google) Group.

    One question: Are “labels” and “tags” (keywords) merged? That is, do they write label info to the IPTC block of the EXIF data yet?

  4. Josh Kenzer Jun 16th 2006 at 01:11 pm 4

    Joe, labels seem to be completely removed from this new version of Picasa. I can’t find them anywhere. The tags do appear to write to the EXIF data.

  5. Joe Jun 16th 2006 at 01:27 pm 5

    Aha. Yeah, “labels” became “albums” and “keywords” became “tags”. Other than that, their functionality hasn’t changed. I was hoping they’d merge the two concepts.

    Hooray for meaningless renames, I suppose.

    Thanks for the response!

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